User blog:Cerne/Almost there

Alright, so here I am typing an entry after midnight (probably well after midnight by the time it is done) on the status of my conworld info-gathering mission. I am actually just about there. In fact, I believe I have all my stats down now. I just need to learn how to create and post these tables...but once I do, I can begin typing. And that shouldn't take very long at all. It is already bubbling away in my mind and ready to erupt like a volcano. Yes, I know, awkward analogy. But that is what it feels like right now. Hopefully the strata of background preparation will not be able to hold it down much longer. But until then, there is still some more work to be done. Gathering statistics may be a thing of the past but I still don't have a clue how this table thing is supposed to work. I took a look at Wikipedia's table for the planet Venus in the Edit page and it looks awfully complicated. I don't even think it lists the field titles so I am as yet unsure as to how to fit the whole thing together. Fortunately I copied the whole thing and pasted it in a blank email with (I think) the stats already in there. All I should need to do now is copy the whole thing onto a blank Wikia page along with the rest of the article.

In the meantime, I did change my planet's rotation velocity and consequently its rotation period. The good thing - good because I don't often do this even though I should - is that I didn't try to determine the former by using existing factors this time. Which makes that bit about correlating density with rotation velocity more-or-less moot now. It gave me a good place to start: my conworld is more dense than Earth is so understandably its rotation would be faster. However, I felt that my previous rotation period of 19 Earth hours was too fast. Given that Earth went from a rotation of just under 6 hours long at the time our moon formed to a rotation of over 23 hours long, I would say that 19 hours is rather odd on both accounts. Especially since - among other possible factors - my planet has two moons, one nearly the size of our own moon. I was actually thinking more along the lines of Phobos and Deimos as models for both moons but that is a matter for another entry.

When I chose my new rotation velocity, I wanted an easier number to work with so I rounded up - using Earth as an analogy - to a speed of 500 m/s with no decimals. It may seem rare, but not completely unlikely when considering that we are talking about only a 1 or 2 metre-per-seond difference between a perfect number like 500 and something imperfect like 493 or 508. These are small differences, and as long as a planet is capable of falling into that range for whichever reason, any one of those numbers is fair game. Including 500. And being so exact, it becomes easy to work with for someone like me who is not particularly adept at or fond of this mathematical aspect of creating a fictional planet. There was a deterministic side to it, however. I needed to find a way to determine how rotation velocity was going to affect my rotation period, so I took the percent of the difference in rotation velocity and applied it inversely to rotation period. Same deal with what I did in the earlier entry but with a different number this time. The process is as follows:


 * Earth's rotational velocity is 465.1 m/s and its sidereal rotation period is 86164 seconds or 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds.


 * 465.1 m/s + 34.9 (7%) = 500 m/s.


 * 86164 - 7% = 79699 seconds or 22 hours, 8 minutes, 19 seconds.

NOTE: The 7% was actually a much bigger fractional number but I left it out to make things easier and cut unnecessary length. The exact number I did wind up with was used to get the number of seconds in my planet's sidereal rotation period. This number was also a hefty fractional number so I rounded up to the decimal.

Anyway, like I said, with two moons adding extra drag on the planet and consequently slowing it down, I thought - from a relative standpoint - that my planet would be faster, but not that much faster. Two moons might make the planet even slower than that, along with adding a few additional effects like higher land tides, but where it has to do with rotation I am beyond caring about that now. The important thing is that I get to complete all of the physical stats for my planet at last. As for axial tilt/obliquity, I decided to make this up as well. Using the correlation between obliquity, rotation velocity and polar flattening that I brought up in an earlier entry, and using Earth as an analogy to draw from, I decided that since my planet rotates faster and therefore should have (unless I screwed up with my calculations) more polar flattening, it sould also have less axial tilt. Therefore, I decided to give it a tilt of less than 5 degrees. The process of nutation (see earlier entries) will cause the level of tilt to vary anyway, so as long as I say "less than..." or give it a range, I should be okay.

