As you might know, I’ve been on a worldbuilding kick recently, brainstorming out planets…and I find there’s a real shortage of good, easy-to-use calculators for equilibrium temperature, surface gravity, greenhouse effect, planetary density (and plausible radius), which substances that might be found are solid, liquid, gaseous, or supercritical fluid over which temperature and pressure ranges (or even what temperature and pressure ranges are plausible), and so on and so forth. So, sensing a gap in the offerings available, I think “why not me?”.
Now, I have precious little experience with any kind of coding, but with modern tools I could probably build a comprehensive suite of worldbuilding calculators myself…and put them on this very website. Heck, I already did planetary radius, density, and surface gravity calculators in Microsoft Excel years ago, albeit purely for my own personal use. And especially with the help of tools like ChatGPT (LLMs tend to be particularly helpful at coding, amusingly enough)…eh, maybe I could create such a webpage?
Imagine if instead of having to cobble calculators together from disparate web pages or having to look up the formulae yourself, if you could just go to Adamas Nemesis’s worldbuilding page, and there it all is: from planetary radius, density, and surface gravity (with ranges provided; e.g. the density of Earth, of iron, etc.), to the equlibrium temperature (complete with bolometric luminosity, albedo effects with the reflectivity of different materials named, etc), and the range at which different substances might form oceans would be liquid under different atmospheric pressures (e.g. you input 100x Earth atmosphere, the phases of water, ammonia, methane, etc show up, all correct).
There would be an orbital eccentricity component included as well, of course, because manually re-entering the aphelion and perihelion values for planets when worldbuilding is really annoying with even the best calculators available out there today: If you could plug in a semi-major axis and the eccentricity, it would be so simple for a little web tool to generate the periapsis and apoapsis of the orbit, and then plug it into the temperature calculator (along with all the other outputs), yet despite all my digging I can’t find any such tool! I might even want to develop such a thing just for my own use, let alone anybody else’s, so frustrating this is…
With some consultation with experts and/or reviewing the formulae, I could even include tidal heating in the calculation, as well as additional sources of illumination, such as star clusters, aurora, even meteors, of particular importance for moons (in the case of tidal heating), high-radiation environments (in the case of aurora), or crowded stellar neighborhoods (like galactic cores or inside globular clusters).
Obviously all this adds up to quite a piece of software: throw in a visualization tool and I’d have by far the most powerful planet-builder out there for sci-fi writers and artistic worldbuilders alike, by far. I could even do something like program the site to give you an SSC file for Celestia and then you just load it up: Celestia is lightweight free-and-open-source software, and so it’s easy to connect together to my project, even if it does have its limitations. Especially since I already have some experience with that piece of software. There’s also the possibility of a visualizer directly in the web browser, which, since I already would have all the necessary data, might be feasible, but for me personally that would be more of a hurdle.
In any case, just arraying all the information you’d get from some cobbled-together overly simple or overly technical calculator plus a Wolfram Alpha phase diagram of this or that substance would be a major breakthrough that would make the lives of those who brainstorm much, much easier.
Especially when you consider that nearby stars are often points of interest: I could even preload their parameters, and program this tool to tell you how big the sun would appear in the sky, what color temperature it is compared to the sun (though what you’d actually see is subject to atmospheric composition, and not just basic gases but aspects like dust and so forth…which gets really complicated really fast, so maybe skip that part for now), and so forth.
Heck, I could even throw in spaceflight calculators, such as constant acceleration, time dilation, and spin gravity. SpinCalc is great for the latter, but it dates to 2000 and was last revised in 2018. Not that it needs to be revised, but it makes people like me wonder “wait, if this super-old website goes offline, what will I do!?”. And yes, a website from 2000 is over a quarter century old at this point; in terms of temporal distance that would have been like kid me in the year 2000 using a computer calculator from 1975. And besides, the graphics are so basic. Not that my graphics would be much less basic, mind you, but over time, someone like me with an artist’s eye could get pretty far with visual upgrades and so forth. It could be not only functional but beautiful.
But first, I’ll need to gather the sort of formulae and data I’ll require, and figure out some way to put these calculators on the web in a convenient format, all in one place. Adamas Nemesis Worldbuilder Calculator (or some such?) might be coming into your life soon, and it might even prove indispensable if you have any interest in hard science fiction. Watch this space!