Math. Why did there have to be math...?

mood: hopeful
music: LOTR Soundtrack
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So I'm attempting to build the worlds necessary for my characters to travel between...but I really wasn't ready for the math. Okay, I probably could just make everything up and gloss over the details, but I wanted to do it right and I have these books full of nifty world-building formulae...I'm just so darn bad at it. Even figuring out how to plug in the figures for things like star luminosity, mass, mean distance and insolation gives me a headache. Yet I soldier on, calculator in hand. I may give up before it's over and just start making up planets willy-nilly, but I'll see what I can come up with according to the numbers before November hits. Fortunately I've found a few good websites to help out as well. Anway, back to it...so insolation equals luminosity over the distance squared...