Terraforming Horror Show

I winter my autoflowering feminised plants all the time, but do give them a season-like night/day cycle that shortens slowly if I want to promote flowering.
I'm not talking about chili plants. Word.
 
Found a good planet for reference purposes; Water world, close to perfect atmosphere, but not a candidate.

gASDsni.jpg

Thing about this world is, that the moon around it is a candidate for terraforming, so it is on goldilocks zone.
 
Are seasons that important?
Our equatorial rainforests would deny that. Life and arguably even sentient cultures just develop differently in an environment that's always the same than they would if weather periodically got screwed up. Heck, if the solar year on Earth was longer, much of the higher latitudes may be completely inhospitable without fairly advanced technology like, e.g., greenhouses and robust cold storage, because the break between growing periods was too long.
 
Last edited:
At least being tidally locked doesn't prevent a planet to be terraformed, Waterloo in Riedquat or Birmingham in Diso for example.
 
Last edited:
Found a good planet for reference purposes; Water world, close to perfect atmosphere, but not a candidate.


Thing about this world is, that the moon around it is a candidate for terraforming, so it is on goldilocks zone.

Uh, no. That's a PPO2 of nearly five (doing the sums with rounded up numbers in my head, here) and the safe limit for human breathing is 1.6 (and it's not terribly safe at that level either). You could stand it for a short while, but since you're exerting yourself at 2.4 gravities it would be a very short while indeed. Past that, you're wrecking your central nervous system, eyes, lungs and (IIRC) several other important bodily organs.

And even at 2 and a half gravities, it takes a serious depth of nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere to produce 7 bar pressure so whatever you're doing to get that excess oxygen out of the atmosphere, you've got to do a LOT of it.
 
My thoughts also. So can we say that gravity is limiting factor in terraforming? And if we can, how much is too much?

A quick google suggests that they've done long-term centrifuge testing on rats, in which they've successfully gestated at 1.8 gravities and lived for months at 3. However, larger animals - like humans, say - get hit with the linear-square-cube problem a LOT harder as gravity goes up.

If anyone can find a useful summary of the stuff NASA did with centrifuges for their astronaut program, that might be a helfpul basis for speculation.
 
Why would you want to terraform a water world anyway?

Unless you are setting up the galaxies biggest fishing destination that is... :p
 
Why would you want to terraform a water world anyway?

Unless you are setting up the galaxies biggest fishing destination that is... :p
Dunno.

But there are lots of terraforming candidate Water Worlds around, and many in the process of being terraformed.
 
Why would you want to terraform a water world anyway?
Floating cities? I'm not exactly accusing Empire architects to aim for efficiency or practicality here. Huge fishing grounds that you mention aren't off the menu either, a pristine ocean with a lot of wildlife, flora, and no butt-stupid humans poisoning the place could feed so many people.

A "water world" isn't necessarily all deep ocean either, there could be small atolls, and if you went ahead and introduced plant life that dragged the place into an explosion of oxygen, you could end up with ice caps and lower the ocean level too. It would take a couple millennia, but at this rate, who's counting.
 
Here's a bunch of pics, illustrating the illogical-seeming status of "candidate for terraforming".
There are some that are CFTs and in my opinion they're fine.
Then there are some that seem quite extreme, but they're still CFTs.
And then there are those tha are not CFTs and I'm confused - why not, if those others are?














screen grab
 
I've noticed that most water worlds have at least some landmasses, and very few have none. So if you're terrafoming a water world, you're not necesarily having to go full Kevin Costner to live on it.

As to why you'd pick a water world, you that is sat there reading this are 70-80% (I forget the exact figure) water yourself, your ancestors evolved in the water, you need water to live and for most of the industrial processes that maintain your civilisation. Why would you not pick water worlds to terraform?
 
Why would you not pick water worlds to terraform?

The thing that makes a water world a water world in ED is the presence of indigenous carbon-water based life. Whilst it feels, to me, likely that in the vast majority of cases any pathogens and poisons would be sufficiently different to us to not cause a problem it's not guaranteed. There are a limited number of amino acids so some worlds may end up similar enough... And of course if there're giant sea monsters with great big pointy teeth then they can pose a problem even if we can't catch a cold off them.

Plus if there's an existing ecosystem of life that can't infect us then it's equally likely that it's also life forms that we can't digest into useful proteins that we need so we'd be looking to establish an edible ecosystem on a planet that already had one which is an additional complication.

Given that, an HMC in the goldilocks zone with available water and atmosphere not too far off what we need might pose fewer problems, and there are lots of those too.
 
Last edited:
Great big sea monsters with big pointy teeth aren't a problem.

They're good fishin'.

