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joeabuy1000 — The Inner Patrata System
Published: 2013-12-15 18:40:09 +0000 UTC; Views: 2045; Favourites: 20; Downloads: 24
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Description
The Patrata System consists of 13 major companion planemos, including one dwarf planet between two asteroid belts, and a number of moons and asteroids. It is centered on the eponymous star Patrata, from the Pirasan word meaning "Winter Star."The orbits of the planets are arranged into three inner planets (shown here), the first asteroid belt, the dwarf planet that's between the asteroid belts, the second asteroid belts, the three rocky middle planets, three gas giants, and three ice giants in its extreme frontier.
Due to its association with Winter in the Pirasan Imperial Culture, the star is often addressed with masculine descriptors, "Big Daddy" being the most common slang used in the Trigalactic Embassy. This creates an unusual scenario to the Pa'atratira colonists since Pirasan are matriarchal and do not normally associate masculinity with superiority.
Copyright by me and the guys at One Planet at a Time .
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The Inner Worlds
Partura, the Barren
The innermost planet, Partura has no satellites and straddles close to its stellar parent. Being very close to Big Daddy Patrata means that Partura is barren, uninhabited, and uninhabitable, with no hope of ever establishing anything more permanent than an observation post. It has a thin atmosphere, much like Mercury.
Pa'atratira, the Blessed
Roughly close to the size of Earth, Pa'atratira is a hitherto barren world well within the Goldilocks zone for most galactic species. Currently being terraformed, the planet consists largely of the desert terrain common throughout the rocky planets of the system, though they are no longer considered lifeless. The planet was first discovered and colonized by the Pirasan, a eusocial insectoid race more commonly associated with pirate-like raids on nearby trade routes.
The Pirasan living in the colony here do not engage in piracy, dismissing it as a heretical endeavor, and focus more on natural sciences. They are affiliated with their own central imperial government and frequently send communications to their homeworld Sansekta'ar. A delegation for the Trigalactic Federation exists in the colony, hoping to establish friendly relations between the two governments.
Pa'atratira has two moons, the larger, volcanic Makutha'ad and the smaller, inert Ba'anad.
Pa'artukra, the Pointlessly Massive
Although slightly beyond the Goldilocks Zone and way too massive to sensibly terraform, the super-earth type Pa'artukra offers promising amounts of metal and other mineral resources in its surface. Barren and lifeless, it is dominated by a cold orange desert. Plans for investigating the planet for minerals are under way by both Pirasan and Trigalactic officials. Like all the other planets in the system, it is nominally under the sovereignty of the Pirasan Empire and legally administered in the First Hive City in Pa'atratira. Unlike most other planets, it's actually close enough to Pa'atratira to be immediately useful.
Apart from the occasional surveyor team sent from Pa'atratira, no living things are known to exist here.
It has five moons.
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Comments: 9
When I first looked at these and noticed that they all began with Pa and ended with Ra, I suspected that one of the two was the Pirasan definite article, or perhaps the two together formed said article. You can imagine my embarrassment when I looked through your journal and found out that was not the case. This race is getting a lot out of those “cold” metaphors…
I feel that the Pirasans care a little too much about these ‘useless’ worlds: the intended observation post on Partura would be better suited for an orbital facility, which has the added bonus of mobility (and you likely don’t want it too close to the sun, where you’ll get glare), and if Pa’artukra is too massive to suitably terraform, then miners will have to fight an intense gravity well to move out materials, something they could avoid by mining the asteroids instead (even though they’re much farther, it’s still worth it). The real benefit of such worlds is as fortresses: semi-permanent installments that would take a tremendous effort to root out, and one could simply dig deeper to avoid heavy weaponry.
