Architect of Worlds – Step Seventeen: Determine Obliquity

September 14, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 2 comments

The obliquity of an object is the angle between its rotational axis and its orbital axis, or equivalently the angle between its equatorial plane and its orbital plane. It’s often colloquially called the axial tilt of a moon or planet. Obliquity can have significant effects on the surface conditions of a world, affecting daily and seasonal variations in temperature.

Procedure

Begin by noting the situation the world being developed is in: is it a major satellite of a planet, a planet with its own major satellite, or a planet without any major satellite? Notice that these three cases exactly parallel those in Step Sixteen.

First Case: Major Satellites of Planets

Major satellites of planets, as placed in Step Fourteen, will tend to have little or no obliquity with respect to the planet’s orbital plane. To determine the obliquity of such a satellite at random, roll 3d6-8 (minimum 0) and take the result as the obliquity in degrees.

Note that the major satellites of gas giants, distant from their primary star, may be an exception to this general rule. For example, in our own planetary system, the planet Uranus is tilted at almost 90 degrees to its orbital plane. Its satellites all orbit close to the equatorial plane of Uranus, so their orbits are also at a large angle, and their obliquity is very high. Cases like this are very unlikely for the smaller planets close to a primary star – tidal interactions will tend to quickly “flatten” the orbital planes of any major satellites there.

Second Case: Planets with Major Satellites

A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has a major satellite is likely to have its obliquity stabilized by the presence of that satellite.

To select a value of the planet’s obliquity at random, roll 3d6. Add the same modifier that was computed during Step Sixteen for the Rotation Period Table, based on the degree of tidal deceleration applied by the major satellite. Refer to the Obliquity Table.

Obliquity Table
Modified Roll	Obliquity
4 or less	Extreme (see Extreme Obliquity Table)
5	48 degrees
6	46 degrees
7	44 degrees
8	42 degrees
9	40 degrees
10	38 degrees
11	36 degrees
12	34 degrees
13	32 degrees
14	30 degrees
15	28 degrees
16	26 degrees
17	24 degrees
18	22 degrees
19	20 degrees
20	18 degrees
21	16 degrees
22	14 degrees
23	12 degrees
24	10 degrees
25 or higher	Minimal (3d6-8 degrees, minimum 0)

Feel free to adjust a result from this procedure to any value between the next lower and next higher rows on the table.

If the result is Extreme, the obliquity is likely to be anywhere from about 50 degrees up to almost 90 degrees. To select a value at random, roll 1d6 on the Extreme Obliquity Table.

Extreme Obliquity Table
Roll (1d6)	Obliquity
1-2	50 degrees
3	60 degrees
4	70 degrees
5	80 degrees
6	98-3d6 degrees, maximum 90

Again, feel free to adjust a result from this procedure to any value between the next lower and next higher rows on the table.

Third Case: Planets Without Major Satellites

A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has no major satellite will be most affected by its primary star.

However, without the stabilizing presence of a major satellite, the planet’s obliquity is likely to change more drastically over time. Minor perturbations from other planets in the system may lead to chaotic “excursions” of a planet’s rotation axis. For example, although at present the obliquity of Mars is about 25 degrees (comparable to that of Earth), some models predict that Mars undergoes major excursions from about 0 degrees to as high as 60 degrees over millions of years.

To select a value for obliquity at random, begin by rolling 3d6 on the Unstable Obliquity Table.

Unstable Obliquity Table
Roll (3d6)	Modifier
7 or less	Roll 1d6 – High Instability
8-13	No modifier
14 or higher	Roll 5d6 – High Instability

Make a note of any result indicating High Instability for later steps in the design sequence. The planet is likely to be undergoing drastic climate changes on a timescale of millions of years.

Now make a roll on the Obliquity Table, but if High Instability was indicated, roll 1d6 or 5d6 on this table, rather than the usual 3d6. Finally, add the same modifier that was computed during Step Sixteen for the Rotation Period Table, based on the degree of tidal deceleration applied by the primary star. Refer to the Obliquity Table, and possibly the Extreme Obliquity Table, as required.

