What's your dream planet?

[The Minmus Derp]

Describe your dream planet here!

with stuff like diameter, mass, etc.

Edited July 12, 2018 by The Minmus Derp
Boo!

[p1t1o]

Perfectly smooth sphere of Tungsten, no atmosphere.

[Scotius]

A world that somehow survived cataclysmic collision. Now it looks like a donut, with a perfectly round hole right in the center.

[Bill Phil]

A gas giant with many large moons, but not too far from its parent star. Basically Jupiter but closer to the sun so solar works better.

[ProtoJeb21]

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

Perfectly smooth sphere of Tungsten, no atmosphere.

That may be possible. There’s this one planet candidate I found that’s so hot - around 5,500*F - that it would have to be made entirely of metals like Tungsten and Molybdenum in order to even exist. It would also lack an atmosphere due to getting over 28,000 times more radiation from its star than Earth, stripping any gases away. 

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

That may be possible. There’s this one planet candidate I found that’s so hot - around 5,500*F - that it would have to be made entirely of metals like Tungsten and Molybdenum in order to even exist. It would also lack an atmosphere due to getting over 28,000 times more radiation from its star than Earth, stripping any gases away. 

Good chance its an degenerated core of an gas giant, take an gas giant jupiter or larger core has so high pressure that metal core become degenerated matter, move it close to the star who strip its atmosphere however good chance the degenerated matter is meta stable, it will stay stable with less pressure than required to create it so you get an ultra dense planet, see this as more likely than an tungsten star. 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

A gas giant with many large moons, but not too far from its parent star. Basically Jupiter but closer to the sun so solar works better.

And yes, take an gas giant, in the habitable zone, put some huge moons around it, this might even be captured planets. Put another or even two as trojans. 
Now you have moons with life and life is related, their Galileo would be the one proving that it was life on other moons. And yes this would give an serious space race down the line. 
However the funniest story might be if intelligent life developed on an continent on the outside of the tidal locked moon. Some pioneers island hopped and see the giant planet raise as they sailed east or west. Hopefully they had fur and not use clothes as it would avoid lots of dirty underwear. 

[Superfluous J]

Four Earthlikes, please. A pair of pairs all orbiting together in the habitable zone. Might need to be a bigger star so they're a bit further away and therefore stable.

They also may be able to be a bit smaller than Earth as their combined gravity could help them hold their atmospheres.

[Bill Phil]

32 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

And yes, take an gas giant, in the habitable zone, put some huge moons around it, this might even be captured planets. Put another or even two as trojans. 
Now you have moons with life and life is related, their Galileo would be the one proving that it was life on other moons. And yes this would give an serious space race down the line. 
However the funniest story might be if intelligent life developed on an continent on the outside of the tidal locked moon. Some pioneers island hopped and see the giant planet raise as they sailed east or west. Hopefully they had fur and not use clothes as it would avoid lots of dirty underwear. 

Well, yeah, I guess.

Really it's cool cause you can go to other moons of the primary with dinky chemical rockets.

[munlander1]

10 hours ago, Scotius said:

A world that somehow survived cataclysmic collision. Now it looks like a donut, with a perfectly round hole right in the center.

Wouldn’t it be very short lived though?

[Reactordrone]

Meringue surface (optional).

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/gallery/guide/magrathea.shtml

[GluttonyReaper]

7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

However the funniest story might be if intelligent life developed on an continent on the outside of the tidal locked moon. Some pioneers island hopped and see the giant planet raise as they sailed east or west. Hopefully they had fur and not use clothes as it would avoid lots of dirty underwear. 

This video comes to mind. Geniunely made me jump the first time I watched it on a big monitor  

[Scotius]

1 hour ago, munlander1 said:

Wouldn’t it be very short lived though?

"Short lived" on astronomical scale still might mean several millions of years I do not expect atmosphere of any kind anyways. Just a cool place space tourists could 'Ooohhh' and 'Ahhhhhh' over

[StarStreak2109]

What is a "plernert"?

[kerbiloid]

It's a piece of rock orbiting a sterr.

Edited July 10, 2018 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

55 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

This video comes to mind. Geniunely made me jump the first time I watched it on a big monitor  

Yes, but that moon flyby was trolling

[The Minmus Derp]

14 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Perfectly smooth sphere of Tungsten, no atmosphere.

Interesting.

 

14 hours ago, Scotius said:

A world that somehow survived cataclysmic collision. Now it looks like a donut, with a perfectly round hole right in the center.

Notpossible.

 

14 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

A gas giant with many large moons, but not too far from its parent star. Basically Jupiter but closer to the sun so solar works better.

