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Stellar Design (Making Stars)

This section is dedicated to the design of the stars above for your characters below. Most unbelieveable, or poorly designed, Sci-Fi worlds tend to be created by people with excellent vision, but with little to no understanding of astrophysics.

This is where we get that classic mistake and running joke from Star Wars, the Kessel Run. Han Solo claims that the Millenium Falcon can make "the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs." Since a parsec is a measure of time, and not distance, most people assume this is a sloppy mistake. However, if you really think about it after doing a lot of space-based research, it's a joke that flew right over everyone's heads: Han Solo is basically saying the Millenium Falcon is so badass that it is capable of bending the physics of their universe -- it made the Kessel Run in less time than normally required to complete it. After you do your research, you realize this means that the Millenium Falcon does what the field of quantum physics tells us is possible: it bends physics for faster travel, bypassing the limitations on physical matter traveling at the speed of light or greater.

I cannot vouch for Mr. Lucas' research, though I'm sure it was thorough when he was writing that beloved classic. I think this long-standing joke comes from a misunderstanding between two types of people - those who don't know enough about astrophysics to know that Han Solo wasn't saying something "wrong," and those who are so over-researched that they wrote a line that could only be interpreted as true by someone who knows more about astrophysics than the average Joe. However, it is more likely that Mr. Lucas made a research mistake rather than such an advanced joke, considering Star Wars was written in a time before quantum physics was as understood as well as it is today. Parsecs are not entirely easy to understand for the average person as well. Either way, it has evolved into an extremely intelligent joke that you can only understand and appreciate once you've done your research.

Some of the best ideas are guaranteed fail if their underlying structure is weak. Even Howard the Duck was a good idea, it was just vomited up in such a way as to make it so awful that no one wants to ever watch the movie more than once in their lifetime. Howard the Duck is disturbing to most viewers because it has poorly thought out, adult situations that make the viewers uncomfortable. Space ducks are always an awesome idea, until they want to have sex with human women. This is a childish (and humanly arrogant) idea delivered by an adult brain, resulting in an awkward scene between a duck and Lea Thompson that makes one worry about what is about to be seen on screen. Ducks with breasts in the first five minutes of the movie is also just strange. Why does she have breasts? They're birds! Of course, the lazy answer is "space ducks."

Just take a moment to think about it. Do you think ducks are sexy? If you do, most medical experts would refer you to a psychiatrist. Space ducks are not going to find human women attractive. If anything, it would have been more realistic and less awkward if Howard had spotted a duck in the park and was interested in meeting her, only to find out that she's essentially the equivalent to his "cave-duck" ancestors. On top of that, it would probably be more realistic that while he's attracted to other ducks but is never going to find an equivalent to himself on Earth, he would probably grimace every time he looked at Lea Thompson's face. While we might find her cute, all he would see is a beakless face with the wrong proportions and shape on top of a featherless, pink body with spider-like arms and legs, sprouting hair from both ends. To a duck, we probably all look like a plucked chicken that has suffered a stay on an medieval stretching rack. Would you go out with a species different from you that looks like it went through a saltwater taffy machine? Personality aside, probably not. Ducks want ducks, and humans want humans (or at least humanoid).

All that realistic pondering would actually result in better humor and innocent jokes that seem dirty, and would have made Howard the Duck a classic to keep, not a classic to throw away. This concept was recently applied successfully in the movie Paul. Paul is a typical Grey alien and finds humans really weird looking and tells us as much, even though his species and our species are both humanoid and very similar. He states that it is because we have tiny, little heads on giant bodies, while we see him as sexually unattractive because of the opposite. However because this was addressed properly in Paul, we are not as readily disturbed by the idea and most viewers would watch Paul more than once. Both Howard and Paul are classic "wise guy" personalities, only Paul feels like he could be real while Howard feels like a colaboration of "cool" ideas and all the cliche lines wise guys use.

Always try to give your space-based stories a firm foundation by going the extra mile and actually understand a bit about outerspace, as well as considering its inhabitants and how they would perceive their universe.

Stellar Classification

Stellar Atmosphere

The stellar atmosphere is the outer region of the volume of a star, lying above the stellar core, radiation zone, and the convection zone. It is divided into several regions of distinct atmosphere, just like Earth's atmosphere: