Through A Procedurally Generated Galaxy (Part 1)

People familiar with the infinite worlds of Minecraft are familiar with procedurally-generated worlds. In a virtual world such as this, the entire world is generated "on the fly", quasi-randomly as the user travels through it. The generation algorithms all generate the same worlds on the same input "seed". 

Enter Space Engine. The author of this software has taken the ideas of the physically-accurate spaceflight simulator (Kerbal, Orbiter, etc.) and married it to a procedurally-generated universe, planets and all. It's not "No Man's Sky" - it's not really a "game", and there are no herds of space-elephants to see. But, it models planetary landscapes down to a 1-m level mesh procedurally, and the planets and locations that I will list in these virtual travelogues can be visited by you, if you have the same software. 

So, on to my travels.

Proxima Centauri (3.9 LY)

My first travels out of the solar system went to the stars closest to the sun that have been marked as possible locations for Earthlike worlds. The FTL drive on this particular ship would boost you around the galaxy at 1 light-year per second. That's about 30,000x faster than the USS Enterprise-D of "Star Trek: TNG". One of the first places I visited was Proxima Centauri as alpha doesn't have any planets in this software. After a rather short burst from the FTL drives, I was there. Space bent, stars got red, things shifted ever so slightly, and then the distortion stopped and I was staring at an orange-ish sun. I used conventional drives to reach the planet Proxima b. 

The planet is tide-locked to Proxima and orbits at a very close distance. The swirling storm you see in the clouds is under the sub-solar point. I planned a trajectory that brought me in close to the planet and "swung me back around" out the way I came. 

The planet has a very thick CO2 atmosphere. ~320 atmospheres of pressure. Terrestrial, with what could only be supercritical water oceans. The airglow and vertical relief of the clouds can be seen. 

 Reminiscent of Venus. 

This was the most interesting thing in the Proxima system. Space Engine reported no life forms on this world. Given the fact that Proxima is a flare star, and the planet orbits Proxima so closely, this isn't surprising. 

The next stop on this particular "mission" was Tau Ceti.