Pluto Time

[Master_Artificer]

In celebration of the discovery of Pluto:

*
(*Image taken 16 hours before encounter. Actually discovered 90+ years ago)

What was pervoiusly thought to be a cold ball of ice and rock has now captivated the nation!
It actually is a cold dusty ball of rock with a hefty layering of sand!

DUNES! CRATERS! a haze around the image that shows ATMOSPHERE! What are those bumps on the far right side? What are the dark splotches!?! Polar Icecaps confirmed!

Anyways, should get first pictures in a day or so, and the rest of the data over a year.


Now for starmade!

We should have a new type of planet! Cold dusty/sandy planets!

Binary Planet Systems (BPS) where their are 2 planets and 1 sector.
Plates could be different colors from one another! (look at the wide contrasts on pluto!)
Icecaps on the north and south plates!
The 2 planets would spin around a fixed point between the two very slowly, and the direction would be random. Pluto's system is near perpendicular with it's orbit, not parallel.


What have you guys done today? I woke 3 hours before I usually do and watched Nasa TV and the Simulation as it should of unfolded in real time.

 

[AdmiralGialAckbar00]

Two planets in one sector?

That's a lot of lag there.

 

[CyberTao]

Double the planets, double the pain!
If I remember right, Pluto was demoted from planet status due to it's size, so maybe instead of 2 "planets", it could be 2+ smaller "planetoids". A cluster of small planet-like entities would be nice to build within in my opinion.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Pluto is indeed a dwarf planet. But it is also a planetary binary system!

Here is a size comparison:

I could see a r80-120 and a r30-60 being in the same sector! wouldn't be that much lag, right?

This is the actual distance between the 2 dwarf planets:

I think it is like a little less than earth's diameter. But in starmade you could edit it down to something like this:

Would be cool, food for thought.

 

[Master_Artificer]

TotesAdorbs

 

[EricBlank]

Actual barren planets, moons, and dwarf planets/planetoids will hopefully be a thing.

Got to come up with a way to minimize the lag from planets, too.

 

[AdmiralGialAckbar00]

I could see a moon in the same sector.

I can't see another planet in the same sector, because a planet is a planet, and the gravity is the same for all of them.

 

[Edymnion]

If I remember right, Pluto was demoted from planet status due to it's size

For the record, Pluto was demoted because it hasn't cleared it's orbit.
Basically, Pluto is at the edge of the Kuiper Belt, an area of debris on the outer edge of our solar system. Kind of like the big brother to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Pluto is big enough to be a planet, its round enough to be a planet, but its essentially in an asteroid field that it hasn't cleared out, making it more akin to an overgrown asteroid than a full planet.

 

[Master_Artificer]

It also has at bunch of asteroids it captured as "moons".

The chaotic tumbling and the orbits they have suggest that the system is unstable and unlikly to be very old, nor last for much longer in the future. Of course, I am talking about times where a few hundred million years is "not very long", but yeah.