Hmm, not bad.

 

11 hours ago, magnemoe said:

And yes, take an gas giant, in the habitable zone, put some huge moons around it, this might even be captured planets. Put another or even two as trojans. 
Now you have moons with life and life is related, their Galileo would be the one proving that it was life on other moons. And yes this would give an serious space race down the line. 
However the funniest story might be if intelligent life developed on an continent on the outside of the tidal locked moon. Some pioneers island hopped and see the giant planet raise as they sailed east or west. Hopefully they had fur and not use clothes as it would avoid lots of dirty underwear. 

Wow!

[The Minmus Derp]

13 hours ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

That may be possible. There’s this one planet candidate I found that’s so hot - around 5,500*F - that it would have to be made entirely of metals like Tungsten and Molybdenum in order to even exist. It would also lack an atmosphere due to getting over 28,000 times more radiation from its star than Earth, stripping any gases away. 

ERMAGERD! @ProtoJeb21‘s here!

[p1t1o]

3 hours ago, StarStreak2109 said:

What is a "plernert"?

Its a type of astrernermical berdy.

4 hours ago, munlander1 said:

Wouldn’t it be very short lived though?

Could be stabilised with a rapid rotation?

[Scotius]

19 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Could be stabilised with a rapid rotation?

I thought about it too. But inertia would rip it apart very fast. Being perforated all the way through by a huge chunk of matter would literally shatter structural integrity of any solid celestial body But hey - dream planet, right?

[The Minmus Derp]

Dreamplanet that you can LIVE on. from now on.

[magnemoe]

51 minutes ago, Scotius said:

I thought about it too. But inertia would rip it apart very fast. Being perforated all the way through by a huge chunk of matter would literally shatter structural integrity of any solid celestial body But hey - dream planet, right?

As I understand you could make an stable donut planet 

https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-the-earth-be-like-if-it-was-the-shape-of-a-d-1515700296

Even one who could have life, however it would be extremely low chance of getting one from an impact as the requirements for it looks very hard.
 

[kerbiloid]

First of all, we would speak about a dream size.

Spoiler

Almost nobody really needs physically huge planets. They are just useless, unless they pay you for miles.

Humans operate with muh smaller locations. Up to 20-30 km or so.
A distance of a weekend foot travel with a night camp. A big mountain. A city. Afaik, a living area of a stone age tribe.

Look at computer games. Fallout/Skyrim maps are ~5x5 km or so, but probably nobody really needs them all.
Depends on landscape designers' skills. An experienced designer can place several worlds in 200-300 m area.
Look at Renaissance multi-level parks with a castle and numerous caves, rotunds, patio, arcades, etc; invisible to each other though placed literally in a meter distance.
(Even in our city (in Russia) there are 2-3 such places, built in XIX by Italian architectors. Absolutely useful, no tasteless barocco or so).

So, unless you are a backpack maniac collecting miles, you probably first of all need several small locations.
Kinda a palace (your vault and lair) and hidden outposts as base camps in places of interest.

***

What size of palace is required?

Children like dollhouses, adults like fishtanks, tourists like mockups of a territory in museums, and they pay for binoculars.
So, probably everybody likes to have a look at a full location at once.

That means your palace should consist of a lower area and a hill from where you can look.
Not a very high hill, as you should have to walk up and down with pleasure, but several tens meters  (that's enough in most of cases).

And the other part of your palace should be a set of valleys at different sides of the hill, perfectly visible from its top.
A downtown with industrious and friendly professionally oriented NPC, a green park with a lake, a shooting range with a prisoners' camp, a sport area, an airdrome and KSC, and so on.

The valleys should not be too large, as you would prefer to see clearly what happens at the opposite side of your location. Probably, several hundred meters maximum.
So, your palace location would be in total  less than 1 km wide. Probably, 200-300 m in diameter or so.
(Computer games show how much can be placed into this enormous area, especially if use a multilevel architecture.)

Probably, the place should be surrounded by a natural wall, a rocky ridge. This makes it closed, self-sufficient, microcosmic.
With terraces along the inner slope, trees, and probably a circular railway to travel around by a small armored gun train.
Most part of your downtown buildings for NPC should be attached to the rocky wall, so you can perfectly see your city squares and their windows.

(NPC are sapient, and they are happy with their job and social role, like always in computer games.
So, you can discuss thematic things with them, but won't have problems when a cook decides to become a librarian.)

***

On top of the hill should be your palace, with an observatory, library, empty square with a pool and fountains, a stonehenge, binoculars, a machine-gun turret (why just machine-gun?), a balcony for sniping (from the shooting range side).

