Analysing Thin Water Atmo bodies' distribution

[marx]

With how the payouts for exobio samples have shot through the roof recently, and how thin water atmospheric bodies tend to have the highest payouts on average, I decided to write up the data and analysis on them. Well, I did look into them before, but never cleaned up and posted the data anywhere - there wasn't much interest back then.

I suppose the main question on most everyone's minds now is where we can find these the best, so let me go with that first.

• Carbon stars are good places to check, anywhere - but well, you won't find many of them.
• When you are outside the core, look at class B, A, Neutron Stars, M red giants (not red supergiants!). The rest of the main sequence is still decent, chances go lower as brightness goes lower.
• When you are inside the core, look at class B, Giants (especially M red) and Supergiants, Neutron Stars. Meanwhile, class A is so-so, but you can forget about the rest of the main sequence. Black Holes are also relatively decent here, but that's probably due to the usual high mass systems with multiple stars.
• When you are inside the suppression cross, you can assume that the patterns mirror those of the outside of the core but are worse, with one notable exception: go look at the suppressed K class giant stars. Otherwise, it's better to get out.

When it comes to mass code instead, that's less useful, but at least shorter: DE(FGH) inside the core, BCD(E) outside of it. (But hey, if you find higher mass codes outside the core, it's a good idea to explore them anyway!)

Thin water atmo bodies are significantly more rare than Earth-like worlds are, though: even at best, your chances of finding one are around 8-10 times less than your chances of finding an ELW. Of course, sampling everything on a TWA can pay a hundred times better than mapping an ELW does.

Right then, here's the sheet with the data and the various processing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zbDQr4oEiyR3yp8CM0wMnRaRndylJVQ2bEy_lzEjB_M.
Credits go to the combined crowdsourced data sources, and as usual, @Orvidius 's EDAstro processed spreadsheets, which saved me lots of work on cross-referencing the data dumps.


Various things to note:

• I excluded worlds which the game classifies as thin water-rich atmospheres. The reasons for this are that their atmospheric gases can be, ahem, rather mixed, they don't have the flora we're looking for, and including them does skew the results.
• Nearly all of the TWAs have no volcanism. Only 239 have any, and it's always minor water magma.
• None of the TWAs uploaded are candidates for terraforming, nor do any of them have rings.
• 70% of all TWAs are rocky moons, 30% are high metal content planets, and only 38 of them are high metal content moons. However, 52% of the total are tidally locked.

That should be all for now then. I'm going to look into boxel metallicities as well, same as I did for ELWs (see here: however, that'll still take some time, running all the counts takes a fair while to complete.

Thanks for reading!

 

[marx]

Time for some more research! Unlike with metallicity and ELW distribution, I won't make a separate thread for the metallicity here. So first, I'll tl;dr the main take-aways, then I'll go off into more detail.

So, in a nutshell: boxel metallicity doesn't seem to matter much, but if you do find a system with TWAs, it's worth checking the rest of the boxel for more systems. I'm only counting systems here; thanks to rocky moon TWAs, it's not all that rare to find more than one per system, if there are any of course.
Maybe there's a slight downward trend as there was with ELWs, but it's doubtful - and even if there is, it's nowhere near as pronounced with TWAs, and not really enough to matter.

With that settled, on to the details then. I did the analysis on a bunch of selected places from the galaxy, but the data I'll share below will be compiled from the Graea Hypue sector only: there don't seem to have been large differences elsewhere, and the sector stands out for having many boxels fully surveyed. This turned out to be quite important, not just with the lower chances of TWAs appearing in the first place, but also with how people tend to cherry-pick body types and not to scan everything: while ELWs show up separately on the FSS barcode, TWAs don't.
I realised most of the way through that the suppression zone does cut into the sector from the East, so to be on the safe side, I added the boxel position estimates to this spreadsheet as well. Thankfully, the zone doesn't seem to have caused issues... although it still makes me wonder. Unfortunately, the only place outside of the cross that has many systems is Eol Prou, and over there, there aren't nearly as many fully surveyed boxels. The IGAU squadron me a list of boxels they've compiled as surveyed in GH, which helped with referencing these. While it only lists mass codes D and E, that didn't turn out to be too bad, as TWAs are significantly more rare (but not non-existent) outside of these. In GH, they've only been found in B-E, and nowhere outside that range. (Little wonder.)

With all that then, here's the data for you to check and play around with: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KkspVXll151E8db9forg-2MYUwz-gqSFsDeD57CbC9g/edit?usp=sharing

Something more on the matter of surveyed boxels: 58% of the boxels marked as surveyed had no TWAs present. Also, if a mass code E had any systems with TWAs (not a lot of them did, but that would be because most of the E boxels here have relatively few systems), then they almost always had more than one. Rocky moons, as could be expected.

So, that's about it. It might be worth revisiting all this in a couple of years, as there should be more data over the galaxy by then.


Finally, the credits: the same as before, with the addition of help from IGAU in the form of a boxel list, and pilots from the At The Eldritch Gate expedition who surveyed selected boxels: CMDRs Chewcat1, Donosporidium, Jtrillo, Tritogeneia. Thanks again!

 

[LifesAJourney]

I read above posts with mild interest. Checked my all-time logs and found some thin water atmo bodies but very far away. Nothing worth buckyballing to. Prepared a custom criteria for ObservatoryCore, you know, just in case, and basically forgot about it.

Until three days ago, when my criteria surprisingly returned true. Six thin water atmo bodies, 47 signals in total. It took me three game sessions to scan them all.

Total face exo value: 439M. Total value including first discovery bonus: 2.19B.

From a single system.

Now I understand why they're so special.

 

[Hellrider]

Analysis like this are one of the best parts of exploration.
Always been.

