Planets in the Equus system... · 3:29pm Oct 2nd, 2021
... just nailing these down, not that I expect to use them.
(This is for the CSP-Maretian setting, but feel free to use them in any case where Equestria is not on a geocentric model.)
The Equus system is a parallel Sol system, with a G0 sun at its heart and very similar but not identical planets. For all practical purposes, the environment of each world is similar to our own. So:
Mercury = Bellerophon
Venus = Aine
Earth = Equus (satellites: The Moon, the Little Stars inc. Minmus)
Mars = Bucephalous (satellite: Alexander)
Jupiter = Sleipnir (four large moons)
Saturn = Chiron (one large moon)
Uranus = Arion (several middling moons)
Neptune = Balius (one large moon)
Pluto = Alastor (recently discovered, moons unknown to ponies as of Twilight Sparkle's time)
Goddess... do i love your lore ♡
I might just steal some of these, albeit for a very different setting.
Prepare Arion!
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What are Galilean moons counterparts?
Personally I don’t particularly mind if Pluto is or is not a planet, I just think that if it is a planet then Ceres should also be a planet. Or rather go back to being a planet. It’s got an astrological sign of its own and everything!
5590622 Denialist! Pluto is a planet!
(let the riots begin)
... as a passing thought, you could Rename Halley's Comet to 'Wilbur', in reference to Mr. Ed. *chuckle*
5590622 If the criterion is hydrostatic equilibrium, sure.
If the criterion is diameter or mass, Ceres has less than half Pluto's diameter and one-fourteenth its mass.
If the criterion is "clear your orbit," then you could argue JUPITER isn't a planet, and certainly Earth isn't, with thousands of orbit-crossing asteroids, and also screw Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
In any case, I didn't have an idea for a Ceres name.
5590584 I don't want to use major Norse gods (or Greek ones either) for this, so I'd lean towards Norse names from old history, but it doesn't sound so good in my ears. So, from inner to outer, I'd toss out as a possibility Erik, Leif, Knut and Haarald.
Is there ever gonna be another sequel to this story?
What is a G0 star, I would have expected it to be GV like our sun
5590773 (looks it up)
G2V to be exact. I misremembered I suppose, though I wasn't aware of the Roman numeral subclassification before.
For those who don't know, the first letter indicates more or less the spectrum of the star (which is much easier to determine than mass in most cases); the number is a relative ranking within the class, with 9 on the low end and 0 on the high end (counterintuitive to me, but what the hell), and the Roman numeral indicates the start type as per its position on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (type V in this case meaning any star on the Main Sequence regardless of spectrum).
As a generality, Sol is brighter (and, by our best estimates, more massive) than 98% of all other known stars.
There's another measurement that doesn't get put into that classification- metallicity, or how many elements besides hydrogen and helium are in our star. Sol is VERY "metallic", marking it as a Population I (relatively young) star, one made from the products of past novas and supernovas. Our best guess at present is, older stars without high metallicity don't have much in the way of planets, but then virtually ever Population II or Population III star that was every like our sun has long since gone nova and destroyed any stars they might have, so that could very well be revisited...
5590622 5590665
RainbowDoubleDash and Georg, meet Mike Brown — Slayer of Pluto. Mike Brown, meet RainbowDoubleDash and Georg…
Seriously, the only reason Pluto was “demoted” was because up until about thirty years ago astronomers hadn’t observed (or had instruments capable of observing) anything else of comparable size that wasn’t either (a) orbiting another object accepted as a planet (i.e., a natural satellite like the Earth’s Moon, or the Gallilean moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto) or (b) in a region with other similarly-sized or smaller objects (i.e., the main belt asteroids including Ceres and Vesta). Then came the first discoveries of large, far-off objects orbiting the sun in orbits beyond that of Neptune — the previously hypothesized Kuiper belt. One in particular, Eris, was initially thought to be more massive than Pluto, and that started the argument of just what is considered a planet — again, because it’s not the first time it’s occurred.
