Why did you choose an icy climate for Andoria, if I may ask?
Andorians and climate?
- Thread starter GalaxyClass1701
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Why did you choose an icy climate for Andoria, if I may ask?
Blue or not, Sharn and Co. showed us some serious whup-ass!
To continue: DON'T piss off the Vulcans!
Those would be some devastating battles!
Edit: The Klingons seemed to have thought it a better deal to kill their gods than get between the Vulcans and Andorians!
To continue: DON'T piss off the Vulcans!
Those would be some devastating battles!
Edit: The Klingons seemed to have thought it a better deal to kill their gods than get between the Vulcans and Andorians!
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Because it had also been suggested in several FASA publications? Harsh environments are to be expected in RPGs, because it's easy for players to underestimate what they need to pack for a mission.
It did include a nice nod to Among the Clans, though, with the "Ka'Thelan Krotus"
The biggest problem with Procyon as the site of a class-M world (planet, moon, whatever) is that B comes much too close to A's habitable zone.
Computer models have determined that the largest orbit of a planet in a binary star system has a radius, in AU, that's a fifth the distance between the primary and its companion(s) at nearest approach.
In the case of Alpha Centauri, where A and B are 11.4 AU apart at their closest, this sets up an outer limit of maybe 2.3 AU, easily space enough for multiple planets and class-M worlds orbiting A and B.
Procyon B, though, comes within 8.9 AU of Procyon A, leaving room for planets with orbits of less than 1.8 AU. This is a problem, since Procyon A is 7.5 times as bright as Sol and its habitable zone allows for planets of Earth-like climate only at 2.7 AU. So, Andor should be--at best--a superheated wet Venus. Having an Andor in a stable orbit in Procyon that's an ice world is ... Well.
Andor was originally located at Epsilon Indi. That star is such a better choice for a class-M world than Procyon A.
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IIRC, an episode of Enterprise precludes that location. It identifies Andoria as being very near a real-life star that's far from Procyon.
I believe that is what I said, Captain.
I'm aware that, realistically speaking, there's probably no chance of a habitable world around Procyon. But ST requires a lot of astrophysical fudging as it is, so I'm willing to pretend that maybe there's something anomalous or not yet known about the Procyon system that would allow a relatively stable orbit in the ecosphere.Except it's canonically the system containing Triacus from "And the Children Shall Lead." Also, given what ENT established about the proximity of Vulcan and Andoria, Epsilon Indi is no longer a viable candidate because it's in nearly the opposite direction from Earth.
kkozoriz1
Fleet Captain
How about this one?
http://www.stellar-database.com/Scripts/search_star.exe?ID=34200
13 ly from 40 Eridani, 17.7 ly from Sol
http://www.stellar-database.com/Scripts/search_star.exe?ID=34200
13 ly from 40 Eridani, 17.7 ly from Sol
Well, I didn't
By the time I was drafting Among the Clans, the frosty Andoria had already been established in prior LUGTrek supplements. It was a detail my book inherited from those and I had to work with it (not that I dislike it; I've always believed that Star Trek humanoid aliens are meant to be allegories for our relations with foreign cultures rather than "alien" in any hard-science sense). But I did take care to tiptoe around trying to _justify_ the detail, and if you read ATC closely you'll find no reference at all to any kind of "blue=cold" reasoning ... instead, I chose to repeatedly point to white-furred fauna, on the assumption that since the Andorians have white hair, that suggests descent from white-furred animals, which (to me at least) is much more suggestive of a snowy-weather heritage. Anyway, I'm awfully proud of ATC and it's tiny impact on canon and that people still use it for games and enjoy reading it and all that ... and I stand by every groovy page of it. Just wanted to point out that while the cover of our book inspired the Enterprise producers (and how cool is that?), if there was ever any blue=cold reasoning, it predated ATC's design by at least several supplements (and decades, if it was a reference to the FASA approach, which I kind of hope it was, being a huge fan of FASATrek as well).
I never suggested that the people who came up with the idea were thinking "Well, blue skin suggests cold." I'm just puzzled when I hear people on the BBS making comments like "Gee, it makes sense that they'd be blue-skinned if they're from a cold planet." The fact that apparently multiple people perceive that as a meaningful correlation is strange to me.
Here's a possibility: What about Procyon B? It's a very dim star, but it's no more impossible for an Earth-like world to be supported by a white dwarf than it would be for a red dwarf. The pulsar planets may have formed out of the debris of their parent star--maybe Procyon B's worlds formed out of the matter ejected by B when it went off the main sequence?
Fanon used to assume that Andorians had blue skin because their blood was supposedly based on cobalt. Is there anything even remotely resembling scientific credibility to this?
As I understand it, cobalt-based blood pigments would be pink or colorless when oxygenated, and amber when not. A better candidate would be copper; the second most common blood pigment on earth is actually copper-based - and results in blood that's blue when oxygenated (and otherwise colorless).
Incidentally, at least one green blood pigment also exists in nature, based on vanadium.
Anything close enough to be warmed by Procyon B would have been pretty recently boiled to death by it, afaik.
In the 1980s, my friends in college and I played the Star Trek role-playing game. We had to create a sufficient backstory for each race. For the Andorians, we speculated that the blue skin had nothing to do with the color of their blood (which we denoted as iron-based, like humans.) Instead, we explained their complexion as the result of blue skin pigment, which is helpful in reflecting short-wavelength light rays, which we imagined are more intense on Andor than on Earth, because of a thinner ozone layer on Andor. (We did not call the planet Andoria.) Their hair is irridescent white, reflecting all light wavelengths more effectively. We originally envisioned Andor as a planet of extremes -- large, thick ice caps at the poles, with a geothermally active equatorial region. I have since modified the background info for recent STRPG campaigns to more closely match the canon that Andor is a large moon. I have it encircling a comparatively small gas giant. This allows for Andor to have a relatively close, fast orbit around the parent planet with nearly zero radiation from that gas giant. This gives Andor both starshine and shade in slightly less than 72 hours. At the same time, that close orbit generates some significant gravitational flexing, providing the aforementioned geothermal activity, mostly in a belt around the middle of Andor. The "shady side" (tidally locked to the parent planet) is ice-capped but gets some lateral starshine as Andor approaches and advances past the umbra and/or penumbra cast by the gas giant, so no point receives eternal darkness. The "sunny side" of Andor is a desert that undergoes soaring temperatures that approach boiling point during the more direct illumination by the parent star. The band or region in between is a mixture of geothermally heated pools and seas interspersed with temperate forests toward the shady side, and tropic-like forests toward sunny side that give way to a ring of semi-arid grasslands along the way toward the desert. Andorians have primarily colonized the temperate belt and the arctic region, both of which have an abundance of water (or ice,) and these regions afford easy tunneling to form living space.
No, why? Unless everyone else posts spammy garbage like you two.
This is the brave new world - we have a search function that allows new users to find threads that interest them and they can respond to them, perhaps sparking new discussions with the current group of forum-readers.
If not, this thread will quietly drop down the forum list.
This is the brave new world - we have a search function that allows new users to find threads that interest them and they can respond to them, perhaps sparking new discussions with the current group of forum-readers.
If not, this thread will quietly drop down the forum list.
Wasn't there a rule against reactivating threads that haven't had any new posts within the last year or so? I mean, you're the mod, so I probably misremembered something, so, my apologies.
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