Designing a Galaxy

[The Raging Sandwich]

I don't really know, but could a red dwarf star produce some solar wind? I might incorporate that into the storyline too.

[The Raging Sandwich]

Update: I'VE CREATED THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK. IT'S CALLED "OUTPOST" 

Tell me what you think! (Sorry for the long post...)

 

Imagine yourself on a distant world far away from home. A desolate world with no water. You fled there on NASA’s journey exploring the stars. You spend most of your free time in your quarters trying to get some rest after a long day of scouting the area. Your only source of food is the lander outside base supplying you with freeze-dried stuff NASA engineered to never go bad.

I don’t have to imagine it. That is a stark reality for me. I got sucked in by NASA to join their journey across the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. Home to about 1 billion stars, about 23% of the stars here are estimated to be home to a solar system, and I’m on one of them, a blue planet called CO 174805a.

CO 174805a (everyone here calls Planet 1 because it is the only planet orbiting its red dwarf sun) is home to 3 tiny moons; the biggest one with a diameter of about 460 miles. Planet 1 is blue because of the amount of Thallium that makes up the majority of its surface. The hottest it gets here is only up to 65 degrees Fahrenheit while the coldest it gets at night is about -20 degrees. Our low budget suits mean we normally don’t go outside at night a lot.

Planet 1 has 20% more gravity on it than Earth, meaning it’s very hard to walk around. Planet 1’s smallest moon sometimes comes up really close to the atmosphere at the shortest point in its elliptical orbit. Its surface is covered completely in ice that reflects almost all light coming to its surface. If the time is just right, normally right before sunrise or just after sunset, the light from the moon reflects into the atmosphere causing the daylight to appear slightly longer.

NASA and the 6 crew aboard this base both agree this planet sucks. That’s why they’re relocating us. In reality, they’re ordering us to move and we’re relocating ourselves. A few years before this planet was discovered, NASA discovered an Earth-like planet they dubbed CO 123572b.

CO 123572b, which they call “Earth’s baby brother,” is about 79% fresh water. That means the planet might harbor life as we know it. Of course, that excites the nerds all over planet Earth, including myself and the crew. It mostly excites us because that means we’ll finally be able to leave this god-forsaken world we call “home.”

Our base, Outpost 3, happens to be located on hydrogen-rich ore. Our ship, Explorer 3, uses liquid hydrogen as fuel, just like in the days of Apollo and the Shuttle. After we mine the ore, trace amounts of hydrogen are converted into fuel for us to use for landing and course corrections.

Normally a typical mining-refueling session takes about an Earth week. Since we used most of our fuel to deorbit and land, the mining-refueling session needed to fully refuel will take about a whole Earth month. After that, our lander will fly back up to the Explorer 3 mothership.

I’ll worry about that when the day comes. NASA gave me the orders to go EVA first thing in the morning (32 hours from now) and start up the mining station. Each day and each night on this planet is about 37 hours long, meaning each full day on Planet 1 is 74 hours long. That means we each get adequate sleep and sometimes even get to sleep in every night.

Sleep schedules will change, however, when we get to CO 123572b. According to NASA planetary scientists, each day and night on Earth’s baby brother is only 9 hours long, opposed to the average 12 hours on Earth.

However, I get to sleep now after a long day of digging up thallium samples all around the Outpost. Because of the long nights, I sleep two times a night for 5 hours. I should write back in the morning.

 

So I woke up today for the second time to light flooding in my window from sunrise. The sunrises and sunsets are really the only thing I like about this planet. They remind me that even in the worst circumstances that something good can happen. But I got up after building up the willpower to get out of the bed and actually do things.

I would have to do the EVA in about an hour according to NASA’s schedule. They hate it when you don’t play by the rules and do exactly as they say. I have no time to deal with any of that so I just suck it up and follow the boss back home.

I walked into the lounge and sat down right next to the bullet-proof window so I could eat some freeze-dried lemon squares. It’s weird eating lemons without the juice in them. Then again, I’m not entirely sure they’re actually lemons. As I was sipping some hot water, my crewmate Edens came into the room.

“Mornin’, Johnson,” she said. She would be joining me on the EVA this morning to make sure everything would go as planned and nobody would screw up. I said “Mornin’” back and gulped down the rest of the hot water. I don’t like the taste of coffee but hot water always gets me going, too.

I went back into my private quarters and changed back into my undersuit. Normally I would’ve changed into my everyday clothes but I would be doing an EVA soon. It wouldn’t make sense to change into something then change into something else immediately after.

The small speaker on the wall near the door crackled to life suddenly. “Johnson, you up and running?” the voice said.