Examples

Both Arcadia IV and Arcadia V are planets without major satellites, so they both fall under the third case in this section, as they did in Step Sixteen.

For Arcadia IV, Alice begins by rolling a 4 on the Unstable Obliquity Table, indicating that she will need to roll 1d6 rather than 3d6 on the Obliquity Table. That roll will therefore be 1d6+1, and Alice gets a final result of 3. Arcadia IV apparently has extreme obliquity in the current era. Rather than roll at random, Alice selects a value for the planet’s obliquity of about 58 degrees.

Alice makes a note of the “high instability” of the planet’s obliquity. Its steep axial tilt may be a relatively recent occurrence, taking place over the last few million years. Arcadia IV, the Earth-like candidate in her planetary system, will have very pronounced seasonal variations, and may be undergoing an era of severe climate change. Any native life has probably been significantly affected, and human colonists would need to adapt!

Meanwhile, for Arcadia V, Alice rolls a 12 on the Unstable Obliquity Table, indicating that the planet’s rotational axis is currently relatively stable. She rolls an unmodified 3d6 on the Obliquity Table, getting a result of 15. She selects a value for this planet’s obliquity of about 28.5 degrees.

Architect of Worlds – Step Sixteen: Determine Rotation Period

September 9, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

A quick note before I drop the next section of the draft: I caught myself making several errors in the mathematics while developing this step. I think I’ve weeded all of those out, but if anyone is experimenting with this material as it appears, let me know if you come across any odd results.

Step Sixteen: Determine Rotation Period

The next three steps in the sequence all have to do with planetary rotation. Every object in the cosmos appears to rotate around at least one axis, and in fact some objects appear to “tumble” by rotating around more than one.

Planets and their major satellites usually have simple rotation, spinning in the same direction as their orbital motion, around a single axis that is more or less perpendicular to the plane of their orbital motion. There are, of course, a variety of exceptions to this general rule.

In this step, we will determine the rotation period of a given world. In this case, we will be dealing with what’s called the sidereal period of rotation – the time it takes for a world to rotate once with respect to the distant stars.

Worlds appear to form with wildly varying rotation periods, the legacy of the chaotic processes of planetary formation. However, many worlds will have been affected by tidal deceleration applied by the gravitational influence of nearby objects. Tidal deceleration may cause a world to be captured into a special status called a spin-orbital resonance, in which the world’s orbital period and its rotational period form a small-integer ratio.

Procedure

Begin by noting the situation the world being developed is in: is it a major satellite of a planet, a planet with its own major satellite, or a planet affected primarily by its primary star?

First Case: Major Satellites of Planets

Major satellites of planets, as placed in Step Fourteen, will almost invariably be in a spin-orbit resonance state. Most models of the formation of such satellites suggest that they are captured into such a state almost immediately after their formation.

Since a major satellite’s orbit normally has very small eccentricity, the spin-orbit resonance will be 1:1. The satellite’s rotation period will be exactly equal to its orbital period.

Second Case: Planets with Major Satellites

A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has a major satellite may be captured into a spin resonance with the satellite’s orbit. This is actually somewhat unlikely; for example, Earth is not likely to become tide-locked to its own moon within the lifetime of the sun. However, a satellite’s tidal effects on the primary planet will tend to slow its rotation rate.

To estimate the probability that a planet has become tide-locked to its satellite, and to estimate its rotation rate if this is not the case, begin by evaluating the following:

$T={10}^{25}\times\frac{M_S^2\times R^3}{A\times M_P\times D^6}$

Here, A is the age of the star system in billions of years. M_S and M_P are the mass of the satellite and the planet, respectively, in Earth-masses. R is the radius of the satellite, and D is the radius of the satellite’s orbit, both in kilometers.

If T is equal to or greater than 2, the planet is almost certainly tide-locked to its satellite. Its rotation period will be exactly equal to the orbital period of the satellite.

Otherwise, to generate a rotation period for the planet at random, multiply T by 12, round the result to the nearest integer, add the result to a roll of 3d6, and refer to the Rotation Period Table.

