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Planning for November 2026

Planning for November 2026

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October was a fairly productive month. I got started on my university courses for this year, and although those are definitely presenting some challenges I seem to still be on track. Didn’t quite hit my objective for Composer of Cultures, but that’s certainly within reach. I also managed to write a complete Lower Decks novelette from a standing start, so there’s that.

November is going to be insanely busy, though – I’ve got to prepare for Philcon 2026, and I have not one but two projects in observational astronomy that are on a very tight schedule. So there’s not going to be a lot of slack time.

Here’s the general plan for November.

University Studies

I’m going to be doing a lot of observational planning this month – target selection, preparation, getting time on the telescope (while working around the inconvenient location of a few objects in the sky, and the presence of a waxing Moon which tends to wash out deep-sky objects). For two projects – one of which involves generating Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams for three star clusters, the other of which involves capturing an exoplanetary transit by measuring stars’ light curves. All of which happens as part of a team effort and on a tight schedule. This is going to be a challenge. Also a lot of fun, of course, assuming it all goes off on time.

The objectives for November are:

  • SXPS288 – Complete the Astronomy modules 2-6, as well as the Skills module 2.
  • S384 – Complete the Exoplanets modules 2-3, the Project modules 1-2, and the Stars modules 1-3.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I finished last month’s story, “Sixpence in Her Shoe,” and wrote the complete story “Asculum” in October. That last was fun – a tense little cross-over with Star Trek: Prodigy.

Unfortunately, as of this week my primary posting destination, Archive of Our Own, is down due to a serious security incident. ETA for the site coming back up is anywhere from 2-4 weeks. Which is causing all manner of angst out in the wild. Personally, I’m just going to put this particular sector on the shelf for the month of November. I may work on the next story so I can post some or all of it as soon as AO3 comes back online, but given how busy I’m likely to be otherwise this isn’t going to be a priority.

No objectives in this sector for November.

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I’m continuing to make incremental progress on version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game. There’s still some work left on the Catalog of Capabilities, but another couple of days of effort should see that done. So I’m reasonably confident I can move on to the next sections this month.

The objectives for November are:

  • Finish the Catalog of Capabilities for version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
  • Re-implement the “Reading the Entrails” section from previous drafts for version 0.6
  • Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
  • Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make very occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

Still working on using a set of games from my shelf to generate a future-history timeline for the revised “Human Destiny” universe. I was able to finish a run of Stellar Horizons in October, and I’m very happy with the results. I doubt I’ll need to go back and tinker with that any longer.

The next phase of this project will involve working with the GMT Games title, Red Dust Rebellion. This is one of their COunter-INsuergency (COIN) games, simulating a futuristic colonial rebellion on a settled-but-not-very-terraformed Mars. I have in mind that several factions of the early interstellar era will have their roots on the revolutionary Mars of the late 22nd Century. Early results are promising – Red Dust Rebellion isn’t nearly as heavy a game as Stellar Horizons, so I suspect I’ll be able to get this piece of the project done in November even with everything else that’s going on.

The objective for November is to continue working with Red Dust Rebellion to build components of a new timeline for the “Human Destiny” future history.

Philcon 2026

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m slated to attend Philcon 2026 later this month. I’ll be running a session of the upcoming RPG Pioneer, offering a seminar on historical modeling for worldbuilding, and sitting on a few panels. Going to be a fairly busy weekend, and although I’ve specifically arranged things so I’ll need a lot less prep time than in previous years, that doesn’t mean zero prep time. So that has to happen in aming everything else that’s going on.

The objectives for November are:

  • Prepare a “convention notebook” including Pioneer RPG materials and notes for my panels.
  • Prepare a slide deck and outline for the worldbuilding seminar
  • Attend Philcon 2026
Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping

Neat Website for Interstellar Mapping

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I recently came across a neat website by Kevin Jardine: Galaxy Map.

It’s an odd site. It’s not clear how it’s all organized. It looks as if the site’s owner planned to write a book about mapping our galactic neighborhood, but the project got abandoned at some point. Nevertheless there’s a lot of interesting data and some gorgeous maps there, if you dig around a bit for them. In particular, Mr. Jardine has used the Gaia data tranches to do some really interesting mapping of relative star densities, the location of clusters and major nebulae, and the location of super-bright stars.

The most immediately useful page on the site appears to be at Galaxy Map Resources, but there’s also a collection of maps at Galaxy Map Posters that includes the one I included at the top of this post.

Really neat material there, if you’re at all interested in writing near-solar neighborhood interstellar fiction.

Some Insight on Oceanic Super-Earths

Some Insight on Oceanic Super-Earths

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I came across this article a few days ago, and it’s making me think I need to make a small adjustment to the Architect of Worlds planetary design sequence: “Astronomers identify a new class of habitable planet” (Astronomy.com, September 2021).

The case in question is one that we should all have been aware of for a while: super-Earths with very dense atmospheres dominated by hydrogen, with deep world-spanning liquid-water oceans. Architect would call these Class 2 (Dulcinea-type, after Mu Arae c) worlds with Massive prevalence of water.

The problem is that if these worlds are too warm, the current Architect design sequence quickly turns them into Class 1 (Venus-type) worlds: very hot due to a runaway greenhouse, but very dry because their primordial oceans have been boiled away and lost to photodissociation. But if I understand the physics correctly, this shouldn’t happen in these specific cases.

If a Dulcinea-type world has a rocky surface, it’s buried under many kilometers of ocean, and atmospheric heat isn’t going to bake carbon dioxide out of the rocks to cause a runaway greenhouse. Now, these worlds are likely to have a ton of water vapor in their atmospheres, and water vapor is itself a really effective greenhouse gas. But that doesn’t seem likely to boil the ocean itself away. With a really dense atmosphere, the boiling point of water soars and you can keep liquid-water oceans with surface temperatures well above 370 K. Meanwhile, these worlds aren’t going to lose their water due to photodissociation, because they’re massive enough to retain molecular hydrogen anyway. Any water vapor that gets into the upper atmosphere may break down due to high-energy sunlight, but the hydrogen won’t just fly off into space, it’ll stick around to recombine with oxygen again.

Fortunately I think adjusting for this will be an easy fix in the Architect draft, something I can do on the fly while I’m doing the rough layout. Basically, I’ll build an exception into the sequence for Dulcinea-types, forbidding them to make the usual transition to a runaway greenhouse somewhere just above a blackbody temperature of 300 K. I may need to add a provision in the procedure to compute surface temperature for these worlds – if they’re already hot, they’re going to have a fierce greenhouse due to water vapor in the atmosphere and yet will still keep their liquid-water envelope.

These strike me as odd worlds to call “habitable,” although in the scientific literature astronomers generally use that word to just mean “probably has liquid water.” You could theoretically land on one of these, but it wouldn’t be a remotely shirt-sleeve environment for humans.