Christmas Quiet Period & KSP-Related Thoughts

So, we have entered the unofficial Christmas Quiet Period here at the Eldraeverse, in which I am running around doing not-working things for Christmas, leading to a shortage of peaceful writing time, and in which so is everyone else, leading to a noticeable drop-off in reading, by the statistics.

So, it’s going to be a little quieter around here for the next few days, on the grounds that Isif and her candle deserve more writing time and more readers than they’re otherwise going to get, and normal service will be resumed after the CQP.

In other thoughts, today’s quasi-lunatic impulse – as discussed on Google+ here – was the notion of putting together a Kerbal Space Program mod using Kopernicus to build a nice 1/6.4x scale model of the Lumenna-Súnáris System, with its two suns and seventeen planets and assorted asteroid belts, not to mention the moons, and thus let people download one of the Orion mods and play “Spaceflight Initiative – The Game” to their heart’s content.

Then I decided that it wasn’t practical, because it seemed very hard to get to perform decently even with 1.1 and 64-bit coming, and I don’t have the artistic skill to make planet textures, and there’s the obvious problem that Eliéra technically ain’t a planet, it’s a flat – well, convex – disk-shaped BDO and how the heck do you mod that in, and all of this would eat lots of valuable writing time, and…

…so, yeah.

But, of course, not practical for me is not the same thing as not practical for anyone.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take some of my available but restricted-creativity time over this Christmas season and write up a big description of the planets and moons and so forth of the Lumenna-Súnáris System, including their orbits and masses and types and atmospheres and appearances and little bits of surface detail that are going to need to go on their textures/biome maps, and throw them out here.

This should entertain those of you reading who are serious astronomy geeks, serve as a handy reference, and also makes it available for anyone who has time and capacity and enthusiasm enough to actually build said KSP mod, or something similar, as a fan-work.

(Up for grabs is the Imperial Star of Canonical Awesomeness, which cobbled-together image you can stick on your download page, or on your refrigerator, or have tattooed somewhere embarrassing, or whatever else you feel like doing with the official recognition that the author has looked upon your works and found them good, yea, even unto canonicity.)

So.

That.