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[Pnx]

Hmmm damn it, didn't think of that, I was thinking it was a partially covered water planet...

EDIT: Ok let's make it Sisyphus instead. Maybe working on some background for the planet and it's economy, how does salt as a valuable commodity sound? It could be mined purely from the north pole of the world.

EDIT EDIT: Ok back to Salmonous.

[rickvoid]

Hmmm damn it, didn't think of that, I was thinking it was a partially covered water planet...

Nope, totally water.

Domes make for perfect City-States. Just modify your history to include those, come up with an explanation for how they managed to launch a ship to another moon, and I think you've got a winner here.

I see your edit and raise you another EDIT: Stick with Salmoneus. It's an interesting basis for a world of this type, and I've always had a love for underwater adventures. We can still use Sisyphus, just now we'll have inter-solar political intrigue!! 

[Boksi]

I imagine Sisyphus would be an agricultural planet. The Salmoneus domes should probably be giant ships; it's better than being in a dome under a kilometer of water. Salmoneus doesn't have weather bad enough to topple them if they're big enough, and they have to be big enough to permanently house a city. They'd probably acquire most of their valuables from the ocean; besides fishing and algae-processing, they could process the ocean into it's components: hydrogen for fuel, oxygen for air and various trace metals for construction. If the starships are light enough, they could probably just float on the ocean and refill their fuel and oxygen supplies as well as make minor repairs, easy.

[rickvoid]

I endorse the above post.

[Pnx]

Ok, so I'm thinking maybe somewhere in the region of 20 city states, with only 15 or 16 states under the regency. There would also be a fair bit of unaffiliated land including some hostile clans/tribes that linger there.

So I'm thinking this will be a metal rich world...

I have an idea, a major landmark of the world should be the rust flats, a region of large amounts of iron that rusts quite easily in the water thus resulting in the rust flats, a place of red dusty environment that is renowned for disrupting the instruments and clogging up the vehicles of people passing through it.

So should the domes be on the water or in the water, cus if it's in the water we may need to have some explanation as to why they can't do above water domes. Also I think the planet should have mostly shallow depths, I reckon this planet will have lower gravity then earth, so maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of ours. If that's true then pressure shouldn't be too much of an issue, from what I learned scuba diving at 10m you have an additional 1 atmosphere of pressure on you, on this world I'm thinking you're at 2 atmospheres absolute at around 35m, so I'm thinking the average depth of most areas should be around 100m tops, of course we'd have really deep abyss areas and canyons that can go as high as 1000m depth in some places.

EDIT: I see from that post there that we're going with giant ships, I'm not sure how I feel about that, the regency might just have to be thrown out or kept for Sisyphus if we're going with that.

EDIT EDIT: so let's see, I'm thinking that a gas giant would be pretty interesting on weather/tide patterns, on the water world it you'd wind up with some huge waves coming along quite frequently when you're facing away from the giant, and you'd have a lot of strong currents up near the surface though it wouldn't be too bad when you got a little deeper. So I'm guessing surface ships are off, also the rise and fall of the water would be rather extreme so any fixed structure might spend 1/2 the time underwater and 1/2 the time above it . Maybe that's how they survive, big gigantic ships that are mostly underwater but have various towers coming out of the top of them rising above the surface.

[rickvoid]

Ok, so I'm thinking maybe somewhere in the region of 20 city states, with only 15 or 16 states under the regency. There would also be a fair bit of unaffiliated land including some hostile clans/tribes that linger there.

So I'm thinking this will be a metal rich world...

I have an idea, a major landmark of the world should be the rust flats, a region of large amounts of iron that rusts quite easily in the water thus resulting in the rust flats, a place of red dusty environment that is renowned for disrupting the instruments and clogging up the vehicles of people passing through it.

So should the domes be on the water or in the water, cus if it's in the water we may need to have some explanation as to why they can't do above water domes. Also I think the planet should have mostly shallow depths, I reckon this planet will have lower gravity then earth, so maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of ours. If that's true then pressure shouldn't be too much of an issue, from what I learned scuba diving at 10m you have an additional 1 atmosphere of pressure on you, on this world I'm thinking you're at 2 atmospheres absolute at around 35m, so I'm thinking the average depth of most areas should be around 100m tops, of course we'd have really deep abyss areas and canyons that can go as high as 1000m depth in some places.

EDIT: I see from that post there that we're going with giant ships, I'm not sure how I feel about that, the regency might just have to be thrown out or kept for Sisyphus if we're going with that.

Think of it as less like ships, more like massive floating platforms anchored to the sea-floor.

