Xeriar said:
Orange dwarf parent I take it?
Keep in mind this is a much cooler star you're dealing with, though it will possibly be a flare star, which would have interesting consequences.
Binary, both low K spectral class, a maximum of 50Gm apart. Desired effects should include a more-or-less Sol-like luminosity (important for viability) at more-or-less 1Æ distance (to not get too close to the indeed possibly occasional erratic stars), but decreased year length due to increased primaries (total) mass. The exact details don't really matter though; the makeup of the moon are sufficiently metaphysical that focussing too hard on hard science would be somewhat silly.
Ok, some more exposition then:
The moon, currently bearing the working name Garden, bears much resemblance to the planet of the same name in Greyspace: a cluster of worldlets held together by a giant plant. Once a normal Mars-sized world -albeit infused with a Gaia-like spirit, a titan named Aiëde-, it has been on the run from an universe-consuming Evil, the Dreaming Dark, occasionally performing hyperspace jumps (ala Zonama Sekot in Star Wars) to stay out said Evil's reach.
However, during the last confrontation between Aiëde and the Dreaming Dark, ten thousand years ago, the world titan got infected / damaged by its enemy, and the hyperspace jump she performed to flee, failed (to a degree). What arrived in orbit around the jovian planet is merely a shadow of the former verdant world: a cluster of worldlets (each 100-500km big) held together only by the titan-become-worldtree, now no longer possessing physical form. The "hyperdrive malfunction" manifests itself in that all parts of Garden are thrown out of phase with eachother; each worldlet (or island) exists on its own, almost oblivious of the other islands co-orbitting the gas giant.
Phase transitions are easy to come by: all one needs to do is travel from one island to another (via airship or whatever other means), and as one approaches another worldlet, your phase slowly shifts from that of your island of origin to that of your destination worldlet. The entire point here is to prevent the sky of an island being filled with heaps of other islands, generating an enormously complex illumination situation. As a nice side-effect, each island could find itself having drifted (metaphysically) adjacent to alternate planes of existance (probably the outer ones, like the Abyss, but also more ephemeral ones like the realm of Faerie). The worldlets would most likely also be sharing a common atmosphere, with the phase variations taking care of the light attenuation problems resulting from hundreds of kms of normal-pressure atmosphere. Finally, one may presume spelljammer-type gravity in effect on the worldlets (also courtesy of the worldtree), so any iffyness on that regard is also avoided.
Anyway, all this is very setting-specific, and while I could prattle on and on about the merits of the entire setup, you see that science can only go so far in explaining Garden's current predicament. It should matter little if you consider the moon to be a garden-variety (eh eh
) jovian one, or the metaphysical marvel it is in the setting I'm involved with, as the questions posed only touch upon its day-night cycle as influenced by the hard-science parts of the system (i.e. the sun(s) and the planet).
Xeriar said:
Err, you're going to have a twin world sort of setup, here. Things that evolved facing the planet are going to be looking at things differently than things that did not. Keep in mind the planet is going to have a magnitude in the -20 range - it's going to supply a blue sky and light the world, though not warm it, any time the sun goes down. By the time it vanishes, the sun is coming back up. That side of the world is eternally lit, outside of eclipses, which will be spectacular.
The other side of the world will probably have a 20/40 sleep cycle or 15/45. Humans are usually geared to 7/17.5 or so, but I've seen no reason to think that couldn't scale up to quadruple that.
Both might use the same cycle, given the planet is likely a few hundred times dimmer than the sun, but still.
Indeed, as expected. Some fiddling with the albedo and/or the mass of the planet in question (a saturn-faximile will actually be bigger in the sky than a jupiter-faximile, for the same orbital period; if necessary, we could go all the way up to the brown dwarf stage, where the planet's own energy output starts growing faster than the apparent size reduction makes its reflective energy output shrink) might be needed to reduce its impact on the ecology of the planetward side of the moon; Also consider that the planet undergoes apparent phases of its own, making midnight brighter (the planet being full) than early night or late night (waxing / waning), to an observer who has it directly overhead.
This for me insinuated a possible 10-10-10-30 activity cycle for planetward-living cultures (where you're up all day, but also in the middle of the night, when the planet is full). Obviously, this is a complex behavioral pattern, and it's exactly because of that that I am soliciting additional ideas from you folks here.
Xeriar said:
Temperature extremes will likely be moderated by additional cloud cover - plankton on Earth play a powerful role in cloud formation and it would seem likely that your planet would have an even more developed mechanism, with, possibly, a very stormy world.
Temperature extremes are mitigated first because each individual island is rather small (not allowing much room for diversified climate zones), and secondly by the shared (if metaphysical) atmosphere.
Xeriar said:
Regarding how I'd use the rules, I tend to despise x/day abilities and such in general, so I won't comment much there.
Still something I need to deal with
