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I'm currently working on another new project, this one being a planetary system surrounding the Sirius stars.

These systems aren't going to be very big, each will have 3 planets and possibly 3 moons each.

The picture below shows the first planet, the closest one orbiting Sirius A. It is called Hermius and I created it's texture using Mercury maps:



Any suggestions or comments?

Nice; I always admire your use of texture and colour on fictional worlds.

Don't forget to include some worlds with giant impact features- many worlds without atmospheres still bear the scars of the processes which made them.

Hmmm... interesting choice of primary star to create a system.

Some points to consider:

Sirius is a young star system, and any planets may still be under heavy bombardment/partially molten.

Sirius B has gone through its red giant phase, which would have destroyed any inner planets orbiting it, and mass loss may have caused outer planets to be ejected from the system.

The habitable zone of Sirius A is far enough out that planet formation there may have been disrupted by Sirius B (the mass loss associated with Sirius B may also have provided a disruptive influence)

And now a personal request: Please do not resort to joke names/obvious references to planet names in our solar system like you have done in other add-ons. I find that kind of thing rather annoying. Hermius may just about be ok, though it seems perilously close to the name Hermes... especially as you've created it as a Mercury-type world.

eburacum45 wrote:Nice; I always admire your use of texture and colour on fictional worlds.

Thanks.

eburacum45 wrote:Don't forget to include some worlds with giant impact features- many worlds without atmospheres still bear the scars of the processes which made them.

I'll keep this in mind for some of the moons.

chaos syndrome wrote:Hmmm... interesting choice of primary star to create a system.

I actually find it surprsing that nobody has already created a solar system for the brightest star in the sky.

chaos syndrome wrote:Sirius is a young star system, and any planets may still be under heavy bombardment/partially molten.

So... if bombardment is still occuring, does this mean that there would be a few asteroids floating around for planets to collide with, possibly even protoplanets or planetoids? Should I put some in?

I haven't really thought of any molten planets for the system yet, I haven't really thought of any plate tectonic activity either, should I try to illustrate that in my planets?

chaos syndrome wrote:Sirius B has gone through its red giant phase, which would have destroyed any inner planets orbiting it, and mass loss may have caused outer planets to be ejected from the system.

Well this sort of messes up my plans a bit . Is it possible that dust and gas from the accretion disk of Sirius A could have been captured by the white dwarf, forming planets in time?

chaos syndrome wrote:The habitable zone of Sirius A is far enough out that planet formation there may have been disrupted by Sirius B (the mass loss associated with Sirius B may also have provided a disruptive influence)

I haven't planned for any planets around the habitable zone as I have taken this into account.

chaos syndrome wrote:And now a personal request: Please do not resort to joke names/obvious references to planet names in our solar system like you have done in other add-ons. I find that kind of thing rather annoying. Hermius may just about be ok, though it seems perilously close to the name Hermes... especially as you've created it as a Mercury-type world.

Well, the names of the planets aren't going to be quite as silly as they used to be because I'm starting to be more mature on the subject on what to call my planet (although I still like to throw in a name that sounds a bit silly at times).

I've decided to name the next world Aphrodite, it's a bit of a Venus type world. Would this name be ok? Or does it cross the line?

The Mercury texture used as a base has some evident compression artifacts. These are apparent on the planet shown.

Michael Kilderry wrote:

chaos syndrome wrote:And now a personal request: Please do not resort to joke names/obvious references to planet names in our solar system like you have done in other add-ons. I find that kind of thing rather annoying. Hermius may just about be ok, though it seems perilously close to the name Hermes... especially as you've created it as a Mercury-type world.

I've decided to name the next world Aphrodite, it's a bit of a Venus type world. Would this name be ok? Or does it cross the line?

I think that was exactly the kind of obvious reference he was talking about. Aphrodite is the greek name of the goddess Venus, whose roman name was used to name the planet.

bdm wrote:The Mercury texture used as a base has some evident compression artifacts. These are apparent on the planet shown.

No, I think it's just the picture's compression artifacts showing up, being a .jpg format image and all. I haven't noticed any compression problems when viewing the planet in Celestia, Hermius' texture being a .png format.

tanketai wrote:I think that was exactly the kind of obvious reference he was talking about. Aphrodite is the greek name of the goddess Venus, whose roman name was used to name the planet.

Yes, but I think that name would be a bit of a grey area, considering that I've made worse names in the past with references to planets or moons or even comets in our Solar System, Kankymede and Shoescraper Lera 9 for example.

If the names aren't very good I can always rename them before release, and use the current ones as working titles, as per my original plan.

