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[Killer of Fate]

"Quite good" in the context that we can observe other bodies well enough to calculate whether planets are present based on their effects etc.  Methods to detect and somewhat narrow down types of planets are way better in 2025 than they were in 2005.  I think literal orders of magnitude more confirmed exoplanets?  I forget how many we knew about 20 years ago.

I doubt that... But I mean, if you got a source. I'll read it
From what I read we still figure out planets by their transitional period (edit: for example)
And I heard the best planet detection is actually around Pulsars. I don't remember why though. Except something about them being highly consistent in their behaviour maybe.

Which does make sense. Cause I think it's very easy to confuse dark dots on star's as planets.
That's how Vulcan came to be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)
And pulsars... Well pulsars behave differently?

Uhhhhhhhhhhh...

We also detect them by gravity-induced bending of light. But that is also again for massive planets

I don't know. From my point of view the Jedi are evil we know very little of exoplanets. We can only assume their existence based on their size. Maybe light diffusion which affects their composition? But how can we do that when we can't even see them properly?

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/exo/#/planet/tau_Cet_f
Like at this thing... It's so close and yet we have no idea what it even is. A potentially rocky planet. We have nothing... Nothing. We only know of its existence from a phenomena I can't even explain with my sleep-deprived brain

Let me try... They figured it out based on the fact that the star and the planet were moving around a common centre of mass. So they reverse-triangulated its location. And established this based on Doppler light shifting.

To me this feels... Like we are barely getting a glimpse into the universe around us.

edit: about Pulsar planets


This does make me wonder how *** the planet gen is in my mod. It has toxic planets and frozen ones. I should use those royalty free assets made by Pixi Rice Bowl to make some exotic diamond worlds or something just for that and maybe other stuff. Like purple giants. I don't know

eh, nvm... Maybe later

[TheMeInTeam]

You can back-infer properties about planets based on other information in many cases.  For example it's possible to determine whether a planet would be tidally locked just by mathing it out, once you know it's there and its mass/distance/etc.  At a given size/range/etc some things are possible.

Either way, I hold that > 5000 planets detected (and many further constrained by type) is a massive improvement over < 100.  A non-trivial part of that improvement is due to improved equipment.  Even the wiki article mentions that.

You can quibble over "good", as in "good relative to what".  Our detection right now is obviously worse than the sci-fi stuff in the game, but it's also objectively way better than a few decades ago.  Normally detecting 10x to 100x as many things and some properties of those extra things is pretty good incremental improvement?  Compare that to the history of detecting them before 1990.

[happycrow]

Yeah, I made some tweaks to procgen and came up with something I like a lot -- gave some of the other types some extra love, but I didn't work particularly hard for realism (or else we'd have far fewer blue giants compared to reds, as you mentioned, and a good 65%+ of the planets would be Irradiateds...).

[happycrow]

(Side note for those who are tinkering with this. Current research posits that White Dwarfs are possibly the most likely stars to host habitable planets, and for around 17% of them, habitable worlds for shockingly long stretches of time -- like a trillion years. So if you want a legit excuse for a gazillion farmworlds to utterly wreck the game balance, working the "Old Sector" option can give you that."    )