Going over hundreds of pages of threads and searching for anything with either FT (Future Tech), factbook, or worldbuilding in the title it seems most people are forever writing in process. In second place it seems most people focus on the society and people side of worldbuilding, fair enough, those made me pretty jealous and like, I can do that. Well two sentences in trying to do that on my own and that sobering experience said, stay in your lane kid, you can not do this. Bummer, well what should I try to focus on then, I want to be a big kid with cool fact books like the rest of the community that closes itself off for what I know are some pretty good reasons. Looking at what I do have made in private that will never see the light of day because that would require hamfisting beyond which I am not capable of pulling off, however I can present it here and it should be fine, I hope.
What is that, well I better get to it I am probably making the rule enforcers impatient. I will present world building, like the building the worlds kind, not the people side of it. That I did look for quite a bit for a long time, trying keywords and just brute force looking that I found out that is yet another thing I really suck at because I found nothing in this forum about actually building a world from the ground up and including a bunch of worthless information that would never be brought up in a roleplay thread. However the internet as a whole did not let me down here, with places like Reddit and the worldbuilding stack exchange providing some crumbs to chase. Though the Youtuber Artifexian pretty much covers most of what I wanted to go over, well that is a good base to follow if I ever saw one. Next paragraph I promise will have some actual rule following stuff, but the last thing I want to add is that this is going to be an open project that I do welcome feedback on because looking at all the other fact books be closed shows how cool those people are and I am not. Probably should try to call a mentor but that scares me.
Now starting off the world building process I did say it was hard to think of where to start, what finally got me writing all of this was I figured out I wanted to start of with the star and then go to the planet basics. The star that holds the solar system together seems like the most independent thing that does not require me to throw information that has not yet been mentioned. Kyrusia has already made something of a guide based off of this,
and why it is not in the helpful links part of the FT advice thread introduction I have no idea, modesty is my best guess but it makes it hard to find by brute force reading. The other guides do not really go much further in depth to the actual details in building a world or star, that makes sense, it does not come up in roleplay so why worry so hard about what in the end is most likely hard artistic license everything.Kyrusia wrote:ONSTARSYSTEMS
A General Guide on the Creation of Stellar and Planetary Systems
To get back to me now, I have a grand total of two solar systems to build up, and I will start with my most complete ferret one. Still thinking if the name I gave it is good enough but that is for later. The ferret system has, get this, two white dwarfs orbiting each other. Sad that Kyrusia only stuck with the boring main sequence of a star. First pitching that idea to myself years ago I was like its outrageous but rule of cool am I right, well looking into it on all knowing Google and what do you know, it is possible. Actually looking it up today, apparently more cool news coming in from July ‘19 about a discovered white dwarf duo that spin around each other super fast. Did not know about that years ago, galaxy seems to be quite the show off proving wacky things are possible.
Now thinking back, I really have no idea why I picked white dwarf stars, but it makes for some good history to build. Building the history of some stars, look at how far I am stretching to get some useless fact book information. Though getting on with it, getting to a white dwarf stage of a star is not that hard, just the standard evolutionary cycle of say, something like our sun we enjoy here on Earth. Boom, one white dwarf somewhere and another one somewhere else, no planets yet but that will hopefully be solved when the two stars find each other and fall in love eh. Now something had to happen to get the stars to fall in love, something simple as they got too close to each other in some sort of galactic mishap could do, and bam they are endlessly stalking each other. Or I could say that some overpowered people just made it be, cop outs work here right, only in character probably, religion idea saved for later. Two white dwarfs orbiting each other, some purple prose and that makes for the start of a good fact book, I hope. Before I get to trying to artistically license some planets in I do want to eagerly share something that I learned about the future of this type of system. Apparently according to Wikipedia and the source it links two white dwarfs merging together can possibly form a Subdwarf B star, which then burns back down into a white dwarf itself. The love story ends with the death of two to make a child, amazing. That also spells the death of any planets that originally orbited the two lovebirds, sacrifices had to be made, future roleplay topic I suppose if any of us live long enough to see that happen. So give it a few years.
