Tidally locked planet

Wouldn't the winds be absolutely awful on such a planet with one side unbelievably hot and the other freezing cold. The storms the temperature differential would create are insane.

I think it'd be unlivable without some high tech/magic.

Unlivable to conventional terran life as we know it. Such a mix of energy on a potentially life-sustaining planet is bound to produce creatures that are used to and built for it.

Still, humans would be stuck to living in sheltered environments in armored facilities and/or underground, and transport to space would be difficult without a means of bypassing the atmosphere or securing a starport in an area of calm. Atmospheric flight might be out of the question entirely.

> Atmospheric flight might be out of the question entirely.
It'd just be one way

Another thing to consider is tectonics. On one hand it would take an aeon for a largeish planet to become tidally locked, so its core activity may be low. On the other the tidal stresses may keep pushing and pulling the tectonic plates, creating volcanic activity.

The second scenario would be better for life as you need an active magnetic field to prevent life from getting cooked from cosmic rays.

I don't see why you would need anything armored or underground, you could just find a convenient bluff or ridge or whatever to hide your facility behind, or between, or however the meteorology dictated. There are after all, many kilometers of terminator to look for a good place in, on even the most spritely of worlds.

There was one listed in the Spelljammer supplement Practical Planetology. iirc it had two huge mountain ranges along the edges of the habitable band that kept the creatures of both the light and dark out.

I'm actually considering setting a 40K campaign on a tidelock planet. I've been hashing out a quick-and-dirty overmap ruleset, and have been thinking of setting.

An active magnetic field would need something keeping it cooking. A planet could stay active for millions of years, but in order to perpetuate it you need a moon to exert enough stress on the mantle to keep it from cooling.

Now, it's possible for a tidally-locked planet to continue to rotate perpendicular to the solar system's plane, possibly a result of a massive impact which changed the tilt of the planet. Also possibly the origin of the perpendicular moon, much like our own but at a right angle.

Uranus is like this, fyi.

I remembered that there was one in this solar system, but I forgot which one. So it's Uranus that's bent over.

Not much wind because the zones don't heat up and cool down, which is where the wind comes from

I can already see it; a string of hives and manufacorum-cities lining the habitable zone, refining the Promethium found on the cold side of the planet, and taking the raw ores from the hot side and producing the arms and armor of the Imperial Guard with it to ship off world, along with countless other prefab vehicles and tools used the Imperium over.

You'd have hellish night-fighting on the cold side where a wrong shot could set a whole refinery ablaze, and massive vehicular combat on the hot side where every shot counts and running iut of rations or breaking down vehicles can cost you your lives.

All the while intrigue and investigations take place in the Hives themselves as cults try to exert their power and the Imperium's sercants try to stop them.

I'd play it user

Thank you I hate people like that can't understand science and use their misunderstand to shit on other people's cool ideas.

When your first instinct is to go:
>that wouldn't work!
Instead of going:
>how would that work?
You might just hate fun.

Ya got me.

I lol'd

No, it wouldn't be able to support life. Sure the "twilight equator" might have bearable temperatures, but being tidally locked would cause such a discrepancy in the atmosphere there would constantly be violent storms. We're talking making the strongest hurricanes look like sprinklers and f-5 tornadoes look like desk fans.

>life flourishes on the warm side of the planet
>life flourishes on the cool side of the planet
>storms so tall you can't see their tops shred the middle of the planet like the wood chipper of an angry god

Tidal locking could be possible around high-end K dwarves as well. Which means that all the problems that a red dwarf brings wouldn't apply to it.

Clarke’s impression of terraformed Europa under the star-jupiter was of a tidally locked world, and as such on the equator directly under Lucifer’s gaze there was an absolutely massive hurricane due to the temperature differentials. That has tended to be the impression of the scientists envisioning said worlds, too.

Bacterial life can take that shit. Unicellular life can survive retarded amounts of abuse. Multi-cellular life could also probably survive to a degree, though it'd need calmer environs to flourish, and possibly evolve into something that can take the abuse. Like, everything would be limpets and chitons, assuming such creatures might have evolved in one of the calmer areas of the planet.

You might still have shitty zones deeper into the cold and hot sides, with one pole a sun-blasted desert and the other an ice-stasis hell.

If I'm not mistaken, the air heats up and rises on the sunny side, leaving a vacuum the cold air from the shadowy side rushes in to fill, resulting in a lot of wind.

You seem awfully rustled about some dude linking science articles.

I think a cain novel was set in one. Iirc it was the one with a slaneshi cult

Ok, fair. I should have said such a planet can't support COMPLEX life.

While we don't have any baseline to establish what can and can't support complex life, I do agree with that statement. The only known sapient life we know, and the several highly intelligent species that live on this planet, evolved in rather temperate conditions and are nearly uniformly social animals (with the exception of many cephalopods). It's not unreasonable to assume that this is a pretty basic requirement for complex lifeforms, as complex life didn't get a jump start until the planet had cooled down a little to allow for more diversity.

