I’ve had some ups and downs so far this month, but at about the midpoint I do seem to be on track to reach some good milestones.

I spent the first week or so of April doing an overhaul of parts of the Architect of Worlds design sequence. I started out just trying to add an alternative mechanism for producing gas giant planets, but that ended up carrying so many implications that I eventually had to overhaul most of Steps Nine through Eleven. I’m still not happy with the smoothness of the revised text, although the model seems to be working well enough.

Once that was done, I went back to an extended test run for Architect, generating planetary systems for a reasonable cut of the stellar population near Sol. I’m working with the data set associated with the paper The 10 parsec sample in the Gaia era – this is probably the best census of the solar neighborhood available at the moment. As of this evening, I’ve gotten about to the five-parsec radius.

I started out systematically generating planetary systems for every star on the list. Mostly this was to verify something I suspected about red-dwarf and brown-dwarf systems – that they are very unlikely to generate planets where humans can comfortably settle. So far I think I’ve confirmed that suspicion. I don’t think it’s impossible to find an Earthlike world in a red-dwarf system, but those stars have so many factors stacked against them that such cases are probably quite rare. Scientific and mining outposts, maybe, but not prosperous colonies. So after I generated 19 red-dwarf and brown-dwarf systems, I dropped those and concentrated on the brighter stars, spectral type K and up.

I now have 13 planetary systems for those brighter stars, and I’m encouraged to see that Architect is doing a decent job of generating Earthlike worlds (generously defined) for them. If we want air with sufficient free oxygen in it to breathe without too much artificial aid, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Counting Earth, I have six habitable worlds within five parsecs of Sol:

• Sol III (Earth)
• Alpha Centauri A-III (a super-Earth with a helium-nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere)
• 61 Cygni B-III (tide-locked)
• Epsilon Indi A-II (tide-locked)
• Groombridge 1618 III (tide-locked)
• 70 Ophiuchi A-III (a true Earth-analog, no helium, not tide-locked)

Not bad. Looks like Architect is going to give us a fair number of tide-locked Earthlikes, and the occasional super-Earth with weird but breathable atmosphere. The variety even in this short list is nice to see.

Eventually I plan to work all the way out to the ten-parsec radius, but this will do for now as a stress test for Architect. For the bottom half of April I’m going to switch to writing up some of these worlds and planetary systems, as a first installment in the rough draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate.

So for my patrons and readers, here’s the likely release schedule for this month.

I do have a new interim draft (v0.9) of the main section of Architect of Worlds, but I think I’m going to hold off on pushing that out to everyone until I’ve had a chance to go through and polish up the text a bit. I think I also want to get to the long-delayed project of cleaning up all the mathematical formulae so that I’m using more standardized variable names and formats. You may see a v0.9 draft next month sometime.

On the other hand, I’m pretty confident I can have a first interim draft of the Atlas of the Human Protectorate ready by the end of April, with at least 10,000 to 12,000 words of material in it. That v0.1 draft will be a charged release for my patrons. I may charge for further additions to that draft, as I have with new sections of Architect or other book-length projects, but only if and when there’s enough genuinely new material to justify it.

More updates as things develop, as always.