Rotation Period Table
Modified Roll (3d6)	Rotation Rate
3	4 hours
4	5 hours
5	6 hours
6	8 hours
7	10 hours
8	12 hours
9	16 hours
10	20 hours
11	24 hours
12	32 hours
13	40 hours
14	48 hours
15	64 hours
16	80 hours
17	96 hours
18	128 hours
19	160 hours
20	192 hours
21	256 hours
22	320 hours
23	384 hours
24 or higher	Resonance Established

Feel free to adjust a result from this procedure to any value between the next lower and next higher rows on the table.

The planet will be tide-locked to its satellite on a result of 24 or higher, or in any case where the randomly generated rotation rate is actually longer than the satellite’s orbital period. In these cases, again, its rotation period will be exactly equal to the orbital period of the satellite.

Third Case: Planets Without Major Satellites

A Leftover Oligarch, Terrestrial Planet, or Failed Core which has no major satellite may be captured into a spin-orbit resonance with respect to its primary star. Even if this does not occur, solar tides will tend to slow the planet’s rotation rate.

To estimate the probability that such a planet has been captured into a spin-orbit resonance, and to estimate its rotation rate if this is not the case, begin by evaluating the following:

$T={(9.6\ \times10}^{-14})\times\frac{M_S^2\times R^3}{{A\times M}_P\times D^6}$

Here, A is the age of the star system in billions of years, M_S is the mass of the primary star in solar masses, M_P is the mass of the planet in Earth-masses, R is the radius of the planet in kilometers, and D is the planet’s orbital radius in AU.

Again, if T is equal to or greater than 2, the planet has almost certainly been captured in a spin-orbit resonance. Otherwise, to generate a rotation period for the planet at random, multiply T by 12, round the result to the nearest integer, add the result to a roll of 3d6, and refer to the Rotation Period Table. The planet will be in a spin-orbit resonance on a result of 24 or higher, or in any case where the randomly generated rotation rate is actually longer than the planet’s orbital period.

Planets captured into a spin-orbit resonance are not necessarily tide-locked to their primary star (or, in other words, the resonance is not necessarily 1:1). Tidal locking tends to match a planet’s rotation rate to its rate of revolution during its periastron passage. If the planet’s orbit is eccentric, this match may be approximated more closely by a different resonance. To determine the most likely resonance, refer to the Planetary Spin-Orbit Resonance Table:

Planetary Spin-Orbit Resonance Table
Planetary Orbit Eccentricity	Most Probable Resonance	Rotation Period
Less than 0.12	1:1	Equal to orbital period
Between 0.12 and 0.25	3:2	Exactly 2/3 of orbital period
Between 0.25 and 0.35	2:1	Exactly 1/2 of orbital period
Between 0.35 and 0.45	5:2	Exactly 2/5 of orbital period
Greater than 0.45	3:1	Exactly 1/3 of orbital period

On this table, the “most probable resonance” is the status that the planet is most likely to be captured into over a long period of time. It’s possible for a planet to be captured into a higher resonance (that is, a resonance from a lower line on the table) but this situation is unlikely to be stable over billions of years.

Examples

Both Arcadia IV and Arcadia V are planets without major satellites, so they both fall under the third case in this section. The most significant force modifying their rotation period will be tidal deceleration caused by the primary star.

The age of the Arcadia star system is about 5.6 billion years. Arcadia IV has mass of 1.08 Earth-masses and a radius of 6450 kilometers. Alice computes T for the planet and ends up with a value of about 0.083. Arcadia IV is probably not in a spin-orbit resonance, but tidal deceleration has had a noticeable effect on the planet’s rotation. Alice rolls 3d6+1 for a result of 11 and selects a value slightly lower than the one from that line of the Rotation Period Table. She decides that Arcadia IV rotates in about 22.5 hours.

Meanwhile, Arcadia V has mass of 0.65 Earth-masses and a radius of 5670 kilometers. Alice computes T again and finds a value of about 0.007. (Notice that the amount of tidal deceleration is very strongly dependent on the distance from the primary.) Alice rolls an unmodified 3d6 for a value of 12, this time selecting a value slightly higher than the one from the table. She decides that Arcadia V rotates in about 34.0 hours.

