could be put into game in some way

What is special about these planets?

Sorry the answer may well be buried in the wiki somewhere but I couldn't find it.

If it looks like an Eye then we already have planets like this. Someone noticed one last night in IRC, called it the "Eye of God" 😉

It's a tidal locked world that is frozen over except for the side which constantly faces the sun, centre around that point there's a liquid (presumably water) "surface" to the world/moon where life might be possible. Kinda of a special case of a tidal locked world in general, further out and it would just all be frozen, nearer in and maybe only a bit of the permanently dark "far-side" would be frozen, but the near-side would be a sun blasted hell etc.

Well its easy to make a planet look like that, whats hard is to make it only appear that way when tidally locked, and to point the feature towards the planet it is orbiting.

Tom did a good job with galaxy and system generation but I don't remember reading anywhere in the code about tide-locking so its probably a feature we dont have.. Except of course when its coincidental 🙂

It's enough to have the rotation period the same as the orbital period. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth but it still rotates. Not relative to us but to the background stars.

Yeah I know 😉 But theres a lot more to it than that otherwise we would already do it. Given the correct math it can be done though.

For example as I mentioned there is no linkage between Body a's orbital period, and Body B's period of rotation. So there actually has to be a seperate check that ensure any body approaching the Roche limit of another body is tidally locked.

This is sounding like it can be tackled when we implement the Roche limit for planetary ring formation.

Again, using the moon as an example, in Pioneer it may *appear* tidally locked, but is in fact not. It only has an orbital period which matches Earth's period of rotation, not perfectly either.

So given enough time it would go out of sync.

Do we support asteroid belts yet?

Logically if not graphically. I mean as distinct bands of material compromised of big (thousands to millions of tonnes) asteroids.

Not yet, I was thinking we somehow link the fractal stuff up with some distribution when a system is generated. That seems the logical choice to me at least.