![]() ![]() These include planets completely covered in water, planets large enough to retain a heavy atmosphere of Hydrogen and Helium, but which are much smaller than the gas giants and thus are nonetheless mostly rock. Most of the planet icons represent types of planets that exist in the solar system, but there are a couple of types that showed up that don't correspond to any of our planets. (The links in the example thumbnail to the right all take you to a real Thumbnail page.) In some browsers, leaving the cursor on a planet icon for a couple of seconds will cause a small tool tip/balloon help message to appear, giving a few of the statistics for the planet. Each planet is a hot link to the data for the particular planet on the system's page. The types are explained on a key page, for which there is a link in the lower right corner of the diagram. The diagram uses different planet icons for each type of planet. An example is shown here to the right, slightly reformatted for use here. The thumbnail tables contain the name of the system (which is a hot link to the system's page), a diagram showing the types and sizes of the planets, and a list of planets whose surface temperature allows water to remain a liquid. Terrestrial: Earth-like (N 2, O 2 - breathable) It makes a Web page for each planetary system it creates, and if it is asked to create a number of systems, a thumbnails page showing a small table for each system generated.Ħ Planets ( size proportional to Sqrt(Radius)) ![]() HTML OutputThe most obvious difference is that StarGen creates HTML pages. I ran into stargen in the late 80's and started working on various modifications of it, since its simulations were much better than my own.įeaturesThis section lists a number of differences between StarGen and other similar programs. During the 70's, I created various versions of this program, all since lost, in FORTRAN, BasicPlus and C. In 1971 I created my own random solar system generator in Fortran. I immediately purchased a copy of the second edition of "Habitable Planets for Man", which had just been published by American Elsevier. My own work on Solar System generators started in 1970, when I encountered Asimov's popularization of Dole's book, "Planets for Man". To be honest, I don't recall what if anything I may have borrowed from the rest. Burke and Chris Croughton, aka Keris.My own StarGen is based mostly on Burdick's, but has borrowed from the others, most notably Keris's. These include programs by Ian Burrell, C. There have been several different versions of starform, with bits and pieces added and modified by others over the years. I believe that it was he who incorporated the earlier work of Kothari into the code. In 1988, Matthew Burdick, who turned the Accrete model as described by Fogg into a program called "starform". Inspired by the Dole and Sagan papers, Martyn Fogg created a microcomputer version of Accrete, still in Fortran, and published a paper in 1985. Carl Sagan and Richard Isaacson refined the model and published a paper of their own in 1977. Fogg.īased on these papers Dole and created a program called ACRETE, which was originally coded in FORTRAN. Additional information came from a 1985 paper by Martyn J. ![]() It's oldest roots are a couple of papers published 30 or more years ago by Stephen Dole of the Rand corporation. StarGen owes a lot to many different precursors written by several authors over the years. The most recent version runs on Macintosh and Unix machines and produces HTML files as output.The image above is a thumbnail of the sort of thing it produces. It's a program for creating moderately believable planetary systems around stars other than our own. StarGen is the latest version of a series of programs I've worked on off and on over the last thirty years, though none of my code in the current incarnation is more than half that age. ![]()
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