Citations

Gladman, Brett et al. (1996). “Synchronous Locking of Tidally Evolving Satellites.” Icarus, volume 122, pp. 166–192.

Makarov, Valeri V. (2011). “Conditions of Passage and Entrapment of Terrestrial Planets in Spin-orbit Resonances.” The Astrophysical Journal, volume 752 (1), article no. 73.

Peale, S. J. (1977). “Rotation Histories of the Natural Satellites.” Published in Planetary Satellites (J. A. Burns, ed.), pp. 87–112, University of Arizona Press.

Architect of Worlds – Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

September 8, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

So, for the first time in over two years, here is some new draft material from the Architect of Worlds project. First, some of the introductory text from the new section of the draft, then the first step in the next piece of the world design sequence.

The plan, for now, is to post these draft sections here, and post links to these blog entries from my Patreon page. None of this material will be presented as a charged update for my patrons yet. In fact, there may be no charged release in September, since this project is probably going to be the bulk of my creative work for the next few weeks. At most, I may post a new piece of short fiction as a free update sometime this month.

Designing Planetary Surface Conditions

Now that a planetary system has been laid out – the number of planets, their arrangement, their overall type, their number and arrangement of moons, all the items covered in Steps Nine through Fourteen – it’s possible to design the surface conditions for at least some of those many worlds.

In this section, we will determine the surface conditions for small “terrestroid” worlds. In the terms we’ve been using so far, this can be a Leftover Oligarch, a Terrestrial Planet, a Failed Core, or one of the major satellites of any of these. A world is a place where characters in a story might live, or at least a place where they can land, get out of their spacecraft, and explore.

Some of the surface conditions that we can determine in this section include:

Orbital period and rotational period, and the lengths of the local day, month, and year.
Presence and strength of the local magnetic field.
Presence, density, surface pressure, and composition of an atmosphere.
Distribution of solid and liquid surface, and the composition of any oceans.
Average surface temperature, with estimated daily and seasonal variations.
Presence and complexity of native life.

In this section, we will no longer discuss how to “cook the books” to prepare for the appearance of an Earthlike world. If you’ve been following those recommendations in the earlier sections, at least one world in your designed star system should have a chance to resemble Earth. However, we will continue to work through the extended example for Arcadia, focusing on the fourth and fifth planets in that star system.

Step Fifteen: Determine Orbital Period

The orbital period of any object is strictly determined by the total mass of the system and the radius of the object’s orbit. This is one of the earliest results in modern astronomy, dating back to Kepler’s third law of planetary motion (1619).

Procedure

For both major satellites and planets, the orbital period can be determined by evaluating a simple equation.

First Case: Satellites of Planets

To determine the orbital period of a planet’s satellite, evaluate the following:

$T\ =(2.77\ \times{10}^{-6})\ \times\sqrt{\frac{D^3}{M_P+M_S}}$

Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the satellite’s orbit in kilometers, and M_P and M_S are the masses of the planet and the satellite, in Earth-masses. If the satellite is a moonlet, assume its mass is negligible compared to its planet and use a value of zero for M_S.

Second Case: Planets

To determine the orbital period of a planet, evaluate the following:

$T\ =8770\ \times\sqrt{\frac{D^3}{M}}$

Here, T is the orbital period in hours, D is the radius of the planet’s orbit in AU, and M is the mass of the primary star in solar masses. Planets usually have negligible mass compared to their primary stars, at least at the degree of precision offered by this equation, and so don’t need to be included in the calculation.

Examples

The primary star in the Arcadia system has a mass of 0.82 solar masses, and the fourth and fifth planet orbit at 0.57 AU and 0.88 AU, respectively. The two planets’ orbital periods are about 4170 hours and 7990 hours. Converting to Earth-years by dividing by 8770, the two planets have orbital periods of 0.475 years and 0.911 years.

