Ilion: A Global Perspective

Gravity: 1.2 g
Diameter: 13,540 km at equator (Earth is 12,742 km wide)
Location: Barnard’s Star, 6 lightyears from Earth
Orbit: Tidally locked; day/year length is about 16 Earth days
Life: Present and thriving

Top left: Ilion’s antistellar (dark) side. At the center is Mentes, Ilion’s smallest and only lifeless continent.
Top right: Ilion’s stellar side, showing the continents Pandaros (bottom) and Deiphobus (top).
Bottom left: The continent Polyxena at the west terminator.
Bottom center: The stellar (light) side with clouds, as it would appear in life.
Bottom right: The continent Aeneas at the east terminator.

Climate

Ilion’s present climate is wholly dependent on the presence of a shallow ocean at the substellar point. A tidally-locked planet would look very different if there were a landmass here instead. The land would be extremely hot and dry at zenith, leaving only a ring of habitability between the substellar point and the terminator. Ilion is not that way. The sun’s heat and air currents whip the humid air at the Greater Ajax Ocean into a permanent, stable tempest. Periodically, a secondary storm will split from this system and head toward the continents. Of these, the hardest hit is Aeneas, where rainstorms supply the forests with water beyond what the trees produce themselves. Every so often, a storm travels in the other direction and makes it all the way to Polyxena. Near the west terminator, these rogue storms mix with the cold subterminator air and manifest as blizzards of biblical proportion. Polyxena’s climate is highly sensitive to changes in stellar output. At times, conditions render it uninhabitable. The continent’s few permanent residents must cope by migrating, hibernating, or sowing seeds that wait for favorable conditions before sprouting.

Heat circulates around the globe through the ocean as well. Four major currents radiate from the substellar point near the surface, carrying warm water to the other side. The currents encroach on the antistellar sea ice at four points known as the Four Corners. Cold water returns to the light side in two ways. One way is through sea currents deep down where the water is coldest (4*C). The other way is by the migration of sea ice. As the ice thickens it pushes outward until it reaches the Four Corners and returns to the ocean as liquid water.

Continents

Mentes

Mentes lies directly opposite the substellar Greater Ajax ocean. It receives very little precipitation and therefore has more exposed rock than other darkside landmasses. Mentes is of great interest to geologists for this reason and more. The Valley of Eras is especially tantalizing; The ice that fills this valley goes back millions of years and has not received more than a few meters of snowfall since 20 million years past, when the continent was closer to the terminator. The site was a candidate for Odyssey II but Ilion International opted for Polyxena instead, so they could continue to study the planet's biosphere.

Polyxena

Skirting the edge of habitability, Polyxena is host to a few resident species and many migratory ones. It is the second smallest continent. Polyxena receives a lot of snow, so much that its accumulated weight forces it back to the sea as glaciers. One of these, Rorschach Glacier, bleeds black algae at varying points along its length. The alga is extinct. It dates from a time when Polyxena was closer to the sun, and would, in its heyday, turn entire lakes and streams as black as tea.

Deiphobus

Geologically speaking, Deiphobus is two continents. The bottom half was once part of Pandaros. The land bridge that once connected them is underwater and visible only as a shallower portion of Greater Ajax and a few islands. As the plates migrated toward each other, they collided and formed the Arcadian Mountains. North of the range is the Great Deiphobus Desert. South is a variety of lush habitats including rainforest, temperate forest, alpine, and rash, a biome unique to Ilion.

Pandaros

As the only entirely sunlit continent, Pandaros is teeming with life. Habitats include rainforest, desert, shrubland, and rash. Its most prominent feature is a lake and river system that seems to cut the continent in two, but is in fact discontinuous. Many of its lakes and rivers disappear under heavy mats of floating vegetation. In fact, the first human visitors very nearly landed their shuttle in one of these. They chose an alternate landing site when, upon closer inspection, the original site was deemed "too swampy."

Aeneas

Aeneas's sunlit half is exceptionally wet. Its rainforests sit in pools of water that can be quite deep in places. The water is rich in chemicals that sustain diverse microbial colonies but render the forest floor hostile to plants and animals. Like Deiphobus, Aeneas has a mountain range that divides the continent into clear halves, with very little life surviving east of the range. A particuarly interesting feature is Elephant Gulf. The gulf is partly enclosed in islands and penninsulas. Warm, humid air turns to fog here which creates a unique habitat for island and coastal life.

Bonus: The Greater Ajax Floating Continent

A brownish swirl would be visible from space if the cloud cover over Greater Ajax weren't so heavy. The swirl is made of the same sort of floating vegetation found in rivers and lakes, but is adapted to a turbulent sea. Despite the name, it is not a single mass but a collection of separate "plantbergs" all caught in the same vortex. Several of these bergs are large enough to support populations of grazers, but most animal life lives within the tangle of vines, leaves, and buoys rather than on them.
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If you're wondering how I made this look so 3D it's because it is 3D. This is the Ilion globe I've been wanting to make for a long time. It was originally an 8 inch decorative political globe of the Earth, and now it is a decidedly apolitical globe of an alien planet. Later* I'll upload progress shots to my journal so you can see its transformation from start to finish, but long story short I painted over it and used molding paste to texture the continents. The clouds and atmo were added later in Photoshop.

This is the new canon. My old maps were a wonky projection** that exaggerated the sizes of continents near the terminator so I could show them all on two faces. The next step is to make new biome maps and mission maps, which will be easier to do if I zoom in on continents rather than try and fit the whole thing on a single map. I'm so happy this is finished. Now I have a real spherical thing I can reference and take pictures of as needed.

Also, it looks nice in my house.

*as promised:

Tutorial: Custom Raised-Relief GlobeIf you are a worldbuilder or mapmaker working at a global scale, it can be helpful to have an actual globe to guide you. If your world is an alternate Earth, then you are in luck. You can go to Amazon or troll the thrift stores and garage sales for a cheap globe of the Earth. All done.
For the rest of us, the globe we need cannot be found in any thrift store. So we make our own.

The above is an 8 inch desktop decorative globe I bought at a furniture store. Globes run for about $15-$30 at stores, or cheaper if you can find them used. What you want is a sturdily built globe with no raised relief.

Accuracy is not important. Any out-of-date borders and countries will be slathered over with a couple coats of gesso. Gesso is a type of acrylic paint that creates a toothed surface that can be painted on. You can buy it at any art store in bulk for pretty cheap. It's a good thing to have around.

**And I ended up using the wonky projection after all.

UPDATE: More islands! More detailed coastlines! The maps are improved too. Take a look: