PlanetFuraha @ Blogspot

[PortalHunter]

Some of you guys have probably heard of the project Furaha: Life on Nu Phoenicis IV. It’s a really nice speculative xenobiology worldbuilding project, with painted artwork and biologically-plausible body plans for the xenos. There’s a blog on Furaha that I recently looked through. It has quite an amount of content not yet published on the main site, along with some helpful information.

A few useful and interesting pages:

http://planetfuraha.blogspot.ca/2013/11/...nts-v.html
How the shapes and layering of leaves can be different on worlds with differently-sized suns.

http://planetfuraha.blogspot.ca/2012/06/...-home.html
The rather unreliable nature of photosynthesis and how leaf colours (don’t) work out.

http://planetfuraha.blogspot.ca/2013/05/...ish-i.html
Inverting fish. A quite peculiar example of locomotion. I wouldn't have thought this could work. The blog post merely explores how such a design would work, not why or how it would have evolved.

http://planetfuraha.blogspot.ca/2013/08/...nts-v.html
Why ‘ballonts’ (human-sized gas-sac creatures) won’t work unless possessed of an extremely large size.

http://planetfuraha.blogspot.ca/2012/05/...hoats.html
The problem (solved) on how to make terrestrial beings have eight or more legs without them bumping into each other while walking or making them in synchronized pairs.

[Drashner1]

Just took a quick look (will dig deeper later), but some cool sounding articles here

Todd

[stevebowers]

That's right. Gert van Dijk (the originator of Furaha) was at one time a member at OA, and gained a few tips on modelling in Celestia here. He has written some detailed and inspirational speculative biology.

[PortalHunter]

That's right. Gert van Dijk (the originator of Furaha) was at one time a member at OA, and gained a few tips on modelling in Celestia here. He has written some detailed and inspirational speculative biology.

I've read blog posts of his that use the term sophont, so now that makes sense. I don't see the term used much elsewhere.

[sandcastles]

The silly 70s TV series Buck Rogers kept mentioning the planet New Phoenix, and I kept thinking that just *has* to be a planet of Nu Phoenicis!  It just has to be!

Since Orionsarm doesn't have the star listed yet, I might write something about it.  Thanks for the links.

[stevebowers]

Incidentally the term 'sophont' was coined by Poul Anderson in 1966, and has been used by several authors since. It is a perfectly cromulent word.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophont

[stevebowers]

Reading that cite again, it seems that the term was actually coined by Karen Anderson, a writer in her own right (and the mother-in-law of Greg Bear)