Regarding the issue of the volcanic moon Makutha'ad: there are two possible explanation. Firstly, it could be large enough to have held onto sufficient formation heat to maintain a molten interior and hence drive its own tectonic processes, which is to say upwards of a quarter Earth masses. This would be enough to significantly influence Pa'atratira and leave an external barycenter such that they appear to both orbit each other (a phenomenon we call a double-planet). Otherwise, it could have an eccentric orbit, but such orbits tend to circularize over time so it must be a recent orbit (ie, the moon was captured relatively recently), be large enough to resist the change through its own inertia (which skirts the former situation), or be in resonance with other moons which maintains their orbits. Io suffers the last of these: it’s in a 1:2:4 resonance with slightly larger Ganymede and slightly smaller Europa (that is to say that for every 4 revolutions Io makes, Europa makes 2 and Ganymede makes 1). There are some such resonances between pairs of moons of Saturn of similar mass, so perhaps such a resonance between Makutha’ad and Ba’anad does its work upon the former, and it would work out particularly well if Ba’anad were significantly larger than its fellow (not all ratios work: try 3:2 or 4:3, where the first number is how many revolutions Makutha’ad makes). Admittedly, you might have to make the moon significantly smaller than Io and bring it closer to the planet to make up for the relative masses (Jupiter being many times more massive than Pa’atratira), but Io is huge as far as moons in our solar system go and tidal forces are influenced by the cube of distance so working with this can really factor things out.
I’m always willing to offer assistance if you ever need astronomy help.
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I appreciate the feedback and thank you for the offer. My astronomy's a bit on the rough side so I'd love to receive help in designing the astrography of the system.
About the Pirasan's obsession with the uninhabitable planets, I like the suggestion of them having an altogether different motive for trying to maintain a presence on world's they can't really live in, such as building a military presence in the guise of finding planets to mine, though mining for minerals that are usually found in abundance on certain planets might also create a more legitimate reason (or a more convincing front) to actually send surveyors there. Whether or not anything comes from any of these things would also depend on how Pirasan society works since most outposts and bureaucracies I've read in Sci-Fi were based on civilizations that emerged from humanlike social structures and may not be compatible with hive-based eusocial societies. Pirasan physiology (i.e. whether their two skeletons can withstand high gravity and pressure) might also factor in.
They could also be sending out probes and staffed scouting missions to the Kuraku-Ana'atraar, the double asteroid belts, with a permanent base on the tiny minor planet Kuraku.
I'm digging the idea of putting an orbital probe closer to Big Daddy Patrata, perhaps acting as a satellite to Partura, rather than planting a probe on Partura's surface.
Another note on why "cold" plays into most of the naming conventions of the planets in the system (with Kuraku, not shown here, arguably counting as an exception): Patrata is tentatively a distant, faint star that appears in wintertime sky in the Pirasan Homeworld [the implications of this to the bylaws might be a bit of a stretch since this implies that their homeworld is somewhere in the region or at least close to it]. Since Pirasan culture associates warmth with femininity (they are matriarchal and ruled by egg-laying monarchs) and cold with masculinity (most of their nonsentient workers and sentient lower castes, who work outside the hive, are born male), the "Winter star" was strongly associated with the cold and is addressed in male terms, and by extension, so were"his children". Confusingly, Pa'atratira and Partura are culturally perceived to be female due to their relative warmth despite having the word "cold/winter" in their names but the obviously hot Patrata is called "Big Daddy" in just about every colonist slang in the system.
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Excellent! The text within the description is a great world building passage by its own right and the image is impeccable. Your annotation is also quite good and I like all of the names that you came up with. Just from looking at the words "Partura," "Pa'atratira," and "Pa'artukra" I can see that you weren't kidding when said you wanted to come up with a language for this race.
Now that I've seen the world(s) and know the background the next two things that I am most curious about are the Pirasan appearance and the architecture of their hive. I'm also interested in your rationale for making one of the moons volcanic (geeky curiosity, not nit-picky jerk). I'm also curious about why the embassy has such a large number of staff given that Pa'atratira lies along the edge of civilization and has such a low population. But then again, if the TGF is using the embassy as a base for covert operations due to Pirasan pirate activity then a large staff size would make a lot sense.