The decision essentially boiled down to:
Option #2 was chosen (to the delight of schoolchildren everywhere asked to memorize the names of the planets) — but if a “Planet Nine” is ever found, by either Mike Brown, et al, or another group, the question of “What is a planet?” could easily be revisited. In the end, the matter really just comes down to deciding where to draw dividing lines for the sake of categorization.
5590726
Secretariat?
5590819
Counterpoint: That's no fun and Ceres should be a planet. It's not like our colloquial definitions of "continents" has much overlap with the term as used in geology, for example.
5590885
Okay, pop quiz! If Ceres and Pluto are planets, what are the other three that would qualify at present under IAU categorization? Hint: none of them are in the Asteroid Belt.
5590909
Eris, Haimea and Makemake? I may have forgotten their names exactly but they’re all in the Oort Cloud if I recall correctly. I remember them because I used a graphic that had them as part of the Solar System for a sci-fi/alternate history story I wrote about ten years back.
5590918
Give the sapient a kewpie doll! But they all are still considered Kuiper Belt Objects. The Oort Cloud is another three orders of magnitude further out to its innermost disc, and nothing that far out has been conclusively observed yet. It’s just too far — the targets too dark and too dim for current telescopes, and the space probes we’ve sent on their way out of the solar system to date will be long-dead before they reach it. Try back again in a decade’s time when the next generation of giant telescopes is online.
And now for the bonus round; name the 120 or so bodies that would qualify as planets by Runyon, et al! The astronomical community is hardly of one mind on the subject.
The answer to what is, and what is not a planet has only become more complex as improvements in our telescopes have allowed us to see things that were previously unseen. It was a much, much easier question to answer when there were only five things in the sky other than the moon, the sun, and the occasional meteor or comet that could be seen to move with the naked eye.
5590749
There is a 'sequel', though not by the same author and very slow to update, which takes place during the epilogue to Maretian, expanding on how things have changed on Equus (which I keep thinking isn't the name of the planet because it's just a continent in EaW).
Short of going full Star Trek (or slice of life in such a world) though, I'm not sure there's really anywhere to go in a direct continuation from Maretian, especially not with the current cast. That said, good sci-fi adventures are always fun and there's plenty of room for side stories (more on Twilight's side of the space race, about the Angel project, etc).
My reasoning (and obviously, I'm not Kris :p) for why any hypothetical continuation would need a mostly new cast:
Fireball's never going up again unless someone chloroforms him and puts his unconscious body in a capsule. While an amusing idea on paper, one should never leave a live and very angry dragon out of one's calculations when it comes to ever getting home again.
Cherry would but probably won't do anything ground breaking any more (on the scale of her previous adventures, anyway). Stints on the space station and the like, probably.
Watney's not going back up and even if he wanted to, nobody would let him, except possibly via that mirror portal to Mars for some hands-on work in the cave if they don't mind the flood of paint-stripping invective even the suggestion of that would incite.
Starlight's probably in a similar boat to Cherry and is a ground support person really anyway. You could probably play around with her perfecting her accidental FTL drive, but that's more of a background thread for another story probably than a major story in its own right. Might make a fun one-shot though.
Spitfire has her own work and I doubt she would want to go back given the permanent damage she's already suffered. Might see her being the most readily available and willing to do PR stuff, which could be interesting, especially if NASA is involved due to her previous issues with the language barrier.
Chrysalis has taken a step back from the space program, so anything which dragged her back to direct involvement would probably have to do something really bad to Occupant, and who would ever hurt the buck-toothed bug?
Dragonfly I could absolutely see flying again, assuming she can get well enough (which given changelings in this verse, seems pretty likely), so she would be my bet for a core of a new cast if such a sequel ever materialised that followed CSP and Maretian's formats to a close degree, assuming it was set within a changeling lifetime.
Goddard would be another good candidate for more page space, come to think of it.