I see nothing wrong with Aphrodite as a name for a Venusian world. Hell, why not Cytherea? Or other similar goddesses, such as Ishtar, Pandemos, Cerigo, Ashtart, or a host of others?

It would be bad if the name were something like Venusia or something.

...John...

Dollan wrote:I see nothing wrong with Aphrodite as a name for a Venusian world. Hell, why not Cytherea? Or other similar goddesses, such as Ishtar, Pandemos, Cerigo, Ashtart, or a host of others?

It would be bad if the name were something like Venusia or something.

...John...

That's sort of along the lines of what I was thinking. I've actually given planets names like Cytherea and Kitherea before, both of them being warmer worlds than the Earth.

I have a host of planet names (all destined to be add-ons) that could be called derivative, I suppose. But, in the end, it is what *I* like that determines the name....

Well, at least until serious peer editing takes place....

...John...[/url]

I see you updated the list, looks good so far. How long do you think it's going to take before you've made an ArcBuilders system for every star listed there?

A full system? Right now, I've only completed the most recent updates for the Alpha Centauri A and B systems. I'm about to start on Tau Ceti. Otherwise, I do have add-ons for several systems more thn what is available at the Motherlode, and several more have just the primary planet of interest added in, but these are no where close for public consumption.

So, I guess, in a nutshell the answer could be: Not for some time! **chuckles** I may post some screenshots of some interesting worlds from time to time, though.

...John...

I have a lot of planets stuff not quite ready for release as well, but getting back on topic, here are some pictures of the second planet from Sirius A, named Aphrodite.

Aphrodite, with clouds:


Aphrodite's surface, without clouds:


Aphrodite is a large Cytherean world with a turbulent atmosphere and oceans of liquified lead. It also has two moons which I have recently created - I'll have some pictures of these soon.

Michael Kilderry wrote:Aphrodite is a large Cytherean world with a turbulent atmosphere and oceans of liquified lead. It also has two moons which I have recently created - I'll have some pictures of these soon.

A quick question about the moons - will you give some thought to the dynamical stability of their orbits? The closer a planet is to its sun, the less likely it will be to have moons. This is driven by two mechanisms - tidal locking of the planet will remove its moons, and the closer a planet is to its sun the smaller is the radius for stable moon orbits.

As to the planet names, you could consider names in different languages.

For example:
Mercury was the messenger of the gods. The Latin word for message and messenger is nuntius, so Nuntius could be a good name for the first planet.

Venus is the Goddess of Love. The Latin word for love is amor, so Amor could be a good name for the second planet. The only problem here is Amor is the name of a well-known asteroid.

If you wanted to feminise these names, they would be Nuntia and Amora.

Bit of an off-the-wall thought here, but why not just use original names instead of derivative ones? Do you really think we're going to be naming every cytherean world we find based on some variation of the theme of "Venus"?

Malenfant wrote:Bit of an off-the-wall thought here, but why not just use original names instead of derivative ones? Do you really think we're going to be naming every cytherean world we find based on some variation of the theme of "Venus"?

Not at all. But it is certainly a good jumping off point.

...John...

Michael Kilderry wrote:Aphrodite is a large Cytherean world with a turbulent atmosphere and oceans of liquified lead.

Whoa, that's a lot of lead. Is all of that lead available in a system as Sirius'?

Tanketai wrote:

Michael Kilderry wrote:Aphrodite is a large Cytherean world with a turbulent atmosphere and oceans of liquified lead.

Whoa, that's a lot of lead. Is all of that lead available in a system as Sirius'?

Really doubtful - lead is a rare element in the universe. You'd need some really bizarre and horrendously unlikely (and probably impossible) chemistry to get enough of it to cover a planet in a liquid ocean.

Sounds like Michael's taken the phrase "hot enough to melt lead" (used a lot for Venus) and taken it a bit literally .

Hmm... then again, I recall that radar-reflective features on the tops of mountains on Venus were interpreted as tellurium "snow" (not sure if this is still the accepted explanation), and according to WebElements, lead and tellurium have fairly similar abundances in the universe, and lead seems to be far more abundant in the Earth's crust than tellurium is. So maybe you could get a few small lakes of the stuff, though whole oceans of lead seem a bit far-fetched. Then again, lead is more often found in ores rather than as the free element, so maybe not even ponds.

chaos syndrome wrote:Hmm... then again, I recall that radar-reflective features on the tops of mountains on Venus were interpreted as tellurium "snow" (not sure if this is still the accepted explanation)

IIRC it was galena or pyrite "frost" - PbS or FeS. Apparently Tellurium can't condense in the highlands. Still, it wouldn't take that much 'frost' to affect the radar readings so it certainly doesn't imply that there's a heck of a lot of it there.

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