As far as bylaws go naming the Pirasan homeworld is definitely a grey area especially it lies outside of the Patrata System but the fact that you did not make any imposing declarations about population size, # of star systems within their territory, or statements like "the center of power and commerce in the Chaan Region" means that what we have here is clearly within the spirit of the bylaws. However, unless you plan to make a historical/cultural profile for the Pirasan Race, in which case you would need to include a mention of their homeworld, it would be best to save it for whenever you get to your Phase VI world or whatever pop size is appropriate. I personally chose to leave out the name of the Drall homeworld when I was working on that world building passage, but I think keeping the name Sansekt'ar is fine.
Again, great image & description. I was thoroughly impressed and entertained 
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I really appreciate it. It's very encouraging to see positive feedback on my work. I've the general appearance of the Pirasan down and will be refining them in a bit before submitting. Working on the possible directions on their language alone has given me a good idea of how to flesh out their culture. I'm still trying to figure out which direction I should go for designing their architecture since I don't want their hives to look *too* much like that of Earth Arthropods, though a few ideas were to incorporate hexagons or other geometric shapes into their buildings and the use of wax produced by larvae as a common binding agent (the structures themselves being made of metal or concrete).
As for the other queries:
(A) Makutha'ad's volcanism is a reference to Jupiter's moon Io. What causes its volcanism I am as of yet not completely sure at the moment if its volcanism is caused by the same factors as Io (combined, Pa'atratira and Ba'anad might not be enough to tidally heat Makutha'ad's core, despite its eccentric orbit), if it's caused by isotope decay and stored internal heat like Earth's tectonic activity, or a combination of both
(B) The large staff population in the TGF embassy came about primarily out of scale purposes, though advanced technology might negate the need to have a large support workforce. I also intended the embassy to be a showcase of the cultures of the TriGalactic, so a large resident population was necessary. The justification you cited might be the better option overall; after all, the TGF has yet to rule out that the pirate raids were privateer activity sanctioned by the Empire's central government. It adds a bit of uneasiness to the otherwise friendly attitudes of the polities involved.
(C) It's fortunate to hear that what I've revealed about Sansekta'ar are well within the bylaws of the group. The planet would feature highly in the history of the Pirasan species but won't make much of an appearance until much, much sooner. The only thing else known about it is that Patrata can be seen from its northern hemisphere as the prominent star in an otherwise blank patch of sky.
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"...of >1800G" I take that back. What I meant to say was "of >400G"
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One consideration for architecture: as species evolve certain aspects of their physiology are lost due to changing survival factors. Case in point: human canine teeth are gradually fading from the gene pool because they are no longer driven by natural selection or sexual selection. Likewise, an insectoid race that develops an ability to use tools effectively might also loose the ability to secrete large amounts of binding agent and thus produce more of its materials through actual manufacturing. Knowing this, the key is to understand the interplay between architecture and Pirasan psychology as opposed to human psychology.
A) I liked Zerraspace's ideas about volcanism. He is a lot better at the whole planetology thing than I am.
B) My initial understanding was that the Pirasan Empire was heavily involved with piracy and that the Patrata system was the exception to the rule. This may be a dumb question on my part but would you say that the Pirasan Empire was historically pirate-based and now weaning itself off (hence, better relations with the TGF) or that it is "double dipping" by heavily engaging in privateer activity while also trying to play nice to other polities?
D) Zerraspace is right about the observation post. An orbital one would make more sense.
E) Saying that Pa'artukra is too heavy to terraform may not be completely true. Individual cells can survive centrifugations of >1800G, so I think that a super-Earth could still useful as a sources of fossil fuels (if the resource expenditure required for terraforming were deemed worth while).
