Coleridge (Planet)
Coleridge is a planet first mentioned in The Lion and The Lizard. A Huntress on the Rocks takes place on the planet, about 50 T-standard years later (AD 2095).
It orbits the B-class star Nunki at a distance of 320 AU. This is within the life zone, and renders the planet temperate. However, it makes for a "year" of 2,050 Earth years, meaning the seasons are just over 500 years long. The planet does have four well-defined seasons, as its axial tilt is similar to that of Earth's, at about 20° to the ecliptic. The planet's diurnal rotation period is ~29 T-standard hours, which are divided by the colonists into 24 hours for convenience, making a 60-minute Coleridge hour about 72.5 T-standard minutes long.
Coleridge is currently in the middle of its spring season.
The planet is 100% covered by water at varying depths, mostly shallow seas, but there are a few deep ocean features, though other than one deep trench of about 20,000 meters depth, nothing deeper than about 3600 meters. Continental shelves seem to exist, covered in some places by less than 50 meters of water, but drop off rapidly to at least 400-500 meters in most places. It is possible that the planet was once considerably drier than it is today, and may have collided with a large comet or some other massive source of water which flooded it.
The atmosphere is oxygen-nitrogen in a human-pleasing ratio. Oxygen is produced in the usual way, by floating plants such as seaweed, etc.
Because the star it orbits is a short-lived B-class, and is about halfway through its 100-million year span on the main sequence, it is thought Coleridge was originally a rogue planet, captured as recently as a few hundred years before present as it crossed Nunki's path (which may partly explain why exoplanet surveys never noticed it).[1] Partly supporting this theory is the existence of complex, vertebrate animal life deep in the world ocean, that may have been able to survive around hot vents in the one extremely deep trench as most of the rest of the planet's water slowly froze in interstellar space. Such life would not likely have managed to evolve in only 50 million years, nor would the planet likely have cooled and produced an atmosphere quickly enough to support such evolution.
Human ingenuity has produced a large floating city and a few subsidiary floating towns on the ocean surface of Coleridge. These are not tethered to the ocean floor, but are movable for the purpose of avoiding the extremely large hurricanes (wind speeds at the eye wall can exceed 500 miles per hour) for which the planet is known. By the time of A Huntress on the Rocks, the metropolis thus created is home to about 50,000 people.
Coleridge is not known to be particularly rich in anything native in which humans would be interested, although recent studies suggest there are minerals deep beneath the sea floor that would be useful if they were in a position to be easily mined. The local flora and fauna (mostly fish) are inedible by humans, but a surprisingly large and rich economy has developed from farming Terran fish and hydroponic vegetables.
The planet also supports a significant tourist industry and has a massive nightclub and casino community, mostly run by former elements of the Chicago mob.
Mass 5.01625638643753e+24 kg
Radius ~6,000km
Sea-Level Gravity 0.95 Earth (9.3m/s2)
Notes
- ↑ It is also possible the planet was there much longer than just a few hundred years, but in the Xzl5!vt timeline which was merged with the human timeline just before the RV Frumious Bandersnatch first entered the system. It has been determined, however, that the planet was unlikely formed in orbit around Nunki, and actually did come from somewhere else. It is further theorized (without much in the way of evidence) that the same presumed collision which flooded the planet may have also knocked the planet out of its orbit around its original star.