“Yeah, I’m up. I just had ‘breakfast’ and now I’m in the undersuit,” I replied.

“Good, go ahead and don your full suit on.”

To avoid conundrum, I did as they said and put on the EVA suit. It wasn’t the big bulky suit of fifty years ago. NASA devised and created a light-weight EVA suit that you could easily move around in. That’s a must-have when the gravity on this planet is constantly fighting against you.

I sat there on my bed with the suit on and the helmet next to me until Edens would contact me through the room speaker. I was checking the lights on the helmet when the speaker crackled to life once more. “I’m by the airlock and I’m gonna leave without you,” Edens said. “I have no problem with that!” I said with a yawn.

I heard my crewmate Shor yell “Will you be quiet!” from the room next to me. Apparently Edens accidentally pressed the “call all” button on the intercom. “Sorry,” she replied. I stood up and walked out my door.

I turned the corner after I exited the lounge and found Edens activating the airlock depressurization. Fans sucked up all the air in the airlock to leave us in a vacuum-filled tin can. She undid the latch on the outer airlock door and opened it up to meet a windy blue landscape.

Rocks littered the ground. Small pebbles were blowing along the surface with the strong gusts of wind. Because of the denser atmosphere on Planet 1, wind here can get about 20% stronger than even the strongest gusts of wind on Earth.

Thallium dust was blowing all over us and got on our visors. It was still really cold because the red dwarf sun just rose. Normally we would use jets of water to wash away the dust from the visors. Because the red dwarf sun just rose, it was still way below freezing. The water jets would freeze over on our visors leaving us blind. We just used our gloves to wipe away the blue dust.

We can’t take off our helmets for many reasons. The air on this planet is composed mainly of carbon dioxide which would poison us almost instantly. The dust constantly blowing would get into our lungs. The wind might blow a rock into our face so fast that it might fracture our skull.

We trudged carefully to the other side of the Outpost where the mining station was. The excavation arms were stowed away, of course. I got up to the control panel and grabbed ahold of the two bars on either side of it.

I let go of one of the bars and set the time limit- 30 days. That would give the machine enough time to mine enough ore. I selected the “overheat monitor” option that would set the machine to work slower in case the electronics got too hot. Next I grabbed ahold of one excavation arm and pulled it down so it was just above the ground. I did the same thing to the other three.

I got back to the control panel and hit the lever. The four excavation arms lowered a bit more. The drill bits started to spin. It through more blue dust into the air in all directions but the wind blew all of it eastward. It all got on my visor so I had to wipe it off.

The progress screen said “Nominal” showing that everything was working as planned. The wind was picking up even more now. To be safe, Edens hooked up a cable to my life-support pack and connected us together just in case one of us blew away in the wind.

We made it back to the airlock and opened the outer door. We got in (rather a gust of wind pushed us in) and shut the door behind us. We re-pressurized the airlock. Immediately through our helmets we could hear something. Something like the air being sucked out slowly.

“There’s a leak in here,” Edens said.

“Yeah, we need to find it.”

We got to searching the airlock walls for a hole. We didn’t take off our helmets just in case the airlock busted open from the leak or if all the air was sucked out before we could find it. I found a small pebble on the floor. I looked up from where it was and saw a small hole in the wall.

“Edens, I found it.”

“Show me.”

I pointed out the tiny hole as she got out the emergency patch kit off the wall.

“Thanks to God that this isn’t in a quilted area,” she said. She opened the small box and took out a roll of Duct Tape. We were happy the hole wasn’t on a quilted area because the air would still be leaking through the seams on the wall. We could stick the whole piece of tape on the wall to stop the leak entirely. As we stuck the tape over the leak the sound went away.

“That must’ve been some wind to bust through the metal outside and the cloth inside,” Edens said.

“You never know with this planet.”

We opened the inner door, took off our helmets, and went our separate ways. The whole EVA took about thirty minutes. I opened my door and walked in my quarters. The door automatically shut behind me.

I unlatched the life support and took it off, making sure I unplugged all the tubing out of my suit first. I set it all neatly in the rack where it belonged. Next I took off the shoulder pads on the suit exposing the zippers. I put them on the rack as well. I put away the helmet too. Next I unlatched my boots and put them away.

I undid the zippers on my shoulders and the one on the back of my neck near my collarbones. My arms slipped out and I took my head out of the top of the suit. I slipped myself out of the outer suit and hung it on the rack. I took off the inner layer as well which left me just in my undersuit. I switched that out for my regular clothing.

            I had the whole day to myself as the rest of the crew did their EVAs as well. I sat down at the lounge. NASA brought a TV here on the base as well. They streamed every show live to it. I switched on the news.