Alice has decided to generate more details for the one satellite of Arcadia V. This is a moonlet and so can be assumed to have negligible mass, while the planet itself has a mass of 0.65 Earth-masses. The moonlet’s orbital radius is about five times that of the planet, and Alice sets a value for this radius of 28400 kilometers. The moonlet’s orbital period is about 16.4 hours.

Short Story Now Available: “Departure”

August 27, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

I’ve posted “Departure,” a short story that I wrote in 2015, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.

“Departure” is a tale about (literally) star-crossed lovers and the sacrifices they may have to make to pursue their dreams. The story should be linked from the sidebar, but here’s a link as well.

Architect of Worlds: The Next Chunk

August 24, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

While I’m waiting for my consulting editor to have a look at The Curse of Steel, I’ve turned back to a project that I’ve been neglecting for too long: the world-building book Architect of Worlds. Several sections of that book already exist in a rough draft, which can be found at the Architect of Worlds link in the sidebar.

The bulk of the material I’ve already written is a design sequence, permitting the user to set up fictional star systems (or to fill in details for real-world systems). The idea is to let SF writers, game designers, tabletop game referees, and so on design locations for interstellar SF settings, using whatever combination of random chance and deliberate choice they prefer. The emphasis is on “hard SF” realism, as far as the state of exoplanetary astronomy will permit, and no dependencies on any specific tabletop rules system.

So far, the draft system permits one to place stars, planets, and moons, and get gross physical properties (mass, density, surface gravity) and dynamic parameters (orbital radius, eccentricity, and period) for each.

The next slice of the system will involve generating the surface conditions for such bodies, at least for the small “terrestroid” worlds that are likely to provide environments for SF adventure. At this point we’re talking about things like surface temperature (average and variations), atmospheric composition and pressure, the amount and state of water (or other volatiles) on the surface, what kind of native life might be prevalent, and so on.

I’ve been mulling this section over for a few years now, since the science involved is a lot more complicated and more difficult to reduce to a set of game-able abstractions.

When I designed a system like this for GURPS Space Fourth Edition, I made a deliberate design choice to reduce all the possibilities to a specific set of archetypes. That provided some backward compatibility with earlier versions of the GURPS system, and with the older Traveller systems that were an inspiration for both. For this book, though, I want to give the readers as much detail as I can, and let them decide what to use and what to set aside. That complicates the design.

So, a very rough overall outline of what’s going to be involved for a given “world” (that is, a terrestrial planet or moon with some likelihood of a solid surface):

The rotation rate of the world (including cases where the world is tide-locked or resonant with a primary). As a sidebar, this gives us quantities for the length of the natural day, month, and year.
The blackbody temperature and incidence of stellar wind for the world, based on the properties and distance of its primary star.
The strength of the world’s magnetic field, and the consequences for the size and strength of its magnetosphere (if any). If the world is a moon (for example, the satellite of a gas giant planet), then the primary’s magnetic field and magnetosphere may be relevant as well.
The world’s initial budget of volatiles – how much in the way of possible liquid or gaseous compounds was the world left with after its process of formation.
Atmospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be gaseous at local temperatures, and can the planet hold onto them?
Atmospheric mass and pressure.
Hydrospheric composition – what volatile compounds are likely to be liquid or solid instead?
Hydrospheric mass and prevalence – how much of the world’s surface will be covered by what kinds of liquid or solid stuff?
Average surface temperature.
Estimated variations in surface temperature with the position on the surface, time of day, and so on.
Presence and complexity of native life – which may require a loop-back to adjust characteristics of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and surface temperature.

All that’s the minimum for what the next section of the book needs to cover. There are a lot of dependencies back and forth here, which is one reason why I’ve struggled for so long to build this piece. I’m beginning to think I see how to design something workable, though. At least enough to get started. More over the next few weeks.

Editing the Novel

August 17, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

My plans regarding The Curse of Steel have evolved with remarkable speed over the past few days.

