And now for something different ...

[Xeviat]

Just read this article, Mars Express Finds New Evidence for Ancient Ocean on Mars, and upon seeing that map, I instantly wanted to play with it and make a mini-setting. It's re-invigorating my desire to make my sci-fantasy alien-world setting again ...

But the massive continent, the giant mountains/volcanoes (especially how they are arranged in a triangle), and the thought of lower gravity just tickle my inner world builder.

I figure this thread could be for sharing sciency stuff that inspires you.

[Humabout]

That looks awesome!  I might nip off with that for my scifi setting, tbh.  I'll check some fun stats for a mars with a breathable earth-like atmosphere in a bit.  Right now....back to doing taxes... :(

[Hibou]

If you guys want some help on the SCIENCE side, let me know. Also: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/9P8860 and http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0709/PangeaUltima_scotese.jpg . Both inspiring; at some point I may use the latter for an awesome setting (search "Earth in 250 million years" in Google images and you'll get a ton of stuff like this).

[Humabout]

Somethign worth noting (and probably the most problematic aspect of Mars) isn't the lack of water, so much, or even the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere.  It's Mars' inability to sustain a thick atmosphere over a long time period.  Part of terraforming mars will require an ongoing process that introduces and maintains nitrogen and oxygen levels, and maintains an overall atmospheric pressure high enough for humans to breathe without equipment.  Even if there is water on Mars, with its extremely low atmospheric pressure, water ice never melts to liquid water - it sublimes directly into water vapor.  Without a thick atmosphere, you'll never have oceans.  Obviously, this wasn't an issue at some point in Mars' history, but as we can plainly see, it didn't last.

That all said, planetary timescales do differ somewhat from human timescales.  And technobabble (or, perhaps, even legitimate) solutions to this problem may exist.  Thinking about it, II'll probably steal that map for a more Barsoom-style setting than using it for my gothic scifi thing that's ever-percolating.  That setting embraces the bleakness of life off of Earth and the prospect of dealing with not just the inhuman, but the unearthly.  Water on Mars makes it a little too homey for that setting.

A few fun things to remember about Mars:  Its distance from the sun, makes it about as bright in full daylight as Earth is on a cloudy, overcast day; its horizon is a lot closer.

[Superfluous Crow]

Didn't one of those candidate-y things (some of) you guys have in the US just promise the public an american moonbase a few days ago?

[Lmns Crn]

I really like the notion of a science fiction game set on a world that is close enough to its sun and of the proper size to be tidally locked. That is to say, it wouldn't spin with respect to its sun, and it would have no day/night cycle: the same side of the planet would always face the sun, which would appear fixed in the sky at a specific point. Astronomers typically write off tidally locked worlds as potential candidates for life, because one side is inhospitably hot and the other is inhospitably cold and dark, with an enormous contrast between two oppositely hellish halves.

I think it would be rad as hell to do a scifi thing about a civilization on one of these tidally locked worlds, which has to straddle the terminator line between deadly eternal day and deadly eternal night in order to survive, clinging to the narrow habitable ring of land where perpetual twilight reigns.

[Hibou]

Didn't one of those candidate-y things (some of) you guys have in the US just promise the public an american moonbase a few days ago?

Newt Gingrich was the guy. Unfortunately it's a bunch of nonsense, likely just his attempt at garnering votes from the Space Coast in Florida. The kind of funding that would need to be more or less instantly allocated to space tech (in order to have it up and running by the time he stated) would be insane and would make a lot of people angry.

I really like the notion of a science fiction game set on a world that is close enough to its sun and of the proper size to be tidally locked. That is to say, it wouldn't spin with respect to its sun, and it would have no day/night cycle: the same side of the planet would always face the sun, which would appear fixed in the sky at a specific point. Astronomers typically write off tidally locked worlds as potential candidates for life, because one side is inhospitably hot and the other is inhospitably cold and dark, with an enormous contrast between two oppositely hellish halves.

I think it would be rad as hell to do a scifi thing about a civilization on one of these tidally locked worlds, which has to straddle the terminator line between deadly eternal day and deadly eternal night in order to survive, clinging to the narrow habitable ring of land where perpetual twilight reigns.

Totes. It should be easy enough to explain-away the small details and the more long-term issues that could make the setting infeasible (I helped SamuraiChicken do something similar a while ago when he wanted to have a planet setting that was in orbit around a Saturn-sized gas giant). Given such a relatively small amount of surface area to work with, it'd be interesting to see what kind of civilization evolves and how far they manage to get; they might not even be able to get past a certain level of tech, depending on the composition of their planet and distribution of resources on such a strange world.

[Xeviat]

If you guys want some help on the SCIENCE side, let me know. Also: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/9P8860 and http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0709/PangeaUltima_scotese.jpg . Both inspiring; at some point I may use the latter for an awesome setting (search "Earth in 250 million years" in Google images and you'll get a ton of stuff like this).

My own setting is Earth in 50 million years, so I've fiddled with those projection maps a bit.

[Xeviat]

I really like the notion of a science fiction game set on a world that is close enough to its sun and of the proper size to be tidally locked. That is to say, it wouldn't spin with respect to its sun, and it would have no day/night cycle: the same side of the planet would always face the sun, which would appear fixed in the sky at a specific point. Astronomers typically write off tidally locked worlds as potential candidates for life, because one side is inhospitably hot and the other is inhospitably cold and dark, with an enormous contrast between two oppositely hellish halves.

I think it would be rad as hell to do a scifi thing about a civilization on one of these tidally locked worlds, which has to straddle the terminator line between deadly eternal day and deadly eternal night in order to survive, clinging to the narrow habitable ring of land where perpetual twilight reigns.

I actually started a thread on that the moment Gliese 581 g was discovered (apparently mistakenly). The idea I was going to run with was a reversed alien astronaut theory. Humans visited the planet once, modern humans like us, but many died as they crashed on the planet. They were able to teach the natives some things before they died out, but they didn't last more than a few generations.

Now, in the setting's present, humans have returned. The trip took the original humans countless thousands of years to reach while in stasis, so humans have evolved much in the interim. The returned humans are seen as gods.

I wanted to have 4 races on this world. The first two would live on the terminator, and would have benefited the most from the jump-start that humans provided. The third lives on the day side in the perpetual sun; they're primitive, as their science and mathematics never went far (I'm assuming that much science was rooted in viewing the stars). The fourth lives on the night side, a dark and mysterious technologically advanced race.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Wow! That's gotta be the coolest setting map in a while.

[Xeviat]

Which? The Mars map?

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Which? The Mars map?

Yeah, it's sweet looking.

[Xeviat]

Seriously. It just gets the brain juices flowing.

[Humabout]

How about a real Martian sunset?

Anothe rone of those odd things - Martian sunsets are blue...