I’ve been very busy (still writing every chance I get), but I thought I might share some background information on the world I have created for the new story!

Here is my (admittedly simple) art of the world, Ko.

Ko is a very warm planet, slightly larger than Earth, with a mass 1.34x Earth’s, and a radius of 1.17 earth radii (or 7,454.07 km). This makes it slightly less dense than earth at 4.59 grams per cubic centimeter, and with a surface gravity of 0.97 that of Earth. Its atmosphere is 1.6x as dense as Earth, which is heavy, but still breathable for humans. It has a rotational period of about 27 hours, so it has longer days.

Due to its atmospheric makeup containing more water vapor, Ko has an average temperature of 22 C / 71.6 F, which is much warmer than Earth (which averages 15 C / 59 F). This is why the majority of its land mass are very warm climates (aside from those smaller islands far to the North).

I only show this hemisphere because the other one has only one small landmass, near the equator, which is devoid of intelligent life. The fact that all the continents are collected like this has several big implications.

Firstly, the free-flow of water north and south helps keep the planet warm – Ko has no glaciation. It also means that the winds that whip over those oceans have nothing to slow them down, causing the winds and waves to get very, very strong!

Ko orbits its host star, Bror, at 1.14 astronomical units (one AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun), and there are seven other planets in the system, which would mostly be familiar to us, except for the frozen water world that orbits outside the hospitable zone at 3.2 AU. This similarity to our system is coincidental, btw, I rolled a D10 for how many planets the system would have!

I could go on all day with other details about its neighboring planets, the star Bror, and things like Ko’s axial tilt (it’s not as tilted as Earth) . . . but I imagine you get the picture!

Figuring out all of these details of Ko (and there are plenty more; I even figured out the makeup of its atmosphere to help with elements of the story) was a fun and challenging process. I used a variety of books (such as World-Building by Stephen Gillett), scientific papers (such as the incredible Habitable Planets for Man by Stephen H. Dole), and youtube channels (like the excellent Artifexian) to help me in this process.

I put a lot of work into the background of each story, to make sure that the science is as good as I can make it. I have a number of friends who are mathematicians or engineers who kindly help me with this process (and who frequently check my math). If you’d like to know more background stuff like this, want to know more specifically about Ko, or just want to know more about how I do these things, please let me know!

As for Episode 12, it is coming soon, I promise. 🙂 I am writing thousands of words a day.