While I was perusing online (the ZBB, actually), I came across a page titled Stellar & Planetary Orbit Calculations that allows you to fill in a few fields with basic information about a planet, a star, moons, and whatever, and the site makes all of these other calculations for you that might have otherwise taken a long time to find out about and then use. Needless to say, it was good news for me. Here is what I put into the fields for the first part:


 * Star Mass (sols): 0.5


 * Star lum (sols): 0.4


 * Orbit Radius (AU): 0.6


 * Orbital Ecc. (0-1): 0.07

And here is what the site gave me:

Insolation


 * 1798.538045503013 - 1358.6824662027736 W/m2


 * 1.2846700325021522 - 0.970487475859124 E

Stellar Abs Mag: 5.794850022329233 Visual Magnitude at 10 pcs.

Naked eye "Mag 6" Distance: 35.852046599753834 light years.

Stellar Habitable Zone


 * Inner Limit: 77584585.0256351 km / 0.5186135362676142 AU / 258.7943209124857 Ls


 * Ideal Distance: 94615347.5922379 km / 0.6324555320336759 AU / 315.60283038108014 Ls


 * Outer Limit: 113538417.1106855 km / 0.758946638440411 AU / 378.72339645729613 Ls

Stellar Stutterwarp Zone


 * Inner Limit/Cutoff Point: 8199970.100936344 km / 0.05481263436454775 AU / 27.352156270131924 Ls


 * Outer Limit/FTL Point: 259305822.6423965 km / 1.7333276914598696 AU / 864.9511273047265 Ls

Planetary Orbit Data


 * Periapsis Distance: 83476800 km / 0.5579999999999999 AU / 278.44863461999995 Ls


 * Apoapsis Distance: 96043200 km / 0.642 AU / 320.36563338 Ls


 * Orbital Period: 240.0667969545143 days

I don't know why I didn't use this site earlier. I mean, a whole load of statistics - and nearly all of the orbital statistics I need - are now over and done with. Just like that. There are more parts on that page, organized into sections and each section having a set of text fields, but I didn't fill them out because I didn't need to. What I have right now is way more than I need to finish my planet's orbital stats. So I am pretty much done with statistical data now. All that is left is to figure out how to put them in a Wikia data table and figure out how to display it properly, after which I can start typing up my first Wikia conworld article. Woohoo!

There is the little matter of Orbital Velocity that the site I mentioned does not include, so in order to fill that out, I needed to figure it out on my own. I started inadvertently with a question that someone asked on Yahoo! Answers, titled "Calculating orbital velocity?" By using the ((M x G) / r) formula with information that I had figured out for the other site - I converted AU's and Solar Masses into metres and kilograms beforehand - I came up with an orbital velocity of 272,528 km2/s (I think I rounded up to the decimal point here, too). Interestingly, the ((M x G) / r) formula also shows up in Geoff Eddy's page but I believe he uses it to figure out rotation velocity instead of orbital velocity...the difference could be using the mass of the planet and its radius for one statistic, and the mass of the star it orbits and the radius of its orbit for the other. Or maybe Geoff is mistaken...but I doubt it. Actually, I don't think either sources were wrong so it could merely involve more research and/or inquiry on my part.

Finally (and I hate finish with a hint of discouragement) there is orbital inclination. But I am so close that I think I will just make this one up. I will need to look into the extent of inclination and perhaps how and why it occurs, but that shouldn't take too long. Before I know it, my article will finally be up. I am learning how to cope with my somewhat perfectionist expectations when it comes to calling something complete enough to post. After all, my profile page didn't start out with much and look at it now. As long as my article covers everything I want to cover or should cover in a broad sense, it should be okay. I mean, I see lots of pages on this Wikia with categories that are either empty or have ardly anything in them. Maybe the people who made those articles are planning to edit stuff in and are using the sections as a framework. I might be permitted to do the same, but I want at least some information in there to make it look decent enough to be an actual article. I can't say when my article will be up for sure, but there will be a blog entry follow-up. I am also going to put a link in my profile page, so if you watch either of those, then you will know when the article is up.

OK, it is now nearly 4:30pm my time. I told you I would be up long after midnight. I have run out of things to say so I am going to end the entry here. Thanks for reading.