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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 3023270" data-attributes="member: 7533">You are greatly mistaken.  Being naturally round is an rather extraordinary phenominon, no matter how it happens.Just as useful as calling a star, essentially, "a self-luminous gaseous spheroidal celestial body of great mass which produces energy by means of nuclear fusion reactions"...  Or an animal "any of a kingdom (Animalia) of living things including many-celled organisms and often many of the single-celled ones that typically differ from plants in having cells without cellulose walls, in lacking chlorophyll and the capacity for photosynthesis, in requiring more complex food materials, in being organized to a greater degree of complexity, and in having the capacity for spontaneous movement and rapid motor responses to stimulation".How are those useful?You must start with a broad definition, then categorize by type...  Rocky dwarfs, Gas giants, Icy dwarfs, etc...So what?  All these guys are doing are stipulating the rules of the various orthogonal categories and then re-evaluating current know bodies in the solar system, and re-categorizing them.  Why is that such a problem?Why?  There's no reason for it.Likely, people will simply continue calling them the "major planets", though that won't technically be an official classification.Perhaps, but it's not normally a very good way to classify something...  Maybe in geology, but certainly not in astronomy, a subject in which it is generally very difficult to determine the origin of any object you are looking at.Consider stars, for instance... They are primarily classified by what they ARE (size, mass, temperature, spectrum, elemental composition, etc...), not by what they used to be, or by how they came to be.Again, so what?  There's more than one way to classify any given group of things.Just because you've only ever eaten red apples, doesn't mean that a green aple isn't an apple.So you propose to replace an easily measured and concrete qualification with a something that can, at best, be only theoretically guessed at?  Because, the simple fact is, we don't really have a very good idea of how the planets formed, or whether they formed differently from all the other debris floating about the solar system.And what would you do with the moon, which has an especially unique theory to explain its formation?</blockquote>

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