It can be enough small, maybe 20-30 meters wide. You have a lot of place across the downtown for your various occupations.

You need industrial and transport infrastructure, but you don't need to keep it on surface.
Sou you should have a network of roads where your carriage gets from one tunnel and then lurk in another.
All your engineering (including the rocket facility) should be underground. Just launchpads and landing pads on surface.

The main location is about 300 meters in diameter and up to 100 m high (including watchtowers).

So, with the underground part your personal mansion is a sphere ~150 m in raduis.
The upper half is your palace, it's mostly filled with air.
The lower half is your concrete dungeon.

It's like your personal dollhouse or snow globe where you hide when got kicked and where you plan your evil deeds.

You live mostly at 50 m above zero level. There's your palace.

***

This location should be separated from all other planet, to prevent somebody's undesired infiltration.
So, it should be placed in some hard-to-reach place, 300 m wide.

Basically, there are two options:
a 300 m wide mesa (an island, a volcano, a hill between bogs, a lunar glass dome; a cave; a pit, etc) on a surface of a rocky planet  or floating in a gas ocean of a gas planet.
a 300+ m wide planetoid. Like a Spore planet (they are 800 m in size, according to my measurements)

***

You need air.
If that's the Earth, you have it by default.
In any other case you need a closed bubble of air around your mansion.

You need ~1 g.
If that's a planet, this just depends on the planet.
If that's a planetoid, you have a problem.

No real material can be really dense and stable to provide you with gravity on a small planetoid. It would just burst.
So, the simplest to describe option (except magic, of course) to have a stable 1 g gravity is an arbitrary value of gravitational constant.

***

If your 300 m mansion is set on the planetoid surface, the planetoid radius should be ~1 km to not bother you with curvature.

Say, its radius is 637 m, i.e. 10 000 times smaller than Earth.

Then you need gravitational constant 10⁸ times greater than now.
This won't effect your health, but will provide you with 1 g on a small planetoid 1.2 km in diameter.

Orbital and escape speeds of such planetoid will be 100 times less than on Earth.
Orbital speed = 80 m/s = 288 km/h.
Escape speed = 112 m/s = 403 km/h.
You you won't orbit riding a car, but you can easily escape by a piston-engined plane.

If you climb on top of your watch tower (100 m), you feel 0.75 g.
But any chute jumping from it would be a basejumping, hard and dangerous.

You would have some safe altitude for flying by plane, for ejection seats, for chuting.
This means  you need about at least triple chute safe height of atmosphere above your surface, i.e. ~3x150 ~= 500 m of air.
You fly at 300 m, have 2x150 to open main and rescue chutes if jump, and 150 m above head if eject.

In fact, such atmosphere thickness is a radius of your asteroid.
So, it's like a natural boundary, you live in an air bubble 2.5 km in diameter (like KSP physics range).

***

But why this huge and mostly unused planetoid?
You anyway won't bombing it (because any delta-V inaccuracy can send the bomb to your head from back).

And why bother with spherical maps?

Let's make it flat. (sic!).

So, we want a disk-shaped planetoid ~300 m in diameter.

Let's recall that a torus has a nice-shaped gravity field.
It's toroidal close to its surface, ellipsoidal a little  away, and spherical far away.

All we need to take a torus of required proportions and cover its hole with caps where its gravity field gets ellipsoidal.
We will get not a real disk (who needs it), but a planetoid of erythrocyte shape.

Spoiler

Let's make the torus out of some densiest material, say thorium.
Thorium is very dense, and I like how sounds: a thorium torus, or toroidal thorium.

That inner concave place is 300 m in diameter.
The whole torus is 500-600 m in diameter.

Let's add some scattered uranium or plutonium or any other radioactive isotope. (Should be computed of course. We can only appreciate helium, but radon is not needed).
This will make our thorium torus warm without any external source of energy.
And this always provides us with ready-to-use power without any efforts.
Radiation is anyway captured by a thick layer of rock/concrete. But you don't need to dig inside, of course.

Redistributing the decaying isotope properly, we can have both hot springs with geysers and cold places with ice.

***

The space between the caps (inside the hole) we can fill with any lightweight material (everything is lightweight compared to actinides).
At some places we leave holes and have a two-sided diving pool with a zero-G area near the equatorial plane.

So, we have an ellipsoid gravity field whose normal vector is parallel to the surface normal vector in every point of the inner areas.
There we build our mansion and its counter-mansion from another side of the planetoid. 
Say, you can place you KSC on the opposite side, to keep your palace safe.

The toroidal edge is like a ridge. Gravity is also normal to the surface there, you can walk across the edge.