Not grinding meaningless credits, because what else I can do with them.
Buy carrier #10?

 

[marx]

A small update to this: I noticed that I made a couple of small errors to the original, so I remade things with more up-to-date data. The URL in the first post has been updated to point to the new version.
Nothing much seems to have changed since the previous data (2022. Dec.), the ratios are the same.

There is something interesting I noticed recently though, which I'll look into in more detail, but I'll mention it here in the meantime. It looks like that when it comes to giant stars, the chances for TWAs are significantly better inside the galactic core than outside, with the exception of the suppression cross. This mostly applies to class M red giant stars though, as the other giants are pretty much crowded there anyway.
I'd like to have more precise numbers on this though, and to check other bodies / atmospheres, so more to come on that later - but so far, it's looking fairly convincing.

 

[marx]

Time for a much more substantial update. @LCU No Fool Like One shared a script to estimate a system's region in Google Sheets, which you can find here, and I had an idea that it could be useful to estimate whether a given system is inside the galactic core or not. Now, I did per-sector breakdowns for ELWs before, but for the TWAs here, I thought I'd take a look at the differences between the core and outside of it... and am I glad I did. Turns out that in the TWAs' case, there are significant differences. So, it's time to amend my original recommendations.
The sheet in the first post has been updated, done with both today's larger dataset, and all the extra stuff from looking at the core, plus the suppression cross too. (Oh, and the old sheet had a couple of star classes missing. Whoops.)

First off, an important part about methodology: the core here is an estimate, and the criteria are that the system is either within 7,680 ly of Sagittarius A* (a mostly-arbitrary number, chosen for six sectors' length) or it's estimated to be within Odin's Hold. Now, this zone doesn't cover all of the core, and Odin's Hold does have some tiny parts which are outside the core, but overall, I think this covers the core pretty well, with not all that much of the core left outside it.

So, what changed? As it turns out, my earlier recommendations for the core were off, because TWAs around main sequence stars below B are significantly lower than they are outside the core. Neutron Stars are so-so. The giant stars I mentioned in my previous post are interesting too, since that's where the differences are. There are also differences between supergiants and giants, inside and outside the core - and, funnily enough, a big one when it comes to suppressed class K giant stars.

With all that in mind, here are my updated recommendations on where to look for TWAs, based on the primary star of the system:

• Carbon stars are good places to check, anywhere - but well, you won't find many of them.
• When you are outside the core, look at class B, A, Neutron Stars, M red giants (not red supergiants!). The rest of the main sequence is still decent, chances go lower as brightness goes lower.
• When you are inside the core, look at class B, Giants (especially M red) and Supergiants, Neutron Stars. Meanwhile, class A is so-so, but you can forget about the rest of the main sequence. Black Holes are also relatively decent here, but that's probably due to the usual high mass systems with multiple stars.
• When you are inside the suppression cross, you can assume that the patterns mirror those of the outside of the core but are worse, with one notable exception: go look at the suppressed K class giant stars. Otherwise, it's better to get out.

When it comes to mass code instead, that's less useful, but at least shorter: DE(FGH) inside the core, BCD(E) outside of it. (But hey, if you find higher mass codes outside the core, it's a good idea to explore them anyway!)

I'll poke around things a bit more, and if I find anything new (or if I made a mistake here), I'll let you know.

Still, it's curious how much of a difference there is with thin water atmospheric bodies and the various main stars, when compared to Earth-like Worlds and Ammonia Worlds. There could be plenty more to look into here: how are things with the other atmospheres? Does this also apply to all water atmos, or is all this only applicable because we are looking at thin atmos only? What about the other atmospheric compositions?
Originally, I looked into TWAs specifically because they are the most rare (of the pure atmosphere types) and the most lucrative for exobiology, but I might look into thin oxygen and/or nitrogen at least now. It also did help that there are relatively few such planets - faster to handle eighty thousand systems than eight million, after all. But it certainly looks like there's a lot more that could be worth looking into, when it comes to various atmospheres and also, their differences inside and outside the galactic core / suppression cross.

 

[Eahlstan]

However, 52% of the total are tidally locked.

How many of them are in synchronous rotation?

 

[marx]

How many of them are in synchronous rotation?

Mm, I don't know. You can see which bodies are marked as tidally locked, and their parents are also listed for convenience, so if you're curious, you could query those and then compare.

 

[Eahlstan]

Mm, I don't know. You can see which bodies are marked as tidally locked, and their parents are also listed for convenience, so if you're curious, you could query those and then compare.

That's an excellent example to show that tidal locking and synchronous rotation are totally different things.

Regarding the metallicity sheet: Of all the bodies on the TWAs table there are only 3 that are in synchronous rotation - Graea Hypue HS-P c7-6 C 3, Graea Hypue KS-S d4-89 D 3 and Graea Hypue SH-A b18-7 B 2. And only Graea Hypue KS-S d4-89 D 3 is tidally locked.

Regarding the sheet linked in the first post: Of all the bodies on the Data table there are 1303 in synchronous rotation, but only 985 of them are tidally locked.

 

[DjVortex]

Thin water atmo bodies are significantly more rare than Earth-like worlds are

That seems to indeed be the case. I searched my logs for my entire PC ED career (almost 2 years now), and it only found 16 entries with "thin water" (a couple of them are "rich"). In contrast "earth like" finds about a hundred entries.

 

[varonica]

That seems to indeed be the case. I searched my logs for my entire PC ED career (almost 2 years now), and it only found 16 entries with "thin water" (a couple of them are "rich"). In contrast "earth like" finds about a hundred entries.

Did a quick count and got 183 listed, there are quite a few with 4 and 5 bodies orbiting the same GG, they are usually the bonanza systems for life and credits.