I've had a hunch for a while that the temperatures of some atmospheric moons might be off, but it took me a while (to recreate these well enough outside Elite) and a couple of helpful examples from MattG to make fairly certain that there really could be errors there. I've recently made a bug report about this, which you can find here. To my surprise, the ticket didn't get the usual "thanks, we're passing this on to QA" response, but that Frontier is aware of the issue. That means that I was right and the surface temperatures of (at least some) atmospheric moons around solid bodies is bugged and is significantly less than it should be, so at some point in the future, that will be fixed.
So, what does this mean for us explorers?
It means that at least some atmospheric moons will get hotter in the future, and as such, they might change classifications. For example, an ELM that was near the high end of the temperature range for Earth-likes could become too hot and change into a water world. Personally, I expect the fix (and probably other changes) to happen when the devs get around to implementing atmospheric flight, as they'll most likely have to tweak atmosphere generation then. So, rather than introduce a small fix, they'd likely get everything done in one patch. Meaning not in the foreseeable future. Still, I thought I'd post this in a thread here, so that people who might have such favourite finds will know that they might have to re-check them in the future.
There might also be a fortunate effect of such a fix: assuming there aren't other drastic changes to atmospheres, this would mean that an as-yet-unfound pair of an Earth-like moon orbiting an Earth-like parent world would become considerably more likely. Mind you, especially since none have been found yet, even that means they would still be extremely rare. After all, there is the problem that the ELM would have to be on the very low end of the Earth-like mass boundaries, while the parent would be on the high end. Then there's the question of a breathable atmosphere. Based on current data (from EDDN, not just from the ELW list), I'd guesstimate that there might be one or two such pairs from what's already discovered - so it's not like you'd see such pop up all over.
So, what does this mean for us explorers?
It means that at least some atmospheric moons will get hotter in the future, and as such, they might change classifications. For example, an ELM that was near the high end of the temperature range for Earth-likes could become too hot and change into a water world. Personally, I expect the fix (and probably other changes) to happen when the devs get around to implementing atmospheric flight, as they'll most likely have to tweak atmosphere generation then. So, rather than introduce a small fix, they'd likely get everything done in one patch. Meaning not in the foreseeable future. Still, I thought I'd post this in a thread here, so that people who might have such favourite finds will know that they might have to re-check them in the future.
There might also be a fortunate effect of such a fix: assuming there aren't other drastic changes to atmospheres, this would mean that an as-yet-unfound pair of an Earth-like moon orbiting an Earth-like parent world would become considerably more likely. Mind you, especially since none have been found yet, even that means they would still be extremely rare. After all, there is the problem that the ELM would have to be on the very low end of the Earth-like mass boundaries, while the parent would be on the high end. Then there's the question of a breathable atmosphere. Based on current data (from EDDN, not just from the ELW list), I'd guesstimate that there might be one or two such pairs from what's already discovered - so it's not like you'd see such pop up all over.
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