My novel-writing process seems to boil down to the following:

A long period of chaotic brainstorming, tinkering, and world-building work, in which the overall concept of the story can change many times. This stage can take several years and is likely to produce a lot of abortive partial drafts. Most of the novels I’ve worked on have never gotten past this point.
Eventually, the concept stabilizes in my head enough that I can produce the first complete draft of a novel. This has happened exactly three times in my entire career as a writer.
The first draft tells a complete story, but it probably has all kinds of plot holes, undeveloped characters, and vagueness of setting in it. After all, I was making it up as I went along – I seem to be much more a “pantser” than a “planner.” So now I go back and write a second complete draft, one that rounds out the story and patches most of those holes.

About eight years ago, my first mature original novel reached that second-draft stage. That was The Master’s Oath, a tale of time travel, alternate histories, and Hermetic magic that will absolutely never be seen again outside my dead files. It wasn’t until I was finished with that one that I had a “What in God’s name was I thinking” moment and realized the thing was utterly unpublishable. Decently written, not a bad adventure story, but bound to mortally offend big chunks of my audience. Lesson learned.

Now, as of last week, The Curse of Steel has reached the second draft stage. Lo, the creator looked upon his work, and he was pleased.

Now what?

Well, to be honest, my workflow doesn’t exist yet past this point. The Curse of Steel is the first original novel I’ve ever written that I honestly believe is publishable.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together a cover image for the book. While I worked on that, I thought about what the next steps should be. Should I just publish the second draft as is, and hope for the best?

The more I thought about that, the less comfortable I was with the idea.

I know my prose style is reasonably clean. When I was a freelance writer, more than one editor remarked on that. As an editor, I’ve seen enough prose from other people to be able to compare.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a few people reading my drafts, and they’ve been encouraging about the story.

On the other hand, a novel is a very different beast from a non-fiction book, there are necessary skills I may not have developed in full, and none of my early readers are experienced editors. I don’t have a decent writer’s circle to help me hammer my drafts into submission. What if I’m missing something?

No, scratch that, I know I’m missing something. Maybe two or three novels from now, I’ll have a better idea of what to do at this point. Right now I’m still not sure.

The obvious solution would be to hire an editor.

Of course, a skilled and reliable editor costs money. Not to mention, there are a lot of people out there ready to take advantage of would-be authors, offering cheap book-preparation services for top dollar without any guarantee of results. Ever since deciding to pursue self-publishing, I’ve been very cautious about laying out cash for such services.

On the gripping hand, I can afford to spend some money on the experiment.

So over the past week or so, I’ve done some research and developed two lines of attack.

One line is to search for software that can help a novelist pick nits in his prose style. Sure, everything has a spelling-and-grammar checker these days, but strong prose writing needs more than that. I need to be able to ferret out filler words, excess adverbs, phrases that I repeat too often, that kind of thing. I could do that by eye, but the process would be slow and painful, and I would be likely to miss the weaknesses in my own style.

Enter AutoCrit.

Autocrit is billed as a “self-editing platform,” and it certainly works as such. It’s essentially a web-based word processor, but it’s specifically designed to carry out a wide variety of specialized text searches and basic statistical analyses. It compares your text to a huge corpus from published novels, helping you find and carve out the flabby bits of your prose.

Using AutoCrit over the past three days, I’ve been able to rework The Curse of Steel with surprising speed and efficiency. Already I’ve cut a little over 2000 words of material, mostly filler words and repetitive phrases that didn’t add to the sense of each passage.

It’s been quite the eye-opener. Every writer needs something to rub his nose in the shortcomings of his prose style, or he isn’t likely to improve. Lacking an editor or a ruthless critique circle, something like this may be the next best thing.

AutoCrit isn’t ideal. It’s web-based, which I don’t care for. It chokes if you hand it more than 50,000 words of text at once, which means I have to edit my novel in chunks. It doesn’t handle special characters gracefully, so all my conlang words that have accents and umlauts in them get snarled up. Its import from Word, and its export back to Word, are both a little kludgy.

Still, I suspect I’ll have a third complete draft, with much tighter prose, by later this week.

The second line of attack is that I have, indeed, hired an editor. This involved a fair amount of searching through the Web, looking for editorial networks that are competent, reliable, and not outrageously expensive. The SFWA site was fairly helpful here – they don’t explicitly recommend editors, but they have an excellent checklist of things to consider in the process.

