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.