You are doubtlessly aware of the news that changed entirely our view of the solar system forever: in August 2006, the IAU decided to downgrade Pluto from its planetary status. We’ll always keep the memory of Pluto being an active full-fledged planet, just like we remember 68k and PowerPC processors being used in Macs, but face it, it’s no longer the case. So just like students everywhere are forced by their teachers to scrape out any mention of Pluto from their textbooks, just like Sailor Pluto is being erased from all Sailor Moon manga and anime master copies, just like Disney is busy with changing its whole product line by changing the name of Mickey’s dog to “Neptune,” just like makers of animated solar systems are recalling all their products to have them factory serviced to forcefully remove Pluto from them, I say we, Nova plug-in designers, should do our part to acknowledge this change and make sure Pluto is only considered for what it really is now: a meager dwarf planet.

Of course, you probably don’t have Pluto in your plug-in to begin with, so in this case, you have nothing to do. But just in case the need would happen, I’m describing here how to code the solar system as it is currently. And I mean currently. In case your plug-in is set in a futuristic setup (which has been observed to be generally the case with plug-ins), then you never know which planets may have been added to the solar system in the meantime so it’s useless to have the solar system in your plug be as it is thought to be currently, since it’s going to be outdated by the time the events you describe happen. So let’s stick with what we know.

To begin with, we should obviously create a sÿst with the name “Solar System.” And that’s it for sÿsts. I mean, we barely know which other systems are out there (only their stars), and even less which hyperspace routes there are between them. Since we’re going to do an accurate description, we might as well forget about them; you may place them if you like (according to their 3D position relative to our solar system, projected perpendicularly on the Galactic plane to fit a 2D map), but then don’t place any hyperlink, you’ll always have to possibility to place them later when they’re discovered. As for how to configure our "Solar System" sÿst, it should be devoid of any düde or përs or whatever, even asteroids (we’ll worry about them later), and not be owned by any government: the UN forbids any appropriation of any celestial body whatsoever, and the same goes for the solar system as a whole, and if fact for the spöbs we’re going to place next too (even Earth, since it’s not owned by any particular government either, no, not even the US, despite what you may think; by the UN? Let me laugh.).

In this system, we should place the Sun as the first spöb. It should obviously be at position 0,0, it’s the friggin most import feature of the solar system and everything rotates around it, so if you don’t put it at the center, it won’t be happy and will let you know. However, it’s also obvious that the player can not land on it, and in fact it should be a deadly spöb. Since (as far as we know) there is no hypergate or wormhole or station in our solar system, we might as well declare the Sun spöb to be a wormhole, and modify the appropriate strings in STR# ID 2002 to replace “wormhole” by “star” and for the appropriate message to say “Your ship is unable to land on this star - do you honestly thought you could land on a star anyway?!” As far as we know, the Sun is uninhabited. It’s obvious that there should be no commodity exchange, no outfitting, no shipyard, and especially no bar, however thirsty may one be next to this hot thing. You can set it to be landable when destroyed, but given that there won’t be any way to destroy it... We’ll put a fair bit of gravity to teach people to respect the thing. As for its appearance, the Sun should be round and white (5500°K white, of course). Big? I wouldn’t be so sure... we must place Eris (average distance from the Sun of 10,000,000,000 km) somehow, and we can only place stuff as far as 32,768*√2 pixels away from it, and since we need to keep everything up to scale, as the Sun has a diameter of 1,392,000 kms, then by a simple calculation we deduce that the Sun must have a diameter of 6.5 pixels. Don’t worry about having to compute any other diameter, though, they’ll all be smaller than 1 pixel so all other spöbs are going to be one pixel in size.

Now, the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturne, Uranus and Neptune). Their type should be of plain, bona fide planets. Each one of them should be placed on the circle with the appropriate radius in pixels given its distance to the Sun and the scale factor, at a random angle (no need to bother figuring out where they are right now, it’s constantly changing anyway). The lone pixel for each of them should be of an appropriate color for the said planet. They should all be landable and uninhabited. Yes, even Earth. I mean, is there refuelling/recharging here? Is there a mission computer? And most importantly, is there any traffic control? I don’t think so. For all the intents and purposes of a space-faring race, Earth is uninhabited. We can perhaps give it a trade center and a few commodities to trade out of pity, but that’s it. If you’re feeling ironical you can always add the mess hall of the Kennedy space center as the “spaceport bar”... Give the planets the description you want, or even a random description if you want, no one is going to bother reading them anyway.

The satellites: screw them. I mean, they are so close from their respective planets that they are practically part of them for someone in a spaceship. Plus, there are too many of them (more than 60) for them to fit in the 16 slots for spöbs in a sÿst. So screw them. In fact, each of our planet spöbs is considered to be “the planet and its satellites”

Now, our problematic little buggers: the dwarf planets (Ceres, the Pluto-Charon double, and Eris). They should be placed like planets and generally have the same characteristics (uninhabited, landable, etc...), except that first they should actually be flagged as stations (and again, the appropriate strings should be changed in STR# ID 2002 to say “dwarf” everywhere), and second they should actually be destructible, i.e. have a non 0 or -1 Strength value. This is to clearly mark the difference between real planets and these ersatz, and generally make them suffer in jealousy. Notice that since the rotation center of the Pluto-Charon system is outside the body of Pluto, the spöb shall be the whole pair, with the name “Pluto-Charon” so that Pluto can feel even worse about being downgraded. As mentioned earlier when we had to set the Sun’s diameter, Eris has no choice but to be placed at the location -32768,-32768. That’ll teach that bitch to be so far from everything else that it’s actually a pain to go or even observe there. Plus, as the godess of discord, she deserves to be cast away in the corner like that.

We placed 12 things in our solar system, we surely have place for a few more things. So let us place the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt. They should be figured by spöbs where you can’t land, uninhabited, etc... and which appearance is that of a few dots over a transparent background at the appropriate distance. These spöbs should be flagged as hypergates so that the relevant strings can be changed to say that one cannot land on a bunch of asteroids. The Oort cloud? Screw it, too far away to be put in our meager 16-bit integer coordinates. There are only a bunch of frozen balls in there anyway, and who cares about frozen water?

Well, that must be all. So now you can have to pleasure of designing a scientifically accurate solar system, at least as far as the Nova engine allows it to be accurate. What are you saying? It’s completely unplayable? The system is going to wrap around the edges before Eris can be reached (serves her right, by the way)? It’s going to be nigh-impossible to spot and land on the things? Who cares about gameplay and all that, it’s scientifically accurate I tell you! Now, of course, if you want to play an unrealistic inaccurate arcade game, it is your problem... ;-)