Horizons Never found a deep canyon or tall peak on a large planet

shreddog

shreddog
Is there a technical reason more massive planets are so flat and .. well, dull? The smaller planets have all kinds of cool surface features, but all the bigger planets >4000km are all just craters and flat terrain.

I know the higher gravity will cause terrain to flatten over time, but really there should be areas with interesting terrain in them. There should be crevices, fault line mountains, volcanoes and such. I've seen none of that. So I assume the reason is down to technical limitations. Due to the huge size of these planets they need to make them have less features or else the framerates would tank when approaching these planets?

Has anyone found any extreme terrain on any larger planet? Maybe I've been looking to little, but everytime I think I see something interesting from orbit it's all just very flat when landing on the surface.
 

NascentChemist

N
While I'm no astronomer/geologist, I'd assume that gravity is the main factor.

Also, a larger planet's surface is likely further from the heat of the core that drives formation of crevices and mountains. But this just conjecture.
 

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
There may be an effect as you describe but, only in the last couple of weeks, I encountered a planet with very deep ravines and mountains and had to take extra care because the gravity was close to 2G. I don't know if that exceeded your diameter criterion, however.
 

varonica

varonica
NascentChemist said:
While I'm no astronomer/geologist, I'd assume that gravity is the main factor.

Also, a larger planet's surface is likely further from the heat of the core that drives formation of crevices and mountains. But this just conjecture.
Click to expand...

Mountains are formed by plate tectonics, planets with thick crusts wouldn't necessarily exhibit the same mountainous terrain as the earth, but by the same regard, bodies a few hundred kilometers and under would more likely to have cooled right through and wouldn't exhibit mountain forming activity in that way., The features of small bodies are much likely formed by external forces, gravitational distortion from large neighbours etc. Most large airless rocky planets should show some sign of plate tectonic activity, rock is a quite good insulator and given a similar composition the crust should be the same thickness as the Earths, they also don't have weather effects to wear the features down, it's very puzzling.

Of course about half of the earth internal heat is a result of radiogenic activity, planets formed in areas where there weren't many radioactive elements in the primordial dust cloud would be a lot cooler and flatter than the earth. How much of this the stellar forge takes into account when generating bodies only FDEV knows.
 

NascentChemist

N
varonica said:
Mountains are formed by plate tectonics, planets with thick crusts wouldn't necessarily exhibit the same mountainous terrain as the earth, but by the same regard, bodies a few hundred kilometers and under would more likely to have cooled right through and wouldn't exhibit mountain forming activity in that way., The features of small bodies are much likely formed by external forces, gravitational distortion from large neighbours etc. Most large airless rocky planets should show some sign of plate tectonic activity, rock is a quite good insulator and given a similar composition the crust should be the same thickness as the Earths, they also don't have weather effects to wear the features down, it's very puzzling.

Of course about half of the earth internal heat is a result of radiogenic activity, planets formed in areas where there weren't many radioactive elements in the primordial dust cloud would be a lot cooler and flatter than the earth. How much of this the stellar forge takes into account when generating bodies only FDEV knows.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, I had just read about Saturn's moons being strained to the point of deep liquid water!

Dang it, Jim, I'm a biochemist, not a geologist!
 

Wedgetail

W
Official answer: reasons

But All I can think of is (c'mon sing it with me)

Oh baby there Ain't no mountain hiiiiigh enough
Ain't no valley looooow enough
Ain't no river wiiiiiide enough...
....etc etc etc
 
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