Eight colonies on Tau Ceti III

This seems like… well, it’s welcome of course, but it’s an awful lot of information for somewhere that adventures aren’t going to be happening in.

I can easily picture a player saying “I have to read all this just to decide where I came from?”.

Which is a shame because it’s fascinating stuff…

Nup. I’d never publish all this. The history in particular is a waste of patience. And all the government, legal, and social stuff ought to be reduced to a few standardised phrases in a form or table, with the “planetology”, “population and economy”, “government”, “legal”, and "society stuff all fitting only one A4 page. It’s just an elaboration of the generator output in post #44, and anyone ought to be able to fill in the details for themselves, given that.

The rot first set in with a “Colonial Office system brief” for Lambda Aurigae that I produced as an in-setting document for the second phase of the first campaign. Players found it amusing, and demanded more, and between one thing and another they gradually became far too long and far too in-setting — which meant verbose circumlocutions around the terse phrases of the planet and population generator output.

This is just the thing I do when players and readers ask questions about details. I have to teach myself to stop it.

It ought to end up looking like this (and a computer ought to generate more of the output):

Provided that the stock phrases used in the entries are well defined two pages like that, a map, and half a page of the kind of details that @whswhs praised are just as useful and informative as the verbose version above.

And by the way: I am braver than @martinl: I would definitely run adventures in Tau Ceti.

Ah. Apologies; I got the impression that that wasn’t consistent with your goals in Flat Black overall.

…Huh? Oh, I said up above it was boring. That was to posit the place as a good source of thrill seeking PC types, and not really strange to WIERD audiences.

I claim that a determined and skilled GM can run a ripping adventure where the PCs are hamsters, the only setting is a hamster cage, and the only objects of interest are a food bowl, a running wheel, and three badly gnawed on bogroll tubes. I don’t think you are going for that though.

As for the planned system specs above - isn’t that a bunch of information for space folks? Will PCs normally care about the moons of the third gas giant? Or the planetary diameter? Or any planetary value of rgavity, atmosphere, or whatever that doens’t have game mechanical or role playing effects on their PCs?

Its availability “adds an air of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing tale”.

I probably wouldn’t give the system tables space in a printed product, but in a digital one space is not much of a consideration. Most of the stuff on the planet sheet either has mechanical effects or might be important to describing conditions and circumstances. Indeed, I’d like to add storminess, windiness, and relief. I could cut a lot of the duplicate values (for e.g. gravity, diameter…), but I think some readers find the trivial units helpful.

I’m parking a copy of some text from another thread here, for reference later:

I sometimes picture Tau Ceti as having continents arranged roughly like Earth, but covered in ice from the poles to about latitude ±45°, and with no land bridge at Panama, South America shifted about 40° to the west and rotated 45° clockwise, and Antarctica dragged 35° north along the meridian 90° E. Then (very approximately):

  1. Avalon consists of the 48 contiguous states of the USA, Mexico, the Caribbean, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, with Canada under an ice-sheet. The River Celadon is ~the Mississippi, draining the proglacial lakes from southern Idaho to western New York.
  2. New Sunrise has the Mediterranean littoral, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and northern Africa, plus northern Europe under ice.
  3. Gogmagog is Oman and Iran to China and the Phillipines, with Central Asia and Siberia under ice.
  4. Ys is Japan, Hawai’i, and Micronesia, with Alaska and eastern Siberia under ice.
  5. San Pietro is consists of Peru, Brazil, the Guianas, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and north-western Argentina, but all out of position.
  6. Zinfandel consists of Africa south of the Equator, western Madagascar…
  7. Alcuin consist of the Seychelles, eastern Madagascar, Mauritius, western Australia, the southern Malay Archipelago, and a coastal fringe of Antarctica in about the location of Île Saint Paul.
  8. Hell consists of the eastern third of Australia and the eastern half of New Guinea, New Zealand, the south Pacific, and a seriously misplaced strip of Chile and “south-western” Argnetina.

That implies a major discrepancy of population and GDP between the octants of Tau Ceti.

I suppose I ought to make a map.

I think there’s probably a niche for it as a setting book - lots of games have those “Region X” supplements, after all. It could also be valuable if you had a set of pre-written adventures/hooks set around that region, where that kind of rich detail would help flesh out characters and allow sandbox play.

For some players it would also be an interesting exercise to flesh out their chosen homeworld, and therefore their character. So it could be a useful thing to offer as an example: here’s how you could turn the output into a gazetteer so you know more about that planet you came from.

Yes, that’s certainly something that I have though about from time to time, even drifted into. But I think that maybe a novella set on a world would be a more effective complement to the kind of thing that I am writing in Forty Exotic Worlds (which is to say, a column of tabbed data, 1,200 words of terse description, and (in my dreams) a map).

The door has been open for players to design their characters’ homeworlds since the first campaign. But in all those years only Phred Smith took full advantage.

One of the requirements for that is a system and planet generator that players can use in the confidence that its output will be canonical.

Yeah. We should take another look at that, shouldn’t we? [guilty look]

1 Like

For a decade and a half or so I have felt very uneasy about the things astronomers were discovering about Tau Ceti What with the huge ring of dust and crud surrounding the star and the crowd of chubby planets orbiting it in tight orbits there seemed to be no prospect for the inhabited world there that is such a landmark of Flat Black.

