Hi everyone! So, I was just working on Rubicon a minute ago, and I'm at least halfway through chapter 3. I should be done before the end of the weekend, if I don't procrastinate. We should all just form an army against procrastination.

In the meantime, however, I wanted to explain some of the physics of Vulcan's solar system, as well as the physical relationship between Vulcan and Orion.

In the picture above (which, of course, is the original Rubicon album cover), you can see Vulcan in the foreground and Orion very close behind it. Several of my descriptions in the book indicate that Orion looks a lot like a massive moon on Vulcan's skyline, not like a star the way we see, say, Mars. Normally, this would be ridiculous, because two planets that close together would crash into each other due to gravitational pull. Don't quote me, though. Science is confusing.

I noticed this problem once as I had nothing better to think about, and it bothered me quite a bit because I wanted Vulcan's solar system to be realistic. It took me a while, but this is what I came up with.

There is a large possibility, according to the scientific community, that planets knows as binaries (or double planets) could exist in far away solar systems. Basically planets that orbit each other. Here are the requirements:

1. The planets must be at least half an astronomical unit away from their parent star (that's about the distance between the Sun and Earth).
2. The planets must be Earth's size or smaller (Vulcan and Orion are both about the size of Mars).
3. The planets must have first collided with one another, but not hard enough as to destroy each other. Instead, they merely grazed each other, and then over X amount of time (not necessarily a long time) fell into lockstep (in other words, the rotation and revolution speeds of both planets match, meaning that only one side of planet A would ever be visible to planet B and vice versa).

These planets could be extremely close to one another as well; as close as half a planet's width apart. So, I decided that Vulcan and Orion would be binary planets.

I got all my information on binary planets from here: https://www.space.com/27832-binary-earth-size-alien-planets.html.

So anyway, that's the relationship between Vulcan and Orion. All the other planets in Vulcan's solar system are just like the ones in Earth's solar system. Well...

...But that's for you to discover later.

That was fun! I hope that clears up some of the science for you guys. Hopefully chapter 3 will be up soon. Now I have to go fit this into the prologue somehow.

See you soon!
-Kat