Celestia Forums

Alrighty. I took a different pluto texture I created, flooded and greenified it, and saved over my existing terraformed pluto files. The new texture has fewer mountain glaciers than my old one. I also reduced the brightness of the specular, to simulate the dimmer lighting conditions. The side effect of the distance from the sun is that city night time lights (as viewed from space) would probably appear brighter than earth city lights (viewed from space), but I could be wrong about that. For the clouds, I took an earth clouds file and meshed it with a cloud file that came with rassilon's globular cluster generater texture package.

Now we all know that pluto is too small or whatever to retain a semi-earthlike atmosphere by itself, but I believe it could if we would implement a global force field surrounding it to keep the air in once we develop the appropriate technology and such. Once that happens, I imagine it would still be too cold for palm trees, but a paradise for fir trees and conifer trees, and lots of snow.

Book a flight to the year-round Christmas Planet, anyone?

Now, enough talk from me. Here are the screenshots.

No clouds


With clouds

Oh my, that's quite a lot of clouds!

Smacklug wrote:Oh my, that's quite a lot of clouds!

Yeah, and?

And, to a planet that far from the sun, large cloud coverage would be unwise; it would reflect the so-much-needed light away from the planet. It would most likely freeze over: snowball pluto (er... like today)

But then again, on a second thought: with a thinner atmosphere, the boiling point would be lower, and so would be the solidification point, right? So, your oceans (which seemed unreal) now kinda looks possible.

Tanketai wrote:But then again, on a second thought: with a thinner atmosphere, the boiling point would be lower, and so would be the solidification point, right? So, your oceans (which seemed unreal) now kinda looks possible.

Nope. Boiling point decreases as pressure decreases, but freezing point stays roughly the same throughout until you hit about 1000 Pa (0.01 atms). At lower pressures, it drops but there's no liquid phase.

See: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html for details.

Alrighty. I took two different earth clouds I had (both from the motherlode) and used them on pluto.




Either of them any better?

Malenfant wrote:Nope. Boiling point decreases as pressure decreases, but freezing point stays roughly the same throughout until you hit about 1000 Pa (0.01 atms). At lower pressures, it drops but there's no liquid phase.

See: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html for details.

Wow. Commom sense took me way outta line this time. Really interesting how the liquid phase disappears; never considered how pressure-dependent liquid water is. Vivendo e aprendendo.