Lubbdub

The inner moon of Squanch, and the tightest sphere of influence in the system.

The numbers

These are the figures the map's card shows when you hold your finger on Lubbdub, plus the two speeds that decide what a flight there costs. Low orbit speed is how fast you must be going, sideways, to stay up just above the surface. Escape speed is how fast you must be going to leave altogether. Sphere of influence is how far Lubbdub's pull reaches before something bigger takes over.

Stationary orbit is the height where one trip round takes exactly one of the world’s days, so a ship there hangs over the same spot on the ground. See Stationary orbits.

Its day and its orbit are the same length, so Lubbdub keeps one face turned toward Squanch for ever. Land on the near side and Squanch hangs in the sky and never moves; land on the far side and you never see it at all.

What it is made of

What the world is built from. It is not something a ship measures, but it is why the ground looks and behaves as it does — an ice moon takes an impact differently from an iron one.

The air

None. Lubbdub has no atmosphere whatsoever, and that decides most of what a flight here is like. There is nothing for a parachute to catch, so the whole descent is flown on the engine and the last metres are taken on the landing legs. There is nothing to heat a hull on the way in, so a heat shield is dead weight. And there is nothing to slow a ship on the way up, so the climb off the surface is as cheap as the gravity allows.

It also means there are no air bands to survey: leave the ground and you are straight into low space. See Science and readings for what that is worth.

The ground

Lubbdub's surface is divided into biomes — bands running round the world, each with its own colour, its own typical height and its own roughness. Which one you come down in is recorded in your flight log, and the first reading taken in each one pays.

Where is the band's place round the world, in degrees from the world's own 0°, running out to ±180° on the far side. Typical height is where that biome's ground sits against the datum the map measures altitude from, and roughness is how far it wanders either side of that.

On the map Lubbdub is drawn from a painted picture, though at 20 km across there is not much of it to see and none of it is bright: three greys, close enough together that you are reading shape rather than colour. The Pharos Basin on the far side is the darkest and by far the lowest — a shallow dish half a kilometre under the datum, which on a world this small is most of the way to its middle. The Facet Ridges facing 0° are the pale ground, angular and flat-sided like a broken stone, and the Dark Regolith between them sits at the datum. Land anywhere: nothing here is more than 132 m of roughness.

Named landforms

Lubbdub's ground is drawn from a table of named features rather than noise alone, as every world you can stand on is. Where you come to rest is recorded by name, which is why some achievements ask for a summit, a crater floor or a plateau rather than just a landing. All 6 of them are below, in order round the world, from the far side back to 0° and on round.

Where is the landform's place round the world, and height is how far it stands above (or below) the ground around it. Flat ground is the level run it promises — the width of the ledge, floor or summit a ship can set down on.

Getting there

The tightest sphere of influence in the system. The space it holds reaches barely a moon's width past its own surface, so an approach that is slightly wrong sails straight by.

Lubbdub has no line of its own on the Δv ladder. The nearest figure is Squanch's orbit. Getting down from there and back up again costs about its escape speed — 63 m/s — each way on top of that, less whatever you can save by coming in shallow.

What it pays

Every place nobody has measured before pays discovery the first time an instrument reads it, and how much depends on how far from home the world is. Lubbdub counts as 7.00 against Earth's 1.00, so every place on it pays that many times what the same place at home would.

A place is a world, a band of altitude and — on the ground — the biome you are standing in, and each instrument surveys each place separately. Science and readings explains the whole of it.