[Boksi]

When I said giant, I meant it. Titanic doesn't even compare, they're city-ships. You can live your whole life in them without going outside. In fact, that's what some poor people do; other poor people rarely get inside. They can be pretty flat-bottomed, too, because of the calm weather, so your depth measurements can work.

As for rust flats... Destroyed city ships? You'd need an absolute catastrophe to destroy one, such as a nuclear explosion. And it'd leave a lot of various junk lying around. Profitable salvage, yes, but plays havoc with instruments.

Perhaps we can introduce some marine lifeform to explain the size, too... Hmm, how about that the bottom of the city-ships is actually made out of a local lifeform, a sort of plant-animal hybrid that wanders around like a big floating lump, consuming sea algae while containing it's own algae? The settlers treat them very cruelly and deprive them of a lot of light. They enslave them by the dozens under the metal shells of the city-ships to make them float... And the regency can kill any of these lumpies at any time at a whim, which they will do if they feel threatened. Without the lumpies, the ships will slowly start sinking, drifting for weeks before finally running aground.

[rickvoid]

Better idea: These critters attached themselves to the bottom of the hull of the ships, much like a barnacle. The settlers were planning to remove them, but they discovered that the things had several medicinal properties and were a basis for the diets of a number of fish. With a large supply attached to their platform, they were able to haul in a much bigger catch.

Because of the rapid expansion of the platforms, the fungus is the only thing keeping them afloat. As a result, there is a short, strict harvesting season for the plant. Attempting to harvest at any other time is a major offense, and carries severe legal repercussions.

I changed it because the concept of a semi-sentient creature abused by the settlers that rely upon it for survival didn't make any sense to me. Also because I prefer my platform idea over some kind of colossal ship thing.

EDIT EDIT: so let's see, I'm thinking that a gas giant would be pretty interesting on weather/tide patterns, on the water world it you'd wind up with some huge waves coming along quite frequently when you're facing away from the giant, and you'd have a lot of strong currents up near the surface though it wouldn't be too bad when you got a little deeper. So I'm guessing surface ships are off, also the rise and fall of the water would be rather extreme so any fixed structure might spend 1/2 the time underwater and 1/2 the time above it . Maybe that's how they survive, big gigantic ships that are mostly underwater but have various towers coming out of the top of them rising above the surface.

Just don't turn them into giant yellow submarines. 

[Pnx]

Here's a very very crude drawing of what I mean.


That's the basic idea, however hard to interpret it is. Most of the actual central city disk would be comprised of buoyancy control centers, that compress and decompress gas automatically in order to keep it at roughly the same depth, the underside has a series of docking bay style structures for such things as small craft, freighters (in big large and super large varieties), destroyers, combat ships etc. Outside the city and maybe on top of it amidst the bases of the towers would be farms where some form of algae or kelp would be grown, life on the world would be divided between growing seasons when they have sun and seasons when they don't because the gas giant obscures it. The towers on the top serve the purpose of collecting air for use. The central tower serves the primary purpose of communication allowing all cities to communicate with a specialized network system, it's common to be able to make a "phone call" to someone on another city, perhaps even on the other side of the world as messages can be transmitted from city to city until they reach their destination, it should be noted these calls are not cheap, but they can be made and the price is not so high that most people can't do them.

The top of the city generally contains solar power plants in various forms, however as power demands increased cities over time started to rely on geothermal generators on the ocean bed, sometimes several kilometers below the city. Most cities now rely on geothermal power extensively, being tethered to one or multiple geothermal power plants below, they always have numerous tethers so that if one is cut they can still maintain power. Some cities, (those with the most geothermal power) have exchanged their panels for more agricultural facilities.

EDIT: I imagine the inside of a city might look a lot like nar shadda, It would have many tower like structures spread like city blocks, there would be a lot of empty space to allow extra buoyancy.

[rickvoid]

So it's like a floating domed city. Works for me.

I've been thinking about a struggling colony on Athamas. It could work as a mining/agri-world I think, since the geological activity would produce fertile soil and lots of easy to get to ores. I'm thinking this should be a fairly poor, low-tech world that is a vassal to Salmoneus and point of contention between Salmoneus and Sisyphus. A Sisyphus-backed rebellion on Athamas could be interesting.

[Boksi]

I approve. It fits my vision of it. Of course, my vision didn't have any politics in it, but the resource usage is right.

[penguinofhonor]

I don't even know what it's for, but this stuff is pretty awesome to read.