Take your point about the biochemistry, though. Against that, you have to set the fact that when it comes to introducing invasive species, we have something of a winning record. It would be a hilarious irony if centuries of unbridled jackassery with our own biosphere equipped us to smash alien ones flat to increase our own living space...
 
One can get some idea of whether or not a planet's statistics are within "terraformable range" by looking at what the extremes are for "Earth-like", and assuming that since an Earth-like planet cannot exist with higher or lower numbers, then the planet is not terraformable.

There are always deductable reasons why a "maybe terraformable" planet is not terraformable. In Zieman's table of examples, counting from no 1 at top left:

#1: At 229 K, it's way, way too cold.
#2: Looks fine to me, which is why it's OK.
#3: At 220 K, its way, way too cold.
#4: Um, it already is Earth-like. You can't terraform Earth-likes.
#5: At 3.9993 Earth-masses, I suspect the gravity would be too high. That's from an older version of ED that doesn't actually give surface gravity, so it's hard to be sure. It's got an Earth-like for a moon, so the gravity must be pretty strong. See the Cemiess system for a hand-crafted system with similar properties.
#6: Looks fine to me, which is why it's OK. Strip away the thick ammonia atmosphere and it'll cool down to within tolerance.
#7: Yep, it's a jungle down there, but condense out all that water and you should be within tolerance.
#8: See #6.
#9: 248 K is way too cold. Even removing the SO2 isn't going to warm it up enough.
#10: See #7.
#11: Wow, that one is hot. But comments at #7 still hold.
#12: Whew, even hotter, but still see #7. It's also getting to the point where general atmosphere thinning would be necessary, helping cool the place down even more.
#13: See #4.
#14: See #7 again.
#15: See #6.
#16: See #6.
#17: See #7.
#18: See #7.

The current atmospheric composition is irrelevant, for terraforming purposes, since it is assumed that terraforming tech can strip away or add whatever atmospheric components may be required. The presence or absence of surface water, too, can also be fixed. The orbital period and rotation period (including tidal-locking) are also irrelevant, as is the "quality" of the radiation (so an M-class star is just as capable of supporting life as a G-class, or a black hole for that matter). The presence or absence of moons or co-orbiting planets is irrelevant. I would assume a wildly eccentric orbit would be a disqualifier, but wildly eccentric orbits with an average distance within the Goldilocks zone are rather rare. So in practical terms, the only things that matter are gravity and baseline temperature. The temperature the planet is at now is not a straightforward indicator, as the current atmosphere can be affecting that (eg. CO2, water, methane, ammonia all make temperature go up, SO2 makes it go down, etc).

Looking at the Universal Cartographics Records site for Earth-likes, we see:
Minimum gravity: [0.2266 Earth masses]
Maximum gravity: [3.3944 Earth masses]
Minimum temperature: 260 K
Maximum temperature: 320 K

So, if a planet is in the Goldiliocks Zone (ie it can be given an "Earth-like" atmosphere and have a temperature that falls within that range) and is within those gravity tolerances, then it will be classifiable as "Terraformable". And since stars of the same type have Goldilocks Zones in the same place, it's all about distance from the star.

Now, I have noticed that some of the more "extreme" planets (e.g. very high or very low surface gravity) are considered terraformable when in the middle of the Goldilocks Zone, but non-terraformable if too hot or too cold; A couple of times, I have seen co-orbiting worlds of almost identical surface gravity, where one was terraformable and the other not; the heavier one must have been too heavy for that baseline temperature.
 
Last edited:
The maximum gravity limit is between 1.9 and 2.00 G. How do I know? Found a pair of planets orbiting each other, nearly identical in every respect, except one of them had G rating of 1.89 (and mass of 3.567) the other had gravity of 2.01G. The one with 1.89 was a candidate, other wasn't. Ergo, the limit is somewhere between 1.9 and 2.00. I bet it is 2.00.
 
#1: At 229 K, it's way, way too cold.
#3: At 220 K, its way, way too cold.
Some good points in your reply, these two I don't buy.

Look at Mars in Sol system, it is terraformed.
What was Mars mean temperature before terraforming?
210 K. :)
 
Well, changing the atmospheric composition of a planet is much easier than changing its gravity.
You know, I originally assumed that in Elite, a planet being a candidate for terraforming simply meant that it's in the star's habitable zone. Given some of the examples here, I now wonder if that really is the case.

In any case, I'd suggest to Frontier (as I have done before) that they introduce a non-binary classification for terraforming candidates, based on how close the planet is to being Earth-like. ("Great candidate for terraforming", "Good candidate" and so on) After all, a hellhole that happens to be terraformable with great effort shouldn't be worth as many credits as a water world that's nearly Earth-like, and would just need a bit of "tweaking" to get there.
Not to mention that a WWTC that's quite big shouldn't be worth more credits than an ELW.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom