>>43394835Having a constant gale that doesn’t change direction on a planet where solar power is almost useless will be useful in powering the settlements… Sailing on sand and water sounds pretty cool too, especially if energy conservation’s paramount in the given situation! Maybe it can be something done by the first few generations of the colonists before becoming a cultural staple even after they have portable energy source good enough to power mecha?
As for rituals I have some ideas in my mind. One of them is a funeral rituals where the body is put in a cradle attached to light air balloon, filled with dry and flammable material and then set off to the sky. The prevailing wind will bring the dead towards the tropical paradise until the material gets ignited by the heat. I think it’s fitting given Liora’s Nordic theme and it also goes well with the original story of the colonists being stuck on a hostile planet like Despina after the Seventh Trumpet
Another idea I have is that traversing the desert and coming back alive would be a rite of passage for some of the groups on Despina. They would have to learn how to survive the cloudless desert by following the rivers snaking from the twilight zone (I guess that means the eyeball planet has a permanent pink eye?) for water and food, and to spot early signs of solar flares and hiding in shelters in short notice (the number I see is ~20 seconds between the start of flaring and its maximum output). I thought about them having to retrieve ornaments that were from the aforementioned flying Viking funerals but I feel that’s an unreliable source and might be too similar to graverobbing
The poles will be less hospitable due to solar wind but I feel most people living on Despina would have some kind of underground shelters anyway since the whole day-side will be bombarded with heat and charged particles when the star flares (which happen fairly common but planet-scorching superflares likely won’t happen more than once every few centuries or so) hit. I think they’ll likely just live in the underground shelters that will be more robust than their equatorial counterpart. Underground cities sound pretty cool!
>>43395102Thank you! I find a lot of interesting materials when I did my reps for the eyeball planet. Worldbuilding Pasta has an article on tidal-locked planets that provided me with a lot of the climate data, and some channels on youtube also talk about how life would be on a tidally locked world and how people could adapt to it for colonization. I ended up incorporating many of the things I learned from worldbuilding in previous settings since even though Despina is a pretty rough place to live in, it’s still reasonably Earthlike (at least it has a breathable atmosphere even if you might get altitude sickness at the beginning) so many of the stuff still applies. That said I’m a bit partial to spec bio since a long time ago when I watched that NatGeo documentary which also deals with alien life on a red dwarf planet (and a moon) so I might unconsciously thinking about them every now and then as well. I wonder if V&U’s violet/purple theme is enough to justify me throwing alien blood into the mix…
