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I read about that. I'm pretty sure that there was another one discovered several years ago. It really makes you think about the wonders of the universe.

Ain't carbon wonderful stuff?
Of course, getting NEAR the thing would be damned near impossible, considering it's sitting next to a PULSAR, which are basically the fryolators of space...

zedjagder wrote:But would it not be awesome to try and either mine it or pull it out of orbit so you can sell the darn thing! Sounds like fertile ground for a campaign to me.

Mind you, it's probably industrial-grade diamond and not one homogenous crystal...Even so, you'd have to shape it with GIGATON nukes.
Its real value would be as a TW PPE battery, even if you just blew continent-sized chunks off it. And you'd have to keep your actions and source uber top-secret or a) you'd devalue by flooding the market, and b) every cutthroat and less-than-scrupulous government would be out to take it from you(Dark Covens would be pulling out Spells of Legend to find and slay you).

Wouldn't it be awesome if it was on some sort of space ley line nexus?

So it's a stellar core remnant, similar to a white dwarf only much less massive. While all matter is derived from stellar fusion I wonder if diamonds in such a situation would have some kind of special magical properties in the Rifts and Phase World setting being formed literally from a star rather than created after the fact by planetary processes.

Not sure about the 'only industrial grade' comment though, it'd probably be some of the purist diamond around as the amount of non-carbon atoms would be extremely low compared to what ends up on a planet. At the least you'd find some of the rarest types of diamond around.

i think is links down

Still the use of any of it would be pretty awesome if you could find something like that on a space based lay line. WOW is all I can say. And the density alone would probably grant it some funky abilities.

Gazirra wrote:Wouldn't it be awesome if it was on some sort of space ley line nexus?

no

And any Techno wizard worth their weight in ideas would love to get ahold of it. Imagine the things you could power with it.

I was already taking that into account. And if you could keep in one piece imagine the power you could tap? That is alot of power. You could run a civilazation with it.

other interesting planet types;

Ocean Planet = a 'super earth' with no dry land at all. probably not habitable (they'd lack the minerals for life), but with the right features, you could sidestep that. (like in under a torrent sea by christopher bennett)

Carbon planet = oil barons dream. lots of complex hydrocarbons.

Chthonian planet = a gas giant that had it's atmosphere stripped away, leaving a rocky ball of exotic materials.

pulsar planets = pretty self explanitory. planets that orbit a pulsar. (we're still not sure if the ones we found were worlds that survived the stars change into a pulsar, rogue worlds it captured, or worlds that formed after it changed.)

Some great ideas! I like them. I have taken several of the others into account GB. Except for the Cthonian and the pulsar ones. Are there any theories on what the pulsar planets might be like? Any ideas.

SamtheDagger wrote:I am assuming the planet is already inhabited by intelligent life of a kind we cannot even comprehend. The mysterious diamond people who think with a collective mind and somehow can see through the eyes of their star.

There was an old computer game for the XT where a crystalline alien race is secretly destroying suns by causing them to go nova, which as you find out they're moving on a time scale far slower than organic life and in fact are the very fuel you use to power your space-fold drive to travel between the stars (you also run across the Enterprise from time to time ).

Aliens destroying stars. I have seen that in various science fiction novels. Great theme.

Nah, man. It's a prison. And you don't even want to know what it's keeping the megaverse safe from.

Aramanthus wrote:Some great ideas! I like them. I have taken several of the others into account GB. Except for the Cthonian and the pulsar ones. Are there any theories on what the pulsar planets might be like? Any ideas.

unless the planets lie along the path of the 'beams' the pulsar puts out, one would expect them to be typical for planets around such otherwise dim stars (pulsars are basically just nuetron stars that spin rapidly, after all)

though the idea of a Smokering around a pulsar might be interesting, so long as the beams put out don't intersect with it. it's a neat idea on its own too
though as my freind cray at heavymetalpro.com pointed out, with accurate data on neutron stars (which Niven didn't have at the time), you wouldn't get integral trees... (the thread in question was a "could such a thing fit into battletech?" discussion. some of the best description of what the setting is like, short of reading the books.)

my freind also created a setting on another bizzare world, which was sort of halfway between a Cthonian, a waterworld, and a carbon planet. Aethra was a gas giant that had most of it's atmosphere blown away, leaving basically an ammonia water world with a dense atmosphere. he then postulated a human colony on the world, using massive aircraft towns and zepplin cities/
he even wrote a bit of short fiction about an attack on one of the planets 'ocean surface' facilities..

another world he wrote up was a double-world, with two near equal sized planets in mutual orbit. fun place, which could be dropped into phase world real easy.

of course, i'll admit i'm, biased. i've already appropriated his Savannah idea and heavily repurposed the core concept to produce my Chor'ii...

I imagine that 'pulsar planets' would be comprised of either the blasted cores of what were formerly the local gas giant population, or iron-rich bodies formed from the post-supernova debris. Not likely to find too much native life in such a system.

Qev wrote:I imagine that 'pulsar planets' would be comprised of either the blasted cores of what were formerly the local gas giant population, or iron-rich bodies formed from the post-supernova debris. Not likely to find too much native life in such a system.

And if you did find life(and could recognize it), it would be like fishing in the Hudson River...anything that could survive there, you don't want in the same boat as you.

Yeah, considering the amount of radioactive material that would be in their makeup, not to mention the x-ray and gamma flux from the neutron star... the locals probably wouldn't be anyone you'd want to sit across a card table or share a movie on the couch with...

I suppose that is where a radiation proof hazardous hard suit would work wonders. Of course it would have a full environmentals.

Aramanthus wrote:I suppose that is where a radiation proof hazardous hard suit would work wonders. Of course it would have a full environmentals.

A competent techno-wizard with access to a few spells like Protection From Space and Sustain could make a FES that'd let you easily handle those conditions.

Nightmask wrote:

Aramanthus wrote:I suppose that is where a radiation proof hazardous hard suit would work wonders. Of course it would have a full environmentals.

A competent techno-wizard with access to a few spells like Protection From Space and Sustain could make a FES that'd let you easily handle those conditions.

Or the highly advanced race that occupies the planet could have created a planetary force field that did the same thing and protected them from the event.

And so we have the start of a civilazation on our diamond planet.

Don't forget the nuclear-chemistry-based civilization living on the surface of the neutron star...

I suppose those silicon based lifeforms which are immune to radiation would work for colonizing that planet.

Qev wrote:Don't forget the nuclear-chemistry-based civilization living on the surface of the neutron star...

no, it would be strangelet based.

Qev wrote:Don't forget the nuclear-chemistry-based civilization living on the surface of the neutron star...

Been reading Dragon's Egg?

taalismn wrote:

Qev wrote:Don't forget the nuclear-chemistry-based civilization living on the surface of the neutron star...

Been reading Dragon's Egg?

Haha, wonderful story that. Not quite as insane as Baxter having people living inside the mantle of a neutron star though...