The Atmosphere of Dara

Dara is the largest moon orbiting Skyler's World and is the setting for the first part of Rome's Revolution. It is one of nine natural satellites but because of its size and atmosphere, it was the only logical choice to build the Vuduri stellar observatory.



As mentioned previously, the Vuduri prefer a world where they can land using aero-braking and they are fond of gravity as well.

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Dara has a mass of 3.14 x 10    kg which is 44 times that of Earth's moon. In fact, Dara is larger than Mars but made of material which is much less dense. Regardless, because of its mass, its gravity is nearly 30% of the Earth which is substantial enough to keep hold of an atmosphere. The atmosphere is completely unbreathable, made up mostly of carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

Despite all the astrogeophysics, there was a much more mundane reason for postulating the size of Dara. It is simply that a moon which has an atmosphere is more interesting dramatically than an airless moon. It gave me many more opportunities to make Dara a player. It allowed the atmosphere to seep into the airlock and suffocate Rei rather than asphyxiate him. It allowed me to open up the gigantic doors of the tug hangar and have a wind swirl the dust around. All of these things give the mind more to work from an imagery standpoint.

In The Ark Lords, I had Rome and Rei land on our moon for a while. Because it was airless, it was just less interesting. They treated their moonwalk as just a variation of a spacewalk. Bottom line: you couldn't grow a garden on Dara but it was an interesting place to visit. Too bad it got sucked up by the Stareater but to a small degree it lives on in the VIRUS units that make up the mass of Planet OMCOM.