#scuds

[polarwooly]

I have made a fan oc for @jayrockin's Runaway to the Stars! And also invented an underwater cigarette! (It's just a lil bug that's got mild poison that you chew on.) I just love scuds so much they are so shaped....

[psittacosaur]

Behold my wet beasts

🗣️I love my pet microfauna they saved my life

[theseekingseaker]

ES-003 #005 20240716

Single large scud was added to ES-003 to aid in detritus breakdown and nitrogen cycle. Video capture shows scud burrowing. No more than one scud was added to prevent possible overpopulation and flora decimation.

[artbyifer]

Bingo Aliens

Sketched a bunch of tumblr aliens during bingo night (yes it's on the back of a homemade card, don't @ me, we play along to the radio but prizes are getting to choose a meal out/ordered in instead of the cash money real players get)

Bugferrets, Avians, Scuds and Centaurs belong to @jayrockin

Crowns are by @charseraph

Uniimas can be found @yellosnacc

Woulda drawn a Birdbug (Birg) but I could't remember how their little pedipalp-arm-things go, so @iguanodont; next time.

(sucks cause I had drawn crowns, birgs, and centaurs before on a previous bingo and it came out Great, much better than these, but it got thrown out with the rest of the cards so no scans for us ;o;)

[legokingfisher]

Today my ecology+evolution lab goes to do an aquatic macroinvertebrate survey at a local creek so that means I MIGHT GET TO SEE SOME SCUDS !!!!!💪💪💪💪💪💪💥💥💥💥💥💥💥🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

[aliquid-de-magis]

listen sometimes you gotta stop and watch a little guy

[hyperfixation-floodgate]

I have discovered that animals can be funny at all sizes, like this extremely zoomy amphipod

(Guest Starring: ostracod)

[thenarrativefoil]

where can I get scuds??? anybody got a go to shop??

[aravindrakon]

post no. 4

attack of the scuds

there were 2 scuds i got from my LFS.

please note, only 2 scuds.

why tf are there now 500+ within 3 weeks

i thought you bred fast but damn.

anyhow i now have free livefood hehehehehe

[hometoursandotherstuff]

These are called Scud clouds. This was recently captured in South Carolina.

Photograph by Zachary Lane

[cmaidaartworkblog]

This video showcases my Blender model of the planet that the Scud aliens call home, the fourth and final world I've mapped out for @jayrockin's "Runaway to the Stars" project. A *lot* of maps were created in service of this final render, and also in service of presenting the special qualities of this planet. I intend to show you as many of these as I can under the cut, and also in subsequent posts focusing on some of the more interstitial, ancillary maps and figures that played a part in producing the primary maps you'll see in this main post.

Before I show the first maps I made for this project, what you see below are the satellite-style maps for the Equinoxes and Solstices, in order of (Northern) Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, the latter serving as the texture for the Blender object you saw in the video.

__________

With that matter covered, our next focus is this project's foundation: Geology. While I didn't spin as elaborate a tectonic history for this planet as I did for the Ayrum commission, I did work out as much detail as I could for the more recent geological activity, to set the stage for the elevation data - including a narrower focus on the coastal shallows that host the Scud populations.

__________

Once I could move on to climate, my first step was finding this planet's relative Insolation, which I managed thanks to @reversedumbrella's code and coaching. With an obliquity of only 16 degrees, this planet's yearly maximum Insolation levels stick close to the equator, compared to pole-to-pole oscillation we see on Earth

__________

Having a rough sense of where heat would concentrate seasonally and how the landmasses would deflect water in light of the planet's retrograde spin, I was able to set down the bi-annual ocean currents (Northern Summer above and Northern Winter below), then the monthly water temperatures pushed around by said currents, and finally -after factoring in many other considerations- the monthly land temperatures as well (combined in the second gif)

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Next came the seasonal air pressure maps and subsequent wind patterns (my first time creating those from scratch), which later factored into the precipitation maps. The incredible temperatures at the largest continent's interior make a desert of most of it, and the other interiors are fairly dry too, but all that heat on the equatorial ocean generates a *lot* of evaporation which ends up coming down elsewhere.

__________

With temperatures and precipitation mapped out for each month, I was able to find how the accumulation and melt of ice and snow played out, too. Given such a hot equator it's surprising to see freezing temperatures hold out in some places, but low obliquity and high elevation shield what areas they can, it seems.

__________

All this monthly data was then painstakingly combined and compared and plugged into equations to produce maps of discrete climate zones, using both the Köppen (left) and Trewartha (right) classification systems. The higher latitudes see some overlap with Earth's conditions, but the Tropics...

__________

I never really finished the map I wanted to make with my own loosely customized classification system, but I *did* get as far as this breakdown of the areas that sometimes surpass 56.7 degrees Celsius, Earth's record for highest surface temperature ever directly measured. And as you can see, that earthly record is broken by a *significant* fraction of this planet's surface, and far exceeded by the equatorial continent's deep interior

__________

The final phase of this project dealt with creating satellite maps of this planet's surface (which you saw at the top of this post), which started with a map of dry and submerged substrate, then a density map of the vegetation that sits atop it, then the colors of that vegetation under annual average conditions (demonstrating how they would appear in-person, rather than the area's appearance from orbit), and finally plant colors under seasonal conditions (same conceit as previous). In concert with the seasonal ice and snow maps, it was the four maps in the last sequence which were overlaid on the Substrate map, using the plant density map as raster masks, to produce the final Satellite-Style maps.

__________

This planet's sophonts being a marine species, it was then worth focusing on the conditions underwater, which included monthly seafloor temperatures (first gif), annual discharge of sediment from rivers (magenta in the 2nd gif), and seasonal upwelling of nutrients from deeper water (blue in the 2nd gif).

The creation of all my maps seen in this post was possible thanks to Photopea, which has been my go-to for several years now. The resolution kinda got crunched when I uploaded these here, so when I share them on Reddit later I'll add those links under this. These have also already been posted on Twitter, which you can see here if you like. Thanks for scrolling all the way down here!

[theseekingseaker]

ES-001 #002 20240413

Scuds introduced, marked Gammarus sp. by supplier. Scuds sourced from "Critters Direct" shipped form Amazon. Photo taken after 80% water change. ES-001 has been stored on east facing window with no further light supplementation. Species determination is probably out of project scope. Best guess will suffice, but requires further research.

[artbyifer]

Sketched a bunch of tumblr aliens during bingo night (yes it's on the back of a homemade card, don't @ me, we play along to the radio but prizes are getting to choose a meal out/ordered in instead of the cash money real players get)

Bugferrets, Avians, Scuds and Centaurs belong to @jayrockin

Crowns are by @charseraph

Uniimas can be found @yellosnacc

Woulda drawn a Birdbug (Birg) but I could't remember how their little pedipalp-arm-things go, so @iguanodont; next time.

(sucks cause I had drawn crowns, birgs, and centaurs before on a previous bingo and it came out Great, much better than these, but it got thrown out with the rest of the cards so no scans for us ;o;)

[legokingfisher]

SCUD🤨⁉️

[reedusdaily]

[hyperfixation-floodgate]

Came back from vacation and stared at my living snowglobe for a while

[Video id: An aquarium in a small jar, filled with delicate plants and tiny crustaceans, seed-shaped ostracods and shrimp-like amphipods, which swim around busily.]