So it's been a little while since my last update (blame Christmas!) and I thought I should share what's going on, aside from all that family stuff.
I have been making progress with the whole planetary formation thing. In the process, I've found that... while I've been using a bit more and more scientific references for my models, I'm a bit lost with some of my previous choices. Mainly, the arbitrary values I was giving stars for their variety, and how they were mucking up my planetary designs. My solution: take a step back to star formation. I'm not going to be revising the whole system and thus need to start over with the stupid equations that took months; I just need to change how the star values are determined, and then adjust a few surrounding things to accomodate the new value ranges.
The specific problem: Originally, I gave stars a random mass and volume, to account for the possibility of small massive bright stars and red giants. Now what I'll do is roll a mass for a star, generate planets according to that mass (and resulting brightness) then roll for its age to determine which phase of star life it's in.
The final piece of related info: The values that I was using were totally arbitrary, so I couldn't relate them at all to the more-realistic models I was starting to formulate and, well, without any relation, I didn't know how to proceed! Also, again, I was ending up with wonky systems due to the star properties being too random.
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to having fun with finding good number ranges and figuring out nice easy ways to make them, so that I can get back to building planets!
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