Moons around Gas Giants

[TheSynopticVision]

As the Cassini mission is drawing to a close, I was reviewing its discoveries in the last 15 years.

Looking at all the moons discovered around Saturn, one thing is clear: gas giants in our universe seem to have at least as many (if not more) "irregular", misshapen, big asteroid-like moons as they have "round" ones (with or without atmosphere). Look here for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens#Itinerary

The Stellar Forge is quite lacking from this point of view. It is pretty rare to find a potato-shaped moon, not to mention more eccentric shapes like Saturn's Pan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens#/media/File:PIA21436.jpg

Is there a way to implement greater variety in the shape of moons? This would make exploration much more interesting, especially considering that these are non-atmospheric bodies, and therefore they would be landable.

Thanks.

 

[varonica]

As the Cassini mission is drawing to a close, I was reviewing its discoveries in the last 15 years.

Looking at all the moons discovered around Saturn, one thing is clear: gas giants in our universe seem to have at least as many (if not more) "irregular", misshapen, big asteroid-like moons as they have "round" ones (with or without atmosphere). Look here for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens#Itinerary

The Stellar Forge is quite lacking from this point of view. It is pretty rare to find a potato-shaped moon, not to mention more eccentric shapes like Saturn's Pan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens#/media/File:PIA21436.jpg

Is there a way to implement greater variety in the shape of moons? This would make exploration much more interesting, especially considering that these are non-atmospheric bodies, and therefore they would be landable.

Thanks.

It would be nice, and I really wanted to find odd shaped lumps of rock and strange moons when I first started exploring the small bodies in the galaxy but there's a problem and it's to do with the way stellar bodies are generated, they use a body mesh to establish the overall shape and then a bitmap for the details, but using this method has a drawback, there's a limit to the maximum curvature radius depending on the resolution of the mesh that has a curious effect, as you get closer to the minimum curvature radius small moons tend to become rounder, not more irregular shaped.

Around 500km radius down to about 200km radius you get some odd shapes, funny depressions and pointed moons and things like that, but drop below 200km's and these shapes start to vanish and you get moons like squashed beach balls. The closer you get to the minimum curvature radius of the body mesh the rounder the moon becomes, until around 135-140km radius, which appears to be the lower limit, at that point they become almost perfectly round. The smallest known moon is I believe 138km in radius, I have visited numerous small moons down to 141km radius, I have detailed my exploration in this thread;

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/327401-A-journey-to-small-places

When you have a look through you will notice the distinct lack of odd shapes, the smaller the moon the rounder it is, it's a limitation of the way planets and moons are generated, I expect for now the only odd shapes we will see are hand crafted moons and asteroids, they would need to make a major change to actually get really odd shaped bodies appearing in the numbers that should be there. It's a pity, when I first started that thread I was hoping to see some, I have neglected it for a while because there really didn't seem a lot of point.