Hello and thank you for taking the time to review this post. I look very forward to any assistance with world building. I apologize for the length. During a prior thread, which I cannot find sadly, I asked about how to flood the Earth. While I found that impossible I decided to throw her into Jupiter's orbit, tidally lock her and essentially have her be cooked on one side by the sun, freezing on the other side where the oceans were pulled. Blaming a Neutron star that wandered a little to close, throwing the orbits of all the planets off. Earth just happened to get pulled far enough out to be snatched up by Jupiter. The rest I'm more or less hand waving. Its Scifi after all and I don't want to go into ultra hard science like a lot of scifi I've read personally. So that is the jist of the previous thread and what I decided to do after reading all the responses. Earth is officially deemed uninhabitable in my story. The UCE(United Colonies of Earth) is left with tens of thousands of refugees and almost nowhere to put them. Venus is literally trying to assert its dominance over Sol to conquer her with its tiny makeshift fleet. Mars takes advantage of the situation to declare its own independence. My plan was to have the UCE have emergency food and supplies on a clandestine station hidden in the Kuiper belt. They would offload everyone on their three Jovian moon station colonies and some on Titan while searching for signs of the other colonies that went dark during the event. I'd have Venus' makeshift fleet ambush them and lose but, not before inflicting considerable damage to the weak UCE Navy. I'd draw up the boarders with the UCE controlling Jupiter, Saturn and mostly everything farther out/in between. Mars and Venus would fight for control of the asteroid belt and Mercury, despite not being able to draw on what few resources Mercury might have. Naturally Venus would assert control over Sol as a whole and be drawn towards the Kuiper belt as well as the Jovian moon colonies, Titan and Saturn's other moons. This last part here would take place over a ten year time skip/mild info dump. Does a setting like this seem plausible given the situation(as unrealistic as it is)? What can I change to improve the setting? Should I alter its boarders?
I actually like it. A lot of space-operas tend to be intergalactic or interstellar in scope; I like how you're confining your's to this solar system. If a rogue neutron star passed into or near the solar system the results would be catastrophic, so I wouldn't have a problem with Earth being pulled so far out of its orbit.
I don’t know if I would buy the Earth being thrown out of orbit, while Venus and Mars go untouched. Even if they were somehow terraformed in the past, a new orbit would present the same problems. I don’t know the math or physics behind it, only that I’d need some explaination for it, given the other explainations.
I'm curious what time scale you have your story taking place in? If this all takes place inside of a thousand years or so, I'd have a very hard time believing it. Most sci-fi readers have a vague idea of the scale of space and even in soft-scifi get caught up on weird things like this. For example: Where did the neutron star come from? The closest neutron star to Earth is about 500 light years away and it's not traveling in our direction. Secondly, the remnants of Earth description is weird to me. How would it get tidally locked with the sun? Objects have to be very close to each other for that to happen, and it takes hundreds of millions of years. The reason tidal locking occurs is because one side of the planet is pulled significantly harder than the other by the second object. For example, the difference in Earth's gravitational pull from one side of the moon is (G * m[earth] * m[moon]) / (250k miles) ^2 where the pull on the other side is (G * m[earth] * m[moon]) / (251k miles) ^2. If you kick Earth out to Jupiters orbit the difference between the suns gravity at 1 billion miles and 999,999,000 miles is negligible and won't slow the planet much at all. Also, you're way off that tidally locking Earth in Jupiter's orbit would scorch it, it would deep freeze it. Jupiter gets 1/25th the amount of energy as Earth. That energy would be distributed around the planet by our atmosphere. It'd condense a little as it cools off, but our magnetic field and gravity would prevent us from losing it. Even if you blasted one side with direct sunlight, at the distance of Jupiter, Earth would be frozen from pole to pole within a hundred years.
Working off of what @John Calligan said, I would be interested in what the new orbits of the other planets are as well. I know you said that all of the planets have new orbits, but aside from Earth you didn't say what they were. The asteroid belts would also be affected, in case you think that might be important. Anyway, assuming that Mars and Venus are still closer to the sun than Jupiter, and that Jupiter is still where it used to be, the inner system might be more rich in resources after such an event. A lot of objects from the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud would be expected to have fallen into the system, giving Mars and Venus more value to their territories, so that's something to consider. You can also easily make it so that some planets aren't orbiting on the same plane anymore, though I doubt that would have much impact on the story unless a plot point somewhere relies heavily on distances between planets. As a side note, Mercury would actually be pretty rich in resources as well; the problem with it would be the difficulty in mining for them due to the extreme heat. You can certainly hand wave this a bit by saying it was thrown a little bit farther out from the sun to make it a more attractive target. If it was thrown far from the sun, though, it would imply the rogue star passed right through the solar system, since it would take a lot to pull it away from the sun. You can do that, of course (the star would need to be going very fast relative to our system to make it work, but it's still a realistic possibility), but you'd basically be guaranteed that all of the inner planets would be on dramatically different orbits by the time everything settled, and probably the outer planets as well. Basically you'd be looking a completely reorganized solar system just to move Mercury. Of course, if that's what's already happened, then never mind! ...I may have gone on a bit of tangent with that last bit
