Ganymede or Titan which one is more resanable for a human base?

[S@tanicoaldo]

So my players are going to leave the underground complex in the moon they have been born and raised in the hopes to see earth as the media and data they have collected seems to indicate.

The plot twist I'm planning is that they are in a moon not the moon.

so the options I'm considering are Ganymede or Titan.

Which one you guys recommend?

[Lord Torath]

Well, Saturn's farther from Earth than Jupiter. Saturn also lacks the terribly destructive radiation belts that Jupiter has. I mean, it has radiation belts, but they're not as nasty as Jupiter's. Also, you've got 12+ years of Cassini photos to stun your players with, and you can probably even get some footage from the Huygens probe that actually touched down on Titan in 2005. Juno's only been at Jupiter for a year-and-a-half, and it's expected that its external camera won't last more than a few more orbits (due to the aforementioned nasty radiation belts).

So my vote's for Titan.

[S@tanicoaldo]

Well, Saturn's farther from Earth than Jupiter. Saturn also lacks the terribly destructive radiation belts that Jupiter has. I mean, it has radiation belts, but they're not as nasty as Jupiter's. Also, you've got 12+ years of Cassini photos to stun your players with, and you can probably even get some footage from the Huygens probe that actually touched down on Titan in 2005. Juno's only been at Jupiter for a year-and-a-half, and it's expected that its external camera won't last more than a few more orbits (due to the aforementioned nasty radiation belts).

So my vote's for Titan.

This is the kind of stuff I was looking for!

Yeah besides Titan has a better sounding name. Btw is there any other moon tha is less radiation, a cool name and it's or our moon? If you have any other moon relatable trivia or adivice feel free to share. :D

[hamishspence]

Callisto has less radiation from Jupiter than Ganymede does, and is still a bit larger than Earth's moon.

[Leewei]

I think Titan's your best option. I'll throw another one out from a different thread in this forum:

Quirinus, an artificial moon of Mars, was created by fusing several asteroids and Mars' original two moons together. The moon exists to induce a magnetosphere on Mars, which is also being bombarded with asteroids to increase its mass, water, and oxygen content. Quirinus is used to observe and supervise terraforming efforts. It is a hollow orb spun for gravity, containing a sealed inner atmosphere. In addition to providing tidal forces, the moon is a manufacturing center, producing equipment and power from raw material mined from asteroids. Waste material from this process is slagged and distributed evenly on the moon's surface to increase its mass and add to its radiation shielding.

[gomipile]

I think Titan's your best option. I'll throw another one out from a different thread in this forum:

Quirinus, an artificial moon of Mars, was created by fusing several asteroids and Mars' original two moons together. The moon exists to induce a magnetosphere on Mars, which is also being bombarded with asteroids to increase its mass, water, and oxygen content. Quirinus is used to observe and supervise terraforming efforts. It is a hollow orb spun for gravity, containing a sealed inner atmosphere. In addition to providing tidal forces, the moon is a manufacturing center, producing equipment and power from raw material mined from asteroids. Waste material from this process is slagged and distributed evenly on the moon's surface to increase its mass and add to its radiation shielding.

If it's spun for gravity, how does slag spread on the outer surface stay there?

[Leewei]

If it's spun for gravity, how does slag spread on the outer surface stay there?

Haha! Good point!

The slagging would have to have been done onto the undersides of platforms fixed close to the outer surface.

[brian 333]

Bedrock of solid ice, ammonia seas, methane rain. Titan is truly the garden moon of the solar system.

Pick an airless one like the conjoined twin Miranda. At least there you only have to worry about vacuum.

Gravity. None of the outer moons have much. Heck, even the three inner moons are lacking. What is the source of your gravity? Natural? Artificial? Some of each, so you have habitat areas at 1g but outside natural gravity reigns? Gravity can be as important a geographical feature to travellers as a river or mountain.

And now it occurs to me that a prison on a planet that instantly turns you into a fudgickle if you try to escape might be interesting.

[Anonymouswizard]

Titan also has the interesting factor that it doesn't require a pressure suit to survive (only a suit to deal with the atmosphere, which I believe is both unbreathable and corrosive). I assume you're going for a 'low g people' vibe with them, where they're used to the moon's gravity, so it shouldn't be a massive problem dealing with the low gravity in-session.

[Mechalich]

So my players are going to leave the underground complex in the moon they have been born and raised in the hopes to see earth as the media and data they have collected seems to indicate.

The plot twist I'm planning is that they are in a moon not the moon.

so the options I'm considering are Ganymede or Titan.

Which one you guys recommend?

One thing about Titan - if your players emerge from underground onto the surface of Titan they aren't going to see anything. The surface of Titan receives only about 0.1% of the light Earth receives at the surface due to a combination of greater distance from the sun and atmospheric opacity. So it's a black darkness all the time.

As for Ganymede, well, the surface of Ganymede is made of water ice, not rock, above a massive subsurface ocean. So an underground base would have to be set into the ice, which would make it pretty clear that one is not on Earth's moon. This is actually true of most of the satellites in the outer half of the solar system - they are icy rather than rocky, especially at the surface.

[factotum]

Low gravity? No problem. Just live in a big centrifuge with a low RPM, and use telepresence androids to do stuff outside your habitat.

That would work in a space habitat, but probably not so much on a moon--while the gravity in such places is low, it's not non-existent, which means that the gravity on a vertical centrifuge will vary depending on what point of the rotation you are and that on a horizontal centrifuge will have a constant offset so it'll be like walking on the side of a hill all the time.

[factotum]

By the time you've gone to that extent it seems to me you've just built a space station anyway, only you've done it on the ground so it's much harder to get to than an actual space station would be--I mean, you're essentially talking about taking a sizeable building and spinning it, which is a very non-trivial thing to be doing.

[brian 333]

If the OP is going for a moon that could be mistaken for Luna by folks who live there, your options are limited. Miranda is one of the few rocky moons of the outer Solar system.

And stellar radiation isn't the issue out near Saturn that it is near Earth. However, the US Navy has been creating magnetic bottles for decades now, and building an effective magnetic shield for the rare particle storms which reach the outer system is far easier to accomplish than one might think. It hasn't been done in a spacecraft yet because we haven't made the jump to Mars yet. But when we do you'll learn all about degaussing and induced magnetic fields.

Does the moon have to be one of the known moons of the system? A Kuiper Belt Object on its nearest pass to the sun in billions of years might serve as it spends the next few centuries passing inside the orbit of Uranus before heading back to the icy void. Such an object could easily be Luna sized or larger, and of any composition the writer likes.

Perhaps it's on a cometary trajectory and approaches the sun often enough to burn off hydrogen ice accretion, leaving it one of the few polished spheres in the Solar System, but on a path which prevented observation by telescope. Six hundred years ago it was on its way out of the inner system, so Gallileo turned his scope to the heavens just a few weeks too late to spot Cue Ball, and in the time of the story its on its way back in to round the sun inside of Mars' orbit. Or adjust the orbit to suit the story. Such a rogue planet might serve to placate the science purists while offering more precisely the scenes envisioned by the OP.