***

We have a 600 m high atmosphere. Maybe thicker, 
So, the sky will be always dark, with clearly visible stars.
Of course we should think how to protect us from UV and radiation, but not now. Maybe some lightweight gaseous layer beneath the sky, or so.
And we should invent how to keep the air inside. Also not now.

So, we can get to the sky by plane.
Escape speed at the sky height is ~80 m/s (as radius is twice greater, hard to calculate a torus field).

So, you can get to sky by plane, escape, fly around the planetoid with fuel just 5-10% of your plane mass.

You can have a personal spaceplane, literally a plane to fly into space.

And this makes your interplanetary flights much easier. You can either leave your interplanetary ship in orbit (1 km above head), or land it on the opposite side.

***

You don't need to rotate your planetoid, though you can.
It will prevent the overheating from Sun and animate the sky.

The equatorial ridge is ~1.2 km in diameter, so you have a 4 km road to drive a car or so.

And from sides it's flat.

***

You can have other planetoids, of the same or spherical shape.
Due to low delta-V, there you can nuke, shoot, do magic, or whatever.
No need to have a lot of them, just one spherical mordor with a thorium+ core (to keep it warm).

Of course if there are other such tiny planets in a region with increased gravitational constant, you can easily visit them spending just a barrel of fuel.

***

An absolutely must have thing are huge planets frighteningly appearing above horizon.
When you see it, you make bricks. (At least, first times in Spore.)
They don't need to be really huge. They should be visually huge. Say, in Spore they are 1-5 km in diameter, but make you fear. That's because they are close.

But they shouldn't be dull as clock. so you should not orbit around them or vice versa.
You and they should orbit around something else, on tilted orbits.
And the orbital center shouldn't be too big, too obvious.
Say, a central collapsar looks enough nice.

***

You don't need a sun (thorium torus warms you), but balls of flame look also nice, so mini-stars are useful, too.

But they have to burn, and burn fast. They can't burn long.
So, let them burn fast, die young.
Let the central gas cluster with the collapsar inside spit with fireballs.

Those fireballs will be of random mass and color, they live for several weeks/months/to be calculated.
Then they burst like normal stars, but with much lesser energy, so safe for you.

You will be like orbiting a boiling gas cloud spitting with mini-stars (several kilometers in diameter).
The sky will be full of star remains and mini-stars at different life phases.
From time to time they fall back into the central cluster.

***

But you don't need all the planets in the Universe to be as little as here.

You want some Spore-scaled planets, some Kerbin-scaled, and a lot of normal-scaled.
And that's pointless to mix them together.

This means that the region of you changed gravitational constant must be limited.
Say, you need several tens of Spore-scaled planets, a ten of Kerbin-scaled, and countless normally scaled.

And you don't need the whol Universe to orbit around your mini-collapsar.

So, the region should be just a region of a Solar System with a locally changed physical constant.

You don't need to spend years flying between the planets.

So.
A Spore-scale region.
Planet scale ~1/10000.
Planet numbers: ~100.
I.e. like a Jupiter/Saturn moon system scaled 10000 times down.

30 000 000 km / 10 000 = 3000 km.

Kerbin-scale region.
Planet scale = 11.
Say, Jool is the last. And we shoul make the system a little denser. 
Say, 0.1 AU in total.

***

So, we should have a stable spherical gravitational anomaly maybe orbiting around Jupiter Saturn (it's nicer, it has rings, and we can visit Titan and Enceladus).
About 0.1 AU in radius.
With gravitational constant growing to the center.
With a central cluster spitting microstars.
A hundred of Spore-like planets and stars in its inner region.
A ten of Kerbin-sized planets orbit around it in peripheral regions.

And with our (probably several more) erythrocyte-shaped planetoid warmed and heavied with a thorium torus insde.
With a lovely mansion with castle on one side, and KSC on another.
With a spaceplane to get to space by plane.

***

More or less so.

Edited July 10, 2018 by kerbiloid

[ProtoJeb21]

15 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Good chance its an degenerated core of an gas giant, take an gas giant jupiter or larger core has so high pressure that metal core become degenerated matter, move it close to the star who strip its atmosphere however good chance the degenerated matter is meta stable, it will stay stable with less pressure than required to create it so you get an ultra dense planet, see this as more likely than an tungsten star. 

So, basically, it won’t be made of Tungsten but it’ll look like it is. I think that’s cooler and more exotic than a Tungsten-based metal planet. 

[Gameslinx]

a black sphere with the jool template

black colour map

clear normal map

3km radius

no unique features whatsoever because they stand out too much and i dont like them

my dream planet