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News: Celebrating 30 years of Star Control 2 - The Ur-Quan Masters

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Author Topic: Trivia  (Read 2095 times)
kfdf
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Trivia
« on: February 17, 2015, 04:44:22 am »

Well, not sure how to start, but I've been playing the UQM on android and thought, "Is it me, or there is ton of life on those -200 C planets?" It would be really nice to have a nice table of all planets and do some queries over it, and amazingly enough such thing does exist and can be downloaded from the star-control wiki. So, a few pieces of code were thrown together to work with the list and here are some of things I found:

Sol is a very special place, and certainly not because it houses sentient life, there is plenty of that around in this region of galaxy. What makes it special is that it is the only star system where axial tilts go from 0 to 180, everywhere else they go from -90 to 90. The planets with axial tilts > 90 are Venus, Uranus and Pluto.
also.. Venus boasts highest atmospheric pressure among non gas giant planets, 90 ATM.
also.. The top three largest moons are Jupiter's Ganymede, Callisto, and Saturn's Titan.
also.. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto have the highest orbits, 19.16, 29.99 and 39.37 a.u. Everywhere else planets lie no further that 16 a.u. from their star.
also.. Pluto is the lightest and the smallest celestial body you can visit in Star Control 2. It is as if the authors foresaw its demotion.
also.. Two constellations have one of their stars missing. Where are Alpha Corvi and Beta Sculptoris? But that's not about Sol.

Now on to what it is supposed to be about.
There is total of 28440 units of bio data in the game. Contrary to what star control wiki says, Organic and Hydrocarbon worlds are very poor with life forms, and the most friendly planet type to life is Primordial with 16 out 29 planets having life. The hottest world that supports life is Alpha Circini V with 1281 C, Alpha Pavonis VII with its 451 C is a distant second, and there is only a handful of worlds with temperatures above 150 C that have life. It's all very different when it comes to sub-zero temperatures. 12 out of 84 worlds with the lowest temperature in the game of -252 C have life. For all temperature ranges below -50 degrees every tenth to fifth planet supports life, and since those planets grossly outnumber warmer worlds, two thirds of all life resides in temperatures below the lowest ever recorded on Earth (-90 C). Also, 19 worlds with life don't have atmosphere. The coolest of them is Phoenicis Beta Va: -251 C, vacuum, and has life, and this life flies! Don't even want to know how. So I wasn't imagining things, it's just Star Control 2 has very unorthodox notion of habitability.

Here is the tool I used. There is virtually no GUI to speak of, and actions are accessible via hotkeys or context menus. It turned out to be two little tools merged together - one is to run queries over a list of planets, and another is the map. The only thing that logically connects them is Tag property of Planet objects. Setting it to various values allows to tag planets on the map or filter them out. There are some scripts included where it can be seen how things are done, but knowledge of C# is a must, otherwise the thing is useless.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-x8G2X1znSacUlSdUVNdHFRQjg/view
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Krulle
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Re: Trivia
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2015, 12:28:53 pm »

Sol is a very special place, and certainly not because it houses sentient life, there is plenty of that around in this region of galaxy. What makes it special is that it is the only star system where axial tilts go from 0 to 180, everywhere else they go from -90 to 90. The planets with axial tilts > 90 are Venus, Uranus and Pluto.
also.. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto have the highest orbits, 19.16, 29.99 and 39.37 a.u. Everywhere else planets lie no further that 16 a.u. from their star.
also.. Pluto is the lightest and the smallest celestial body you can visit in Star Control 2. It is as if the authors foresaw its demotion.
I presume this is because Sol's planets are known to Humans, and thus should be more or less correct.
Everywhere else in the game you can ditch the likely irrelevant outer planetoids to avoid flying there and wasting time/fuel.
And I need to get playing again. I want to check the life planet without atmosphere....

Thank you.
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Telecart
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Re: Trivia
« Reply #2 on: March 06, 2015, 03:17:44 am »

 Shocked cool!
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