The Building the Ultimate Solar System series explains how I would go about building a new Solar System. My goal is to maximize the number of potentially life-bearing worlds in a single system. I take a bottom-up approach. I first discuss the pieces involved — stars, planets, orbits — then put them all together. Then I take things farther, and then way way too far…
Here are the posts:
- Build a better Solar System. This was a first game in which I could only re-shuffle the planets in the Solar System but I wasn’t allowed to change any of the existing orbits or worlds.
- Building the ultimate Solar System. This post introduces the game.
- Part 1: Choosing the right star.
- Part 2: Choosing the right planets.
- Part 3: Choosing the planets’ orbits.
- Part 4: Two ninja moves. These are tricks that help pack more worlds into a fixed space
- Part 5: Putting it all together. I came up with two ultimate Solar Systems, then combined them. Boom!
- Part 6: A system with many stars. Here we extend the Ultimate Solar System to a vast, 16-star system that is even more Ultimate!
- The biggest tragedy in the history of the Universe. This could also be titled: Destroying the Ultimate Solar System.
- The Ultimate Trojan 2-star planetary system. A twist on Trojan planets!
- The Ultimate Retrograde Solar System. A new ninja move to pack more planets into the habitable zone.
- The Ultimate Engineered Solar System. A mega-system delicately packing more than 400 planets into the habitable zone.
- The Black Hole Ultimate Solar System. A packed planetary system orbiting a supermassive black hole
- The Million-Earth Solar System. A million potentially-habitable planets orbiting a supermassive black hole. Bonus: they’re connected into rings!
- Cohorts of Co-orbital Planets. Systems with many planets sharing the same orbit, but in different setups than you’ve seen before. And tested with N-body simulations.
- Constellations of Co-orbital Planets. A new class of co-orbital system in which neighboring planets undergo horseshoe oscillations.
PLANETPLANET 
Raymond, I’d like to interview you on my global show, “The Other Side of Midnight.” Richard C. Hoagland
I’d like to ask if its possible to do what you did with the dozens of habitable earths around a star but with a gas giant planet, say around Jupiter mass? I’m asking because I think it would be interesting to build a habitable shell over a Jupiter mass planet then engineer all the orbits around the planet you’ve shelled over with moons of roughly Mars to Earth mass for more variable habitats.
Sure, it’s easy to build the same kind of setup but with gas giants. A much smaller number of planets can fit within the habitable zone since they are so much more massive, but it’s very simple to do.
After some thought I’ve upgrade my idea significantly and will now be tackling some of the math. I’ve replaced the Jupiter mass gas giant with a 0.6 Solar mass white dwarf supporting a shell-world of roughly 600 times earths diameter (that gets you the 1G gravity you need for the surface and gives you a power source which will last many trillions of years).
The co-orbital math is going to take some learning but I think I can manage. I want to put maybe a million smaller earth-sized shell-worlds in orbit around big one. These can store mass for future repairs or construction projects. Or be completely different types of artefacts. The entire setup will be lit by another white dwarf which has been dysoned over to produce a nicoll-dyson beam which will be bounced around the system via mirrors and modified further by lenses to produce the desired sunlight for each world.
The advantage of this artificial setup is no habitable stellar zones are required, and none of this is superscience tech. The shells are supported by orbital rings maintained by active support
I am trying to build a three star system, based upon earth, I would like one star, located where Sol is on our system, to be a blue white star, replace Jupiter with an M class star and Saturn with a Red Dwarf. Then create habitable planets around all of them much like their current satellite systems. Is there a piece of software that i can use to model this? i do not have the math background to do it myself.
I feel that right now Callisto would be in the habitable zone if Jupiter was an M class star.
What i am really worried about is resonance, as i would want Callisto to be earth sized and massive. the rest of the planets do NOT need to be habitable.
It would also be nice to see the orbits so I can track eclipses and such.