Probably should’ve waited for my next paycheck to get my hands on this, but I found Space Engine completely at random and decided that I might be able to use it for some of my novels. I’m thinking it might help with fleshing out locations in the novels if I ever get around to posting in-depth articles on World Anvil.
One of the things I wanted to do with these novels is to keep them grounded in reality as much as possible, so that means using real stars and exoplanets as often as I can. While finishing up Game Over, one of the ideas I’d gone with was that humans were the newest arrivals on the galactic block, at least as far as the quadrant all the known spacefaring nations had explored and settled so far. Which meant that Earth and its settlements were on the bottom of the technological totem pole and every other civilization had existed for thousands of years longer.
As a result, humanity hasn’t spread far into the galaxy yet. One of their outermost settlements, a handful of space stations orbiting the planets in the Gamma Leonis system, is only about 130 light-years from Earth. I used a website I’d found a number of years ago, 100,000 Stars, to figure out which other stellar systems would be a reasonable distance from where the main characters ended up in the last few chapters of Game Over. The sequel, Uncharted Territory, begins a few months after the characters arrived at Gamma Leonis in the late 22nd century and got an extensive refit for their ship, the SS Mae Jemison. The crew is hired to transport a science team to investigate alien ruins on another planet and a recently-reappeared explorer ship that vanished decades ago. The planet, and other locations the crew would bounce back and forth between, would need to be within a reasonable distance of each other, and I would’ve had a hell of a time working out the details without that website. I could’ve found each star’s distance from Earth in their Wikipedia articles, but being able to actually see their positions relative to each other was a massive help.
Events in this book lead to the characters joining an expedition deep into the unexplored (as far as anyone knows, at least) Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way. A gravitational-lens telescope based in the Lambda Scorpii system had captured an image of several mysterious ships that were very similar to one the Jemison‘s crew encountered near the end of Game Over, and the person putting the expedition together worked with the crew before, so he hired them to join the fleet. As the expedition ventured farther into the unknown, I wanted to keep using real stars, black holes, nebulae, and so on.
There was just one problem. I couldn’t find any information on specific stars on the far side of the galaxy. Even after months of searching, I came up empty-handed. All I could find was an image of the galaxy with the arms labeled and lines showing where it’s divided into quadrants. I thought I was going to have to just make stuff up.
Then I stumbled onto Space Engine and gave it a whirl. Haven’t had time to play around with it much, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to find the locations of real stars and whatnot so the path the fleet takes will make sense. And because Space Engine can generate planets and moons where there aren’t any, I figure I can at least end up with some stuff that gives me new ideas for the characters to explore and cool images to use as cover images or lore files.
For instance, a place the characters visit a couple of times is a major colony world of the mulathi, an alien civilization that’s existed longer than any of the others. This planet, which they named Tevsa, orbits the star Alpha Ceti, aka Menkar. If the name seems familiar, it’s where Khan and his crew were sent in the Star Trek episode “Space Seed” — except the script reversed the name for some reason. And yes, a couple of the characters in Uncharted Territory bring it up in a conversation while en route.
So. Real star, but I couldn’t find any info on planets orbiting it, so that’s where I had to start wingin’ it. Luckily, Space Engine generated seven planets and even gave them moons, plus it tossed in some asteroids and dwarf moons.
The nearest planet is way too hot to be Tevsa — over 3,000 degrees Celcius. The next several were also too close and too hot. One that would, if I’m not mistaken, be catalogued as Alpha Ceti c, looks absolutely badass but is also way too hot at over 1,800 degrees Celcius.
One of the cool things about Space Engine, aside from the beautiful planets and other objects it renders, is the info it places in the upper-left corner. It’s good to have an idea of how far the planet is from its parent star, the planet’s diameter and circumference and whatnot, its range of temperatures, atmospheric composition, gravity, number of moons, and other variables … even if you never end up using any of those, it’s good to have the info ready just in case.
One of the other planets the software generated, which we’ll call Alpha Ceti e, looks a lot more hospitable even though it isn’t, according to the data. The atmosphere isn’t breathable, atmospheric pressure is almost double that of Earth’s and so is the gravity, and the surface temperature is over 400 degrees Celcius.
