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Forum:Titania (system): Difference between revisions
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Titania can be divided, roughly, into three layers: the atmosphere, extensively hydrogen with pockets of trace gasses; the oceans, liquid water, ammonia, and methane; and the crust, rock in varying states and metallic hydrogen. | Titania can be divided, roughly, into three layers: the atmosphere, extensively hydrogen with pockets of trace gasses; the oceans, liquid water, ammonia, and methane; and the crust, rock in varying states and metallic hydrogen. | ||
The atmosphere, when measured from the surface to the point where true space begins, is approximately 24000 kilometers thick. This keeps the surface, and the oceans below, warm, heated by the dual processes of the greenhouse effect and the immense pressures on the planetary core from its gravity. Despite violent storms wracking the planet on the super-continental scale there exists life aplenty drifting along the turbulent currents. Many of these are collective organisms, resembling enormous floating jellyfish. They feed on aerial colonies of plankton and algae. Others follow the lightning storms, feasting on the energy discharges. Others are massive winged entities, some of these reaching wingspans of ten kilometers or more, hunting the floaters. The most notable of these are a species of enormous bird-like creatures, tentatively termed | The atmosphere, when measured from the surface to the point where true space begins, is approximately 24000 kilometers thick. This keeps the surface, and the oceans below, warm, heated by the dual processes of the greenhouse effect and the immense pressures on the planetary core from its gravity. Despite violent storms wracking the planet on the super-continental scale there exists life aplenty drifting along the turbulent currents. Many of these are collective organisms, resembling enormous floating jellyfish. They feed on aerial colonies of plankton and algae. Others follow the lightning storms, feasting on the energy discharges. Others are massive winged entities, some of these reaching wingspans of ten kilometers or more, hunting the floaters. The most notable of these are a species of enormous bird-like creatures, tentatively termed "rocs", apparently at the top of the food chain. Incredibly there exist floating continents, solidifed hydrogen and other gasses that have formed on the canopies of some of the most massive of the floaters, which can measure up to twenty kilometers around. Upon these alien continents live entirely unique ecosystems of wholly unique organisms similar to Terran species, not unlike the Galapagos Islands. | ||
The surface, meanwhile, is hostile to all forms of known life in spite of the relatively balmy temperatures of 300 K prevalent upon it. Lighting storms frequently cover large swathes of the surface, pouring hydrogen and methane rain upon the scarred and pitted ground. Mountains are blasted into rounded mounds with no discernable features; caves exists on the leeward side, but are seldom protected for long. Cryovolcanoes and hydrothermal vents are common, adding their erupting plumes to join the stormy fray. Great canyons and vents honeycomb the "land", cutting across the shallow seas and join with vast underground cave systems which penetrate deep into the subglacial oceans below. The largest, and most stable, of these is called Cronus, providing a direct link between the blasted overworld and the peaceful underworld. | The surface, meanwhile, is hostile to all forms of known life in spite of the relatively balmy temperatures of 300 K prevalent upon it. Lighting storms frequently cover large swathes of the surface, pouring hydrogen and methane rain upon the scarred and pitted ground. Mountains are blasted into rounded mounds with no discernable features; caves exists on the leeward side, but are seldom protected for long. Cryovolcanoes and hydrothermal vents are common, adding their erupting plumes to join the stormy fray. Great canyons and vents honeycomb the "land", cutting across the shallow seas and join with vast underground cave systems which penetrate deep into the subglacial oceans below. The largest, and most stable, of these is called Cronus, providing a direct link between the blasted overworld and the peaceful underworld. | ||