The editor I ended up with is being hired specifically to do a manuscript assessment, not a complete edit of the novel. This will set me back a few hundred dollars, and it may not end up being part of my usual workflow in the future. Still, the experiment should be worthwhile. I’m hoping he’ll be able to provide actionable feedback that I can use while producing a final complete draft – the last step in my development process before the book goes out the door.

At the moment, the plan looks like this:

Finish working through The Curse of Steel with AutoCrit (to be completed by about 21 or 22 August).
Wait for my editor to complete his review of the draft (probably about the end of September).
Produce the final release draft (to be completed by late October).
Publish the book!

So it looks as if The Curse of Steel will finally hit the virtual shelves by Halloween. There will be much rejoicing . . . and then I’ll get started on The Sunlit Lands, the second book in the series. One assumes that one won’t take nearly as long to reach fruition.

In other news, that four- or five-week gap in September, while I wait for my editor to finish his task? I think I may sit down and work on Architect of Worlds for a while. No promises . . . but I think my research, and the subconscious work in the back of my head, have reached the point where I may be able to develop a rough draft of the third chunk of the world design sequence. We’ll see how things go.

The Curse of Steel: Second Draft Finished!

August 13, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

With the cover art ready to go, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks focusing on day-job work (writing and editing course material that’s going to go online) and working on the second-draft edits for The Curse of Steel.

That latter task has paid off. As of this afternoon, the novel is complete in the second draft.

What this means for the project is that I’m about to do one last editing pass, and then prepare the manuscript for release as a self-published novel. If all goes well, the novel will be released sometime in September. The one wild card is that I’m considering submitting the current draft for a manuscript assessment from a reputable freelance editor, to help me organize and direct that last editing pass. If I decide to go with that plan, that might delay the release a bit, depending on how long the assessment takes and how deep an edit it suggests I make.

In the meantime, though, the last chunk of the second-draft manuscript will be released to my patrons within a few days as the charged reward for August. All of my patrons, from the $1 level up, will get a copy of the last eight chapters of the draft (about 24,800 words). When the novel itself is released, all of my patrons from the $2 level up will get a free copy.

I’ll probably also release another piece of short fiction later this month, for my patrons and in the free-fiction section of this blog. More about that as we get closer to the end of the month.

Book Cover Finished!

August 1, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Whew. After over a week of work, a pile of tinkering and experimentation, at least a dozen new digital-art techniques mastered, and a lot of frustrated beard-tugging . . . I’ve finally put together cover art for The Curse of Steel.

My self-imposed deadline was the end of the month, and it’s now about two hours away from local midnight on 31 July, so I’m barely under the wire. Even so, I’m very happy with the results.

Now to finish revising the draft and get the book ready for release. It’s starting to look like a mid-September release is going to work.

Angry Krava

July 29, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 0 Comment

Further progress toward an image I can build into a book cover for The Curse of Steel. Lots of small posing and rendering techniques acquired for this one: creating a floor with a plane primitive and a materials shader, mixing upper-body and lower-body poses, and so on.

I think I may be getting within striking distance of an image I can use.

Star System Generation: A Neat Automated Tool

July 28, 2020 Sharrukin Comments 1 comment

Today I came across a neat example of automated star-system generation, based on the design sequence I wrote for GURPS Space, Fourth Edition back in the day.

It looks like a robust code base, supporting a web-based interface. You can generate star systems at random, possibly forcing a few parameters (existence of a garden world, position in an open cluster, and so on). You can pick from several naming schemes for the resulting planets.

The output includes a neat animated map of the system, and hierarchically tabulated information for randomly generated stars, planets, and moons. All in all, it looks very slick, and it seems to reflect the original game rules pretty accurately.

The source code for the project can be found at Jan Sandberg’s GitHub repository. The redditor Myrion_Phoenix hosts an instance of the application on his website as well.

I’ve mentioned my own more recent work on Architect of Worlds – it would be neat to see a similar automated version of that once it’s ready for release. In any case, this application looks very useful for folks who are running hard-SF games, whether using GURPS Space or something similar.