What would a rainbow look like?

Where would the Aurora Borealis be and what would it look like? More powerful?

Not sure about the Aurora Borealis. Might be that it only happens on the hot-side pole (let's call that pole "North") so it might not be visible during the day. Or since the magnetic field is weakest at that point, it could actually be visible during the day, but that pole would be irradiated.

The Aurora Australis might not even happen, given that the "South" side would never face the sun at any point. It might make that side the least irradiated point on the planet, and possibly the most stable because it's so far from all energy sources.

>You seem awfully rustled about some dude linking science articles.

He's mad becauise the guy who linked them misrepresented what those articles were saying. They do not support his argument, and that makes him either dishonest, or a dummy spreading misinformation due to ignorance.

Question since someone here knows astrophysics, is it possible to have a tidally locked planet in a binary system?

You mean so that it follows a figure eight pattern where one star lights up one pole and the other star lights the opposite pole? That would be cool. Strange but cool.

It makes more sense to put solar panels in space anyway, unless it's energy for local consumption

Tidally locked moons are different because they're not locked to their star, it would still have a wacky day/night cycle.

Shouldn't be any reason not to, as long as it's circumbinary and not one of the crazy figure-eight orbits, which probably couldn't support life in any case. Most binary star systems have a major star and a minor star, so apart from the edges being "fuzzy" compared to a single-star system, it'd be fine. The bigger the size discrepancy between the planets, the fuzzier the edges.

Note that even the moon doesn't exactly face the earth the same way all the time, it tilts and rotates slightly. This is called libration, and it's due to the moon's elliptical orbit. So even though you can only see half of the moon's surface at a time, only about 40% of the moon is actually the "dark side of the moon" that isn't observable from earth.

So if the circumbinary planet has an elliptical orbit, the border regions would be even more unstable.

I had three options in mind, kind of, as "can it work? I'm too dumb" potential solutions to the weather patterns which would be caused by permanent tidal lock in a unary system.
A figure 8 where the east pole and west pole so to speak had opposing half-year-long "days", a circumbinary orbit where the effect you mentioned produced a moving twilight zone and limited the permanently cold area, or a loose system where the dark side was kept semi-warm by half a year of twilight from the far sun.

Is it?
Assuming that we have a way to remotely transfer that energy down to planet surface, wouldn't space radiation fuck panels up?

By the time they're putting mass amounts of solar panels into orbit, they've already gone past "primarily planetary life".

single cell life at most

In the book in question, Jupiter was ignited by the monoliths and turned into a dwarf star.

And then this happened
youtube.com/watch?v=eMuz1rBVB78

Was that increasing Jupiter's mass to be dense enough to ignite fusion? Because I can't see what else would've caused those gravity effects.

That's assuming that there is an increase in gravity of Jupiter.

If it's just "igniting" Jupiter somehow without increasing the mass that shouldn't happen.

What if complex life evolved on the planet before some cataclysmic event fucked up the planet? Could be natural (asteroid impact, although that would probably kill everyone), magical (a dumb super-mage did it / (a) god did it) or other (aliens fucked around). Any of those could work for a fantasy setting, and the ruins of the previous human civilizations can be the mysterious precursor ruins adventurers try to seek out.

It looked like they increased the mass of Jupiter a thousandfold to make it equal to the sun. Not surprising that would fuck things up, it's like doubling the mass in the solar system in an instant. Jupiter 'only' needs to be something like 60-70 times heavier to ignite nuclear fusion, which would take the sun down from accounting from 99.9% of mass to more like 99.83%.

I wouldn't be so sure.
Or was it enceladus that might have complex multicellular life?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus#Possible_heat_sources
With a little luck. Imagine what an intelligent species from a deep vent ecology might be like. No sight, no fire.

That does not asnwer the radiation question.

I'm somewhat uneducated in all of this but would it be a problem?

Mir seemed to do alright until it caught fire.

Caiphas Cain served on one of these. The Cold face had large amounts of mining and refining of hydrocarbons, the sunny face had irrigated farming near the habitable zone, as well as a huge tourism industry and hotels, since you can have a permanent perfect sunset at certain points.

After several millenias worth of storms, I'm guessing the landscape is pretty smooth and wouldn't have much shelter left

Depends on how volcanic shit is.

Radiation does gradually degrade computers (especially as they get smaller and more delicate) however unless your equipment is passing into something like Jupiter's radiation belts or close orbits around a star you're not going to be dealing with enough hard radiation to significantly damage your machinery.

How about we visit the Meat Planet instead?
youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA

The Warp Riders concept album by The Sword has this setting, pretty fuggin cool desu

goddamnit