WIP - HELP? Pretty please?

[Jalyha]

Ohhhh thank you guys That actually makes a lot of sense!

I'd never thought about how the wind would affect the rivers/water, and I'm not sure how to make the smaller rivers without it looking out of scale.

I *was* trying not to overwhelm my map with forests, even though i pictured a lot of woods in my head.

I may simply start over keeping these new ideas in mind. I'll try to work it out first, though...I'm stubborn that way.

[Gamerprinter]

Not that it will help, but I use a vector application for my maps, and when placing rivers I use shaped stroke lines - meaning that the further end of a drawn line gets smaller to a point, so the river width diminishes as it gets closer to its source. Say I'm creating a river from the coast, I might use an 8 point line that diminishes to a single point on it's source end. Any rivers that I intend to merge into that larger river I use a smaller width, so 6 point and 4 point lines depict rivers merging near the center of the river length, and 2 point lines for smaller creeks anywhere along the river length and near the headwaters. Since you're using a paint program, I'd just choose a smaller pixel width line to draw in your smaller, joining river arcs.

Regarding the point mentioned about mountains and tectonic plates. Not all mountains are on coastal areas (though many are). Consider the Himalayan Mountains, though the Indian plate is smashing into the Asian plate, the Indian plate is actually connected by land to the Asian plate and causing the rise of the Himalayan mountains, those mountains are nowhere near the sea, more like south central region of Asia. Also look at the Caucasus Mountains, same thing. Look at the Alps, caused by Greece slamming into Europe and noting this region as earthquake prone. Even the Rockies in the US are far from the sea. The California coastal range on the other hand follows the close to the sea, tectonic plate caused mountain formation - so coastal ranges do exist, but cannot be considered the same for all mountain ranges.

With regard to the prevailing winds and rain shadows, look at the coastal range in Washington state and SW Canada. The west side of the mountains is considered a temperate rainforest, whereas the east side of the same range is arid and sometimes desert. Look at Kuaui, Hawaii. The north and eastern side of the island is rich in palm jungle, but the west and southern side of the island is bone dry - almost a desert.

If your mountains aren't that high in elevation, however, a rain shadow might not form, such is true only for fairly high elevation ranges. Something to consider.

[Jalyha]

ummm i also have that Gimp program (though i'm not comfortable with it) and some ink-something program that makes my head hurt... I just don't feel comfortable using them yet. Simple tools for simple minds, and all that. But is there a way to do that line/stroke thingummy in Gimp?

The reason I started with this "continent" is because there's not much on it that is vital (yet) to my story. So... pretty much anything that needs to be changed can be changed

& Except for a VERY basic shape.... not much more about the others. Getting stuck on the land was part of what brought me here.

What cannot be changed is:

1) The number of continents - I need at least 5 :/
2) 1 valley village that... oh wait I took it out already because it was ridiculous. Nevermind
3) The planet. It's supposed to be *mostly* water (even more so than the earth)
4) The moons. They are central to the larger plot events in my story... There are 2 moons, and one of the moons has a (3rd) moon orbiting it.... for now...
5) One continent must have steep cliffs close to the shore on the west and the character must cross 1 mountain range on his way to the capitol on the eastern shore.


So...

Would it make more sense (given all this stuff about winds and plates, and the fact that I have virtually no restrictions) to start with the tectonics/air currents/etc before attempting to start on the continents?

If so, I could just start anew.


By the way, I was actually thinking about Hawaii a lot when I wrote my manuscript (and thus imagined the land, lol)


Anyway, here's what I fixed so far based on what was said here (or tried to fix):




So... keep trying, or start over?

[Veldehar]

This really relies upon so many details we just don't have that it is hard to say for certain. Should be adequate to "justify" what we can see here. A single continent can be plopped down and things forced to make sense, but then when you set that continent into a world, it can go haywire if you put it in the wrong place. So keep going and post back, LOL.

[Azélor]

4) The moons. They are central to the larger plot events in my story... There are 2 moons, and one of the moons has a (3rd) moon orbiting it.... for now...

why do you for now ... ? It's possible to have that many moons but under certain conditions if you want to keep it realistic.

And I approve Veldehar, it's usually hard to be wrong with just one part of the world. You could try to make a rough outline of the world to see how it fits.

[Jalyha]

Welll.... I could tell you why but that would spoil the story

I know what happens with the moons.

I have a world outline somewhere...