Since these are just going to be standard white dwarfs that is easily Google searchable, so onto the planets to not bore anyone that has gotten this far with statistics that are not cool. I already gave the ferret system three planets, one to orbit one star and one to orbit around both stars as the stars orbit each other. Easy enough, but let me bring in the outrageous part again, the planet that is habitable does a figure eight around the two stars, within their habitable zones. There is a reason that Kyrusia’s star guide binary part does not include a lemniscate of Bernoulli, it is unstable and completely breaks that suspension of disbelief if the word realism even enters the same realm of worldbuilding. But according to physics stack exchange, there is a small probability of it not instantly falling apart, time to double down on this in the face of being told how stupid this is trying to make it seem like it could happen in real life.
Working with the Roche Lobe both the stars have to be pretty much exactly the same mass so that the planet can just barely skirt over to the other star, repeatedly forever. Well the two white dwarfs can pretty much be the same mass, the planet orbiting closer to one of the stars has to be really small and probably would be called a dwarf planet. Lot of dwarfs. The other star would have to be infeasible bigger mass wise to make up for that, the odds of that being are pretty much zero but damn it I am in too deep full steam ahead. The other planet would have to be small and far away orbiting both stars to not affect the interior workings of this system. How would this come to be, a lot of improbable things happening at just the right moments to capture rogue planets and stellar dust forming rocks I would suppose. Or advanced magic, it is in the back pocket once this goes wrong, trust me. That habitable planet also has to be really close to support life, like, within point zero one astronomical units. (0.01 AU). We should know that Earth is one AU from the sun, setting myself up to look stupid there if that is wrong but oh well. The problems that comes from being that close is that first, the planet will be tidally locked to the star and two, the white dwarfs are so close together it takes some strong counter forces to keep them from suiciding into each other too soon for live to evolve.
However, something saves me with evolution on the habitable planet, that crazy figure eight orbit. Doing the math, a planet at .02 AU would have an orbital period of 12 hours, double that and the year is 24 hours long. Was surprised to learn that when I did it, did it again to make sure that I would be consistent in being wrong and that is the case. One side of the planet would face one white dwarf for 12 hours, then the other side would face the other white dwarf for 12 hours. Not much in the way of seasons and I still have to work out what the climate will be like, since this is not the standard Earth like environment and I imagine the biomes will be really weird. Also have to figure out when each sun is visible in the sky at what time in the center of the orbit between the two stars. Though that part is for later, and maybe it will be fine, this is fine after all. Another thing that has to be considered is how hot the stars are, looking up white dwarf habitable zone, it seems like having a temperature of 5000 K and can last 3 billion years. That would give the planet an average temperature of 260 K to 280 K which is doable. Cool, looking up Earth and oh, well life took over that period of time to get to us sapient creatures. Umm, going to have to speed that process up by a lot, I can see realism hating me so much right now I mind as well move to a fantasy children’s story.
But for now we have other problems to deal with, as they are endless in this scenario system, white dwarfs have the issue of emitting extreme ultraviolet rays when they are young. Which means life, if it water based, has to come in much later when the stars are less angry at the galaxy. The planet being so close to the white dwarf has another issue with being tidally heated, possibly to the point of not even ever getting liquid water, just a bunch of worthless oxygen in the atmosphere. Time to deal with these things, the first one is just let that be, water and life can come later as I pushed that aside at the end of the first paragraph. The second problem is more interesting to me as I looked up tidal heating and realized that the habitable planet would have to be really small to begin with in order to try and have something of a stable orbit that I gave it. Now let's say I gave this planet point one mass of Earth, that is pretty small for a planet. Looking at the solar system we live in like Earth and Mars, some theories state that because Mars was smaller it lost its magnetic field because the core could not keep up and cooled down faster than Earths. If this is what I go with and put that on my habitable planet I am making, well it loses the only thing protecting it from the wrath of space. This is where tidal heating from the white dwarf might come in to save the day, where on a bigger planet it would superheat things, on this small planet, it might be the only thing keeping it chugging along. Wow, amazing how some things in this insanity might just click together.
With that I suppose this is a good place to finish off for the starting post, if you actually read that thanks for humoring me, there will be more to come. Feel free to ask any questions about something that I missed or tell me where I am wrong, or perhaps right if you are feeling really kind of this internet stranger. I will be trying to move onto more specifics about the stars and planets and then move onto my second solar system, which is more of a work in process and will be more open to last minute public mess ups.