Then I read the following intriguing titbit in the abstract of a paper published last October: We also predict at least one more planet candidate with an orbital period between ∼ 270 − 470 days, in the habitable zone for τ Ceti. So I read the paper (An Integrated Analysis with Predictions on the Architecture of the τ Ceti Planetary System, Including a Habitable Zone Planet, by Jeremy Dietrich and Dániel Apai of the University of Arizona), and liked this bit:

If PxP–4 is close to the widest predicted orbits (i.e., has a period close to ∼470 days), we find that an additional planet may reside in the habitable zone. This second habitable zone planet would then have a period of ∼270 days.

It turns out that Dietrich and Apai used two different models and compared the results. Both predicted planets that seem likely to correspond to the unconfirmed candidates Tau Ceti b, Tau Ceti c, and Tau Ceti d, and both predicted a yet-undiscovered sub-Neptune or super-Earth in Tau Ceti’s habitable zone. But one model (the “period ratio” model) puts it in a 277–395-day orbit, and the other (the “clustered periods” model) puts it in a 406-468-day orbit.

The clustered periods prescription predictions after adding in all 4 predicted exoplanets. The gap between [Tau Ceti] e and the additional inserted planet PxP–4 is large enough for another planet to fit in between, with a period of ∼270 days, at the inner edge of the habitable zone.

It’s not a matter of betting on the extreme edge of a 95% confidence interval. It’s a matter of choosing one out of two plausible models. I can have my habitable planet in Tau Ceti without having to at least tacitly declare Flat Black to be a retrofuture for which I must ignore the last 15 years of progress in astronomy.

Now, Tau Ceti has a mass of 0.783 solar masses, so a planet in a 270-day orbit around Tau Ceti will have a semi-major-axis of 0.7535 AU. And Tau Ceti has a bolometric luminosity of 0.52 L☉(bolometric), so the settlement candidate will receive at least 0.916 times the insolation that Earth does. Its black-body temperature will be only 6.25 K cooler than Earth’s. The only significant changes that I would have to make to my draft write-up on Tau Ceti would be to change its year-length, reduces its solar illuminance to 79% of Earth’s, and to change its designation from τ Ceti III to τ Ceti VII.

2 Likes

Hurrah! Reality is living up to fiction.

2 Likes

It seems to me that just as, sixty years ago, science fiction writers had to face up to our knowing too much about the solar system to write about ancient dying thin-aired canaliferous Mars and swampy or flooded Venus (Roger Zelazny’s early “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” reads almost like an elegy for ancient Dying Mars), now we have to deal with knowing too much about nearby stars to just make up planetary systems for them. And soon the imagined planets of Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti will have the same retro charm that the Mars and Venus of Space 1889 have.

1 Like

I am far from immune to the retro charm of Indiana Jones-style cliffhangery and pike-and-shot swashbuckling, and I have a distinct soft spot for retrofuturistic SF such as the Burroughs-to-Heinlein habitable solar system. I’ve run a lot of RPG campaigns in it. Though I like them both, futuristic and retrofuturistic SF require different suspenders of disbelief, and there is a moment while you are changing suspenders that you have to be careful that your trousers don’t fall down. In 1987–88 Flat Black was RPG adventure in the far future. Now it is becoming ever more clearly the days of futures past. (Both its astrography and its technology are becoming dated.)

I think that’s inevitable in anything that actually gets written down. The alternative is to change the thing constantly to fit new ideas, and my own inclination is more to start a new setting if I want to do that.

1 Like

So: the Tau Ceti system turns out to consist of one really small gas giant, with a disk of debris ten times as thick as the Kuiper belt instead of an outer system, and and inner system that is crowded with super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. Spectacular night skies!

That being the case, I have decided on a naming scheme in which the sub-Neptunes and super-Earths are named for giants from myth, legend, and folklore (not literature) — Surt, Blunderbore, Cormoran, Gogmagog, Goliath, Humbaba, and Skrymir. And I’m going to name the small gas giant for Jack the Giant-Killer. The obvious thing to do would be to name the settlement candidate “David”, after the most famous giant-killer in Western literature. But that is such a common name that it might be thought confusing. Ought I to call it “Gilgamesh” instead? Quest for immortality and all that?

I could replace “Goliath” in the list of giants and call the gas giant “David”.

1 Like

Is there a predominant culture/mythology among the surveyors/first settlers? (I’m sure you know this but I don’t.)

Addendum to my comment above, of course, is that if you explicitly don’t use the real world then that doesn’t get overtaken. Traveller’s starmap is as valid as it ever was. (While Traveller 2300/2300 AD’s isn’t – indeed the new 2320 AD says it explicitly.)

2320AD still uses the old 1969 Gliese catalog, rather than the newer Gliese II, Hipparcos or RECONS catalogs. This was done to ensure compatibility with the background and history of the game.

Oh, certainly. I enjoyed Transhuman Space a lot, as an SF setting whose aspiration was to be (then) contemporary science fiction, and eschew the tropes of 1940s-1960s science fiction: no FTL, no aliens, no time travel, no parallel worlds, no mutants, no psionics, and instead of classic robots who were essentially humanoid, it had AIs inhabiting and running cybershells of diverse shapes. It looked nothing like such classic-form SF as Star Trek, and I kind of enjoyed that. But these days Transhuman Space is looking dated, too, and running it has aspects of nostalgia.

But I had fun running a campaign in Space 1889, back when I’d only gotten started in GURPS. I still enjoy thinking about the future solar system, ten times as old as ours, where Jupiter has cooled from a sort of brown dwarf (as some 19th century writers seemed to envision it) to an Earthlike planet orbiting a dim and dying sun.

Not really. They were recruited from all over the world in AD 2095, which probably means some degree of over-representation of EIRD, but not so much of W.