The whole thing is very tentative, though

[jbgibson]

If that's the whole world, it's an odd projection. Since a globe's equator is twice the distance as from pole to pole, most views of whole worlds are going to be wider than they are tall. All kinds of compromises in distortion are endured to obtain certain desired characteristics, but if you're showing pole to pole N-S, then *some* proportion wider than a square might be expected. If it's all of the world that *matters*... say, the rest is ocean, like our Pacific... that would be at least plausible. But the wraparound Antarctic continent tends to say what you see is all there is.

Nothing particularly wrong with the arrangement of landforms you present above.

Moons with moons are fine... at the right size and distance. Look at earth - it's a 'moon' of the Sun, and has a nice moon of its own :-). Now, if you want a close/large moon like ours, that then has a large one of its own.... physics is getting bent. Unless you'll settle for a REALLY little subsatellite... we have those too. Manmade lunar orbiters a meter or three long are able to keep a reasonably stable orbit... for a while.

[Jalyha]

Okay, so... (If I've done the math right)


A planet the size of earth, with a similar distance to a star of about the same size as our sun would have a similar hill sphere.


Earth's hill sphere is about 1.5 million km.

Earth's moon is 370k km from the Earth. It has it's own hill sphere (based on size and distance and such) of about 60k km.

Technically, Earth could manage about more satellite's... say one at around 850k km from earth which would have a larger hill sphere than our current moon, and one out beyond 1.3mill km. Of course that wouldn't last long, would it?

A larger planet OR one much further away from the sun would have a much larger hill sphere. With both, you get something like Jupiter with a hill sphere 35 times as large as Earth's and capable of supporting more moons.


Let's take a planet (Call it "N") with a mass somewhere between that of Earth and Jupiter and place it somewhere around the distance of Venus. Now we'll give it 2 Moons of it's own, an extremely large, close moon I shall call "B", and a further smaller moon OUTSIDE the hill sphere of moon B. The smaller moon can be moon C.


If I'm correct, moon C would have a smaller hill sphere of its' own,

But moon C could have a MUCH smaller satellite, at around 30k km from moon C, which would still be visible from planet N.

Moon B would act much like our own moon, Moon C would be more shy

And moon T... welll... it wouldn't keep a stable orbit for more than a generation or two. Not that the moon would just spin off into space. That doesn't happen, does it? No, something much worse would happen.

Poor moon C. Poor moon T.

Poor planet N? :S


Anyway, that's if my math is right, which it probably isn't (I have a very small attention span, and a very large notebook filled with equations to figure out my moon problem).

Plausible? :/



As for the map:

My planet is mostly water. More so than even the Earth

I didn't know that about the antarctic continent, I'd just read somewhere around here that on a flat map it should wrap-around. Also, I have yet to actually finish a map, because I am shockingly bad at mapping.

OR even deciding on my map.

So... those are the (tentative) continents. Some of which are starting to have some serious natural disaster-type problems. For un-earthly reasons.

And my poor little medieval people are dying off faster than a Stark in a Game of Thrones novel. By the thousands. Cause I'm mean.


In the meantime, they still need somewhere to live, and I can't figure out how the world in my head would fit together on a map.

Which is why I keep begging for help on every step of my project. It's a pretty stretch to accomplish what happens in my plot(s), so I need to get all the nit-picky details right. (Also because I'm a bit obsessive).


I also don't know if the continents are realistic enough (plate-wise/erosion-wise) to make it worth fixing the world map, which is why I started trying to do a single continent.

Now I'm just frazzled.


PS: I had a bunch of numbers and more explanations, but it was too long, so I didn't put it :/

[Veldehar]

Speaking of projections... if you haven't checked it out yet, a cool little freebie from NASA. Handy little thing.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gprojector/

[Azélor]

Isn't it possible to squeeze an equirectangular projection in a square ? I don't know if it's possible but Hai-Etlik surely knows about this ...

The easiest way is to make the submoon orbit the larger moon. If it's the smaller moon, well let's just say that the submoon would be more like an asteroid. And it would be hard to see it from the planet (I guess).I know it's possible but I haven't been into the details. I bought a astrophysic simulator called Universe sandbox on Steam and it worked. It's possible to get arround this n body problem but Binary star systems are much more complicated...

Moon T should be stable otherwise it would already have disappear. Either by crashing on moon C or to become the third moon of the planet.


I already saw your map on another topic... So far, it seems fine to me. I have to admit I have a problem when it comes to world construction. I started with a region with no idea of the surrounding. Yet I find myself ''forced'' to fill the map because things like climates and plates does not make much sense if the world is empty.