Arthur Green [email removed] asked about how a star affects planetary
life, mutation rate, etc.
My only suggestion (besides DGP World Builders handbook) is a BASIC program
published back in the days of Creative Computing. You would select a main
sequence star and put in some basic info about your planet and the program
would generate min and max yearly temps, suggested climate, and suggested
lifeforms. The program takes into account the effects of the planets moons,
axial tilt, and orbital eccentricity. A fun program to play with. I cannot
handle planets orbiting gas giants. Only earthlike planets orbiting single
stars.
Does anyone know if this program exists in a ftp archive somewhere? Another
good place to ask would be sci.space.
Worse comes to worse I could find my copy of the program (TRS-80 BASIC or
GWBASIC (I said the program was old) ) and uuencode an ascii basic version of
it. It was basic BASIC which should run on any computer with BASIC.
Hope that helps :-)
John Bucsek | [email removed]