Gliese 581-G (Just for fun)

[Lingon]

This looks neat! It's very nicely done and I like the idea. Though I have to say, it's rather unlikely that the landmass would be that round and perfectly centered on the dayside
I don't know if this is interesting, but I started a thread about a similar setting about a month ago. I haven't had time to finish the map yet, and it deals with a somewhat different situation where the tidal lock was sudden on an already inhabited, normally rotating world, but there are some links and discussion there that might be fun anyway (or not)! Here it is, if you want to take a look:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...ed-planet.html

[Podcreature]

That comment reminded me of an interesting piece of information I read in Jared Diamond's book Collapse which could be relevant to this world. He spent a lot of time on an island in the Pacific called Tikopia which is particularly isolated, with next to no contact with the outside world even today. The island they live on is so small that they can see the ocean from almost any spot, and that they're all intimately familiar with every square meter of the place. They denote direction in relation to the ocean - for example in one instance that Diamond witnessed himself, one islander told another that they had some food on the oceanward side of their face!

If the sun is completely stationary in the sky, the inhabitants would be likely to behave in a similar way to this I think!

Thanks for that input Raptori! This can be very useful, after all it would be a waste of good science fiction not to formulate a specific way that natives navigate on a planet that lacks day/night cycles. It's especially cool when we can use real world facts as a template. Side note; creatures native to a world like this would probably be very disoriented on a planet with a sun that seems to move. It might even make them sick.

This looks neat! It's very nicely done and I like the idea. Though I have to say, it's rather unlikely that the landmass would be that round and perfectly centered on the dayside
I don't know if this is interesting, but I started a thread about a similar setting about a month ago. I haven't had time to finish the map yet, and it deals with a somewhat different situation where the tidal lock was sudden on an already inhabited, normally rotating world, but there are some links and discussion there that might be fun anyway (or not)! Here it is, if you want to take a look:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...ed-planet.html

Thanks. I look forward to reading more thoughts and ideas in that thread. I'm excited to see that others hare hypothesizing about these kinds of worlds!

I agree that tectonics are the primary way continents are formed. To decide how to lay out my land masses, for an earth-like planet, I had to look at Earth. We also know that water does have a huge impact on how land masses form, though it may not be that obvious. Where water is constantly deposited, the land will erode. Over hundreds of millions of years, we'd see rain dumping on the outer edges of the warm zone. Land in the center will be continually dryer. Oceans would form around the perimeter, and expand because water has weight. The crust would become thinner there, creating fault-lines, pushing the land toward the middle. Planets try to stay in a spherical shape. Where there are glaciers, the buildup of freezing water, the ground depresses. Where there is rain, and glacial melt, there is erosion and pooling. So in the cooler zones, that are not quite frozen, over time, we'd see oceans congregate there, erosion and ice breaking up the land. So the formation of ice on the back of the planet, we'd have the trapping of a lot of water, but not all. And under the ice, there's probably an original shape of land masses, with the erosion on the warm side creating a cookie-cutout of whatever land was there. As clouds form around the sea, and encroach on the outer ring of the world, they deposit snow, creating huge ice-ranges. As they expand, they slide and crumble into the sea, but the tall range is growing at the rate that it is deteriorating, maintaining a height that is a barrier to the clouds, trapping liquid water in the warm zone. The extra thick ozone is the only thing that prevents the atmosphere from freezing on the dark side of the planet. Anyway, that's how land masses would most certainly be shaped by the congregation of water. In the confined space that isn't glacier, fault lines would appear where the crust is shallower, depressed by the sea, so the coastline would have more volcanoes.

Of course I would need a computer simulation to be sure of how any of that would really find balance and I am not saying a world like yours isn't possible. That might be a scenario where the oceans remained liquid or slush. Possible with enough greenhouse gas. Some simulations reveal that tidally locked planets have a big hurricane around the band, dumping rain on the far side constantly, and I imagine that's what my own world was like in the first millions/billions of years, before glaciers built up, or the planet drifted a little further back in the habitable zone.