            “We’re live here in Oklahoma where another terrorist attack unfolded here late last night…” the reporter said. “That’s the third one this week!” I said to no one.

            “The third what?” I heard my crewmate Shor say as he walked into the room. “Terrorist attack?”

            “Yeah! This one was in Oklahoma. The US really needs to step up security. They’ve had three attacks just this week alone.”

            Shor went over to the coffee maker and started it up. “NASA gave me the orders to check on the mining system in a couple hours,” he said. “How was your EVA?”

            “It went well. NASA really took the wind on this planet lightly,” I responded.

            “How’s that?”

            “Well, the wind was so strong that it made a pebble burst through the airlock wall causing a leak. Edens fixed it, though.”

            And that was the end of that conversation. Shor sat down at the small table by the coffee maker. There was a small computer-sized TV on the wall next to him. I continued watching the news. Man, I thought to myself, they only show the bad things that happen in the world.

Edited July 14, 2016 by The Raging Sandwich
Formatting errors

[The Raging Sandwich]

I'll now be posting the chapters I create in a seperate post in Science and Spaceflight called My book Outpost. Make sure you check for new chapters. Keep in mind that this is just the rough draft!

Edited July 14, 2016 by The Raging Sandwich

[DDE]

On ‎11‎.‎07‎.‎2016 at 3:46 AM, SyzygyΣE said:

My advice is to think of the bizarre. What is the most bizarre star system you can think of that can actually exist? Just to list a few examples, the star systems AR Cassiopeiae and Nu Scorpii have likely—though not completely confirmed—7 stars in them, the shortest orbital period of any exoplanet is about 6 hours, there have been confirmed a ring system on a planet 200x larger than Saturn's rings, the newly discovered exoplanet HD 131399Ab is in a triple star system, and for a portion of its orbit, 2 suns set the same time as 1 sun rises.

So yes, weird scenarios like this can really capture a reader's attention. I've provided a few links for you. Hopefully you can acquire a few ideas to incorporate in your writing from them:

• List of exoplanet extremes
• The strangest alien planets
• The strangest exoplanets we have ever discovered
• Kepler's weirdest exoplanets
• HD 131399Ab

On the other hand, one should not delve too deeply into the exotic. As one may guess, most solar systems would be average, with small peculiarities rather than outright crazies.

[The Raging Sandwich]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

On the other hand, one should not delve too deeply into the exotic. As one may guess, most solar systems would be average, with small peculiarities rather than outright crazies.

Most of the solar systems I've created aren't downright wierd and rediculous as one might think. Most of the planets I've created are fairly normal!

[DDE]

2 minutes ago, The Raging Sandwich said:

Most of the solar systems I've created aren't downright wierd and rediculous as one might think. Most of the planets I've created are fairly normal!

Well, I wasn't quoting you, was I? I'm just all too aware of the high risk of slipping into this. For instance, when I developed five factions, one's from Earth, one are Earth rogues who signed a treaty on Kapteyn b, one comes from a halo subdwarf, one suffer from a 3.12 time dilation factor due to a Kerr-metric black hole primary, and the incomplete one get a loose binary sun and crimson oceans of ammonia-contaminated CS₂.

[KSK]

On 11 July 2016 at 1:46 AM, SyzygyΣE said:

My advice is to think of the bizarre. What is the most bizarre star system you can think of that can actually exist? Just to list a few examples, the star systems AR Cassiopeiae and Nu Scorpii have likely—though not completely confirmed—7 stars in them, the shortest orbital period of any exoplanet is about 6 hours, there have been confirmed a ring system on a planet 200x larger than Saturn's rings, the newly discovered exoplanet HD 131399Ab is in a triple star system, and for a portion of its orbit, 2 suns set the same time as 1 sun rises.

So yes, weird scenarios like this can really capture a reader's attention. I've provided a few links for you. Hopefully you can acquire a few ideas to incorporate in your writing from them:

• List of exoplanet extremes
• The strangest alien planets
• The strangest exoplanets we have ever discovered
• Kepler's weirdest exoplanets
• HD 131399Ab

Everyone's writing style will differ of course, so take this as you will, but I would amend that slightly to 'focus on the bizarre if it drives a plot point.'

Explorers finding a weird star system, scanning it, logging it and doing a quick survey is cool but ultimately a little forgettable. But turning the weird into part of the story could lead to all sorts of good stuff. What's it like to live in a system with seven stars? (Asimov's Nightfall is a classic look at this) How would you cope with a six hour 'year'? Are there any strategic implications to that absurdly large ring system? Etc.