[Pnx]

We really need to start adding cities, you guys can start naming names and talking about what makes that city interesting, I or someone else can flesh it out as needed. So let's talk about ice.
Salmoneus like all the other moons has an extreme degree of temperature variance, during the light season temperatures can reach levels usually associated with tropical regions. During light season when the moon is facing the sun, it usually manages to build up a large amount water vapour that gathers in large storm clouds, due to the heavy weather farming has to be done at a safe depth, even at that depth there is still surge and currents exerting a pull. Visibility on the surface during the light season can be rather bad, it varies from day to day but mist, fog and heavy cloud coverage is extremely common. Under the surface visibility is rather low as well, most of the sunlight tends to not make it very far, it tends to be very dark down there, more then 150m below the surface and most of the surface light has vanished.

During the dark season other dangers become a problem, not only is the entire ocean void of sunlight but the temperature starts to drop to below freezing temperatures, if it were a freshwater ocean the surface would freeze, as it is only about 25% of the surface freezes near the poles. There is already a region of permanent ice in and around the poles, but when the dark season comes the water near the poles tends to freeze very quickly, none of the living cities need to fear being frozen in, even the few ones that are close to the poles are kept warm by the extensive geothermal activity. One interesting occurance to note, is that during the dark season the ice's tendacy to freeze quickly and the surface's extreme weather patterns causes natural caves to quickly form out of ice, and then melt during the light season. These caves are known as labyrinths, labyrinths are characterized by large amounts of shifting ice. They tend to be highly unstable. Regions near the pole where there is geothermal activity tend to create unusual large domed structures out of ice as a natural formation of gas being released from life around the vents and the gas released by the vents themselves. These pockets of gas are usually breathable though they can contain some amount of noxious fumes. Labyrinths are generally restricted to near surface regions, lower depths either freeze solidly, or simply don't freeze at all due to being kept warm by geothermal vents. It is thought that the entire ocean would freeze were it not for the heat provided by the extensive geothermal vents that keeps most of the ocean warm during the dark season.

[Boksi]

Well, you seem to know what you're doing. I'll go with Sisyphus then.

Sisyphus is the original human colony, and although old it's never been that powerful because of it's lack of resources. It's compensated for that with a quality of life and technological advancement that surpasses Salmoneus, it's rogue splinter colony, by far. It does not survive because of it's geothermal energies, which are nonexistent, but thanks to the large trees that live there and have lived before humans ever arrived there. They collect the stray microwave radiation emanating from the gas giant. Along with sunlight, they collect the stray microwave radiation emanating from Ĉolus, and convert all this into a highly nutritious sap that forms the diet of many local species. During wintertime, these animals hibernate in, around and under these trees, because the trees radiate thermal energy, generated by themselves using the sap. The proliferation of these trees across the vast majority of Sisyphus is what keeps it's winters the mildest ones around.

[Nonanonymous]

While these are some neat ideas, it's a little bit farther ahead then I was thinking of.  For those who were wondering what this is for, it's for the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or 'GURPS.'  I was hoping to come up with a Generic Universal Campaign Setting, with a multitude of time periods that would be suitable for everything from low fantasy, to pulp fiction and sci-fi.

I was thinking of coming up with a host of sentients for the various moons, then trying to orchestrate a history for them in some form or another.

So, going from this, here's a few basic ideas for life forms: 

So this is what your moons are like?
Aeolus: Gas Giant, Uninhabitable (Although largely uninhabitable, there's still a smattering of native life that resemble jellyfish in some respects and blimps in others.  They drift about and feed much like whales, albeit in the swirling maelstrom of the winds of Aeolus.)
Sisyphus: Largest Moon, Habitable, Geologically Inert, You require more Vespene Gas  (This can host the typical world, with humans, dwarves, orcs, and so on.  These will, of course, reach into space when they become sufficiently advanced.)
Athamas: Second Smallest Moon, Barely Habitable, Geologically Active, Bad Air, Resource Rich (For the 'power in decline,' this might make a good home for a species host to the Great Race of Yith.)
Cretheus: Third Largest Moon, Uninhabitable, No Air, Artifacts (The same could be said about this moon.  Other possibilities include a Great Old One trapped within.)
Salmoneus: Smallest Moon, Habitable, Water World, Great Air (Considering the 'great air' trait, we might assume that algae could have evolved into a sort of undersea tree, making underwater civilization more plausible.  Cephalopodal sentients are a must.  Fish people are also a possibility.)
Deioneus: Second Largest Moon, Geologically Active, Magma Covered Hellhole, Bad Air, Uninhabitable, Ridiculously Resource Rich
Perieres: Third Smallest Moon, Uninhabitable, Extemely Hot, Extremely Cold

I don't really know if the last two should get any native life or not.  Oh, and I guess by now it should be obvious that I plan to include the Cthulhu Mythos to some degree.