F) The gravity limitation would depend primarily on a given civilization's level of technology. In fact, mining a Super Earth might even be easier than mining a Gas Giant (but I would have to do some physics calculations involving G*m_1_*m_2_/r^2^ that I don't feel like thinking about right now in order to confirm that). Sure, asteroids don't require any energy in terms of escaping a gravity well, but it takes time to explore large areas of space and test for various ores. With a super Earth, on the other hand, you would only have to survey the planet's surface and then *walla!* you know where most of the valuable ores are and you don't have to fly all over the solar system to get whatever metal is currently in demand. Assuming you have good gravity-manipulating technology as well as fusion (unless you are dealing with grav-tech driven by exotic matter/energy tech) the cost of lifting off as well as conventional mining and/or tractor beam based mining might be negligible compared to asteroid mining.
G) Zerraspace's idea about super Earth fortresses is cool and I never thought about that before. A super Earth as close to its sun as Partura would also have the advantage of being on the hot side of the planet half a year which would serve as another natural defense (assuming it was placed far enough underground) against military engagement.
H) I am surprised that you chose the workers' sex to be male because in our world insect workers are all female. If I remember correctly the queens have two X chromosomes, the males have an X and a Y, and the workers just have a single X. Is there an evolutionary reason for why you chose to set up the Pirasans differently?
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On (B), the first initial contact between many space-faring polities and the Pirasan were from pirate raiders, hence the stereotype of them being pirates is entrenched in the consciousness of many species, including humans. I've yet to reveal how entrenched piracy and privateering is to the Pirasan Empire, the hives of which usually have an degree of semi-independence, which could also reflect on the Empire's organization and reveal how Pirasan politics actually work. Pa'atratira's exception to the rule status might simply come from being the only one that the TGF has encountered thus far. In any case, the TGF embassy staff have every right to be suspicious.
(E) While the planet may still be well within the abilities of an advanced civilization to terraform, the Pirasan Empire (or the Pa'atratira colony) might have figured it to be too expensive to attempt to terraform Pa'artukra the time, instead focusing their efforts on the Goldilocks-zone Pa'atratira. The "fossil fuels" in an uninhabited world perplex me, however. Is this supposed to indicate that Pa'artukra once had primeval species of plants that became extinct or would it instead refer to deposits similar to the hydrocarbon oceans of Titan?
(F) The Pirasan are still surveying the both the planet and the asteroid field. This might also factor in story-wise since the TGF delegation also plays host to representatives from corporate lobbies who might be keen on establishing mines in Pirasan space without being harassed by pirates. There will be debates on who gets to mine Pa'artukra or Kuraku.
(G) Plans by the Pirasan to build a super-earth fortress might say a lot about the exact relationship between piracy and their central government; if they don't want to cause trouble, why would they build one? (It could be that they're understandably trying to defend themselves from more powerful invaders).
(H) The idea that "all workers are female" is true only for eusocial hymenopterans (ants, bees, wasps; at least for bees, it is the males who have a single x, laid as they were from an unfertilized egg), not for termites, where female and male workers are common, from which I based the Pirasan's workers on. The higher ratio of male workers to female workers may have resulted with associating femininity with higher status (since the egg-laying royals ultimately call the shots), hence certain castes comprise mainly of males (engineers, scouts, nonsentient workers) while other castes comprise mainly of females (intellectuals, soldiers, manufacturers). Only the reproductive classes (royals and nobles) have an even ratio of males to females. Whether this came out of natural evolution, a result of deliberate selection by the ruling castes, or a bit of both can be discussed on a later date.
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E) "fossil fuel" is a semantics error on my part. "biofuels" would have been the correct term: algae fields after terraforming could be a source of hydrocarbons.
H) I stand delightfully corrected. Never mind about the evolution question. I'll look into that myself
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By sooner, I meant as a description or footnote in the histories which wouldn't reveal too much of its current state but suggest highly of its central organization as needed. The physical planet itself won't show up until a couple of planet's worth of world building later.
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