eurymir

Trope-a-Day: Endless Daylight

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Endless Daylight: A property of more than a few worlds in the Empire. Some, like Eurymir, because they’re tide-locked, and the noon pole always points at the sun. A similar situation applies to the hexterranes of Coricál Ailék, which are oriented such that “up” is always sunward, and the danglehabs of Esilmúr, in which down is always sunward.

In other cases, it’s because the world inhabits a binary system. Eliéra, for example, has this periodically – in a manner of speaking – because for half the year, the summer, it is located between the two suns, and as such each side of the world receives some insolation. (Although, obviously, not identical – it still has a day-night cycle; it’s just that it alternates between full daylight and a red-tinged twilight that’s bright enough to read by, somewhat more so than a full moon.)

Trope-a-Day: Alien Sea

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Alien Sea: Obviously – not all oceans are water, y’know. Just look at Ólish, or Galiné, with their golden-black hydrocarbon seas. Or the molten metal lakes on Eurymir’s day face, or the reddish salty brine of terraformed Elémíre, or the literally wine-dark seas of rusty Talentar, or the colloidal algae-gelled oceans of Pentameir, or the copper-salt-blue waters of Daliethe, or…

…and that’s before we even consider non-terrestrial planets.

Lumenna-Súnáris System (2): Eurymir

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(Or maybe a little more often, if I happen to feel like it; also, a shout out to Wolfram Alpha, whose fine facilities make running the necessary calculations a great deal easier.)

I/1. Eurymir

Class: Eurymic
Orbit (period): 0.21 au (35.15 T-days)
Orbit (ecc.): 0.05
Radius: 1,758.5 miles
Mass: 4.712 x 1023 kg
Density: 4.96 g/cm3
Surface gravity: 0.4 g

Axial tilt: 3.9°
Rotation period: 35.15 T-days (tide-locked)

Black-body temperature: 577 K
Surface temperature (avg., sunside): 672 K
Surface temperature (avg., nightside): 56 K

Atmosphere: None.
Hydrographic coverage: 0%

Satellites: None.

The innermost planet of Lumenna, Eurymir is similar to Mercury as we once imagined it, which is to say, tide-locked, with a sunward face hot enough to have lakes of molten metal and roast anyone on even momentary exposure, and a dark face plunged into deepest chill, even occasionally to the extent of having water ice. The mind boggles…

Unlike Mercury, though, Eurymir can muster up some volcanic activity, especially on its sunward face: the tidal stresses also keep its core molten and perking right along.

(Being the fine, inhospitable world it is, it’s not all that populated even in the future. It houses a fascinating experimental a-life ecology, but apart from that, its principal use is as a gravity anchor for solar power stations and antimatter generators.

Its best-known settlement is actually a temple: because when you have a solar deity, where would be the best place to put that but the nearest solid ground to the eponymous sun?)

 

Trope-a-Day: Mercurial Base

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Mercurial Base: There are actually quite a few of these, as apart from relatively easy mining (assuming you have had to solve the heat problem anyway), those innermost planets are very useful places to put the antimatter generation infrastructure powered by the solar panels even closer to the sun, where power is dense and largely free.  Usually most of the colliders and other infrastructure doesn’t move around the planet – often the colliders are wrapped right around it – because the unmanned hardware can handle the radiation just fine, it’s just the squishy organics and more delicate computers and such that have to be kept out of the glare of the sun.

A variation, without the intense sunlight or radiation problems, is to be found on any number of spacer asteroid settlements, who sometimes wrap a track around their asteroid and mount a habitat on it to get spin gravity as a courtesy to visitors from places with the natural kind.