But all I have to do is tweak the numbers a little. Also, an interesting thing about these planets being 250 light-years away is that, if any of our telescopes could image the planet directly, we’d be seeing it as it was 250 years ago. So even without fudging the numbers aside from the gravity, I could just say that mulathi planetary engineers made whatever adjustments they needed before they settled there, so the atmosphere and temperature pretty comfortable for them — and, coincidentally, for us and several other alien species as well.
For another stellar system in Uncharted Territory — not visited, but mentioned in dialogue — let’s have a quick look at Zeta Orionis, aka Alnitak. It’s a triple-star system but I couldn’t find the third one in Space Engine. I’m still getting used to the controls, so it’s probably behind one of the others and I couldn’t figure out how to rotate around enough to find it.
This is the home of the mulathi homeworld, which they call Izanakha. There aren’t any actual planets there, according to the software, and it didn’t generate any. I’ll need to play around with it some more and see what I come up with. Still, I really like the image I managed to screenshot here.
The idea I had for the mulathi civilization was that they’ve been a spacefaring species for something like twenty to thirty thousand years, and they’ve had plenty of time to figure out a balance between nature and technology. So the cradle of their civilization doesn’t resemble a place like Coruscant or some other planet that’s entirely covered by one massive city. They have a few major cities with skyscrapers like you’d see in The Fifth Element but without the lower levels piled in everything that’s thrown away. The ground and lower levels are where tech and nature coexist and the mulathi have kept or rebuilt their forests and don’t let the cities encroach on them. The type of city the mulathi tend to favor the most is the arcology, many of which have more typical cityscapes around them that have several parks and nature preserves and don’t have any buildings higher than three or four floors, letting ground-level inhabitants have mostly unobstructed views of the sky.
From here, we hop on over to another inhabited stellar system, Alpha Scorpii, aka Antares. The homeworld of the mekharan people, which they call Duthora, orbits Antares A. Yep, the one that’s predicted to go supernova. The Wikipedia article says it’s expected to happen within 1 to 1.4 million years, but elsewhere I’ve seen ten thousand years. I’m going with the latter in the novels and have a couple of ideas as to why. One is simply that more accurate measurements were eventually made that reduced the star’s life expectancy.
The other could make for a much more interesting story: what if the 1+ million-year estimate was the more accurate, but something was done to Antares A to cut its life short? Could it have been a deliberate act or a natural phenomenon?
Since the overarching mystery of the whole series is spacetime rifts that appear at random, usually last a few seconds or minutes, and then vanish … it’s possible that one of these rifts may have flared up inside Antares A and remained open, siphoning the star away, eating it from the inside and causing it to blow long before it would naturally. So far, the only rift known to have remained open indefinitely is the one near the zorai homeworld, which they named Hell’s Heart because it’s one of those planets where everything is constantly trying to kill its inhabitants, to the point where they were teetering on the brink of extinction throughout their entire history. The location of Hell’s Heart was never determined due to the constellations being unrecognizable to explorers from Earth who got there through the rift, but the local star shared its vicinity with a black hole, the gravitational pull of which could explain the frequent ground-quakes and other natural disasters that plagued the planet.
So. That’s the only rift to have remained open permanently, or at least long enough for the zorai population to be relocated to Earth before the black hole tore the planet apart. But if it happened once, there’s a chance that it could happen again, this time causing a star’s premature death.
The mekharans, who evolved from a mammalian snakelike creature that developed four arms — think of them as a mix of the Vipers from XCOM but with slightly more humanoid faces and the Shokan from Mortal Kombat, but with two full torsos one on top of the other, giving them two hearts, four lungs, four pectoral muscles or breasts, and so on — eventually reached a technological level that allowed them to study Antares A and discover its brief candle was almost out. This discovery prompted them to dedicate their entire society to building a space program so they could find planets to settle far enough away not to be damaged by the eventual supernova.
And they did it. Ever since they developed interstellar travel, they’ve explored and found planets they could survive on, and have been gradually moving their population off Duthora. They expect their planet to be completely empty of animal life long before Antares A pops.
So there we are. A bit of worldbuilding, a bit more background on a couple of the alien species, and a bit of inspiration from a piece of software that I never expected to find but am glad that I did.
Now all I have to do is not let myself spend too much time playing around with Space Engine instead of finishing Uncharted Territory …
Fred T. Kerns, Sci-fi Writer 