Hi there,

I've been reading up on Triton and have some questions I was hoping some might know the answer to.  This is a Traveller question, I'm trying to set something on that far distant moon in Paul Elliott's _Orbital_ setting which makes a change from being further out there!  Please excuse the woeful ignorance that I suspect some of these questions demonstrate!

I found an artist's illustration of Neptune from Triton's surface (I was trying to get an idea of how big the planet would be in the sky) and it had the weather bands of Neptune vertical - which made sense to me as I know Neptune is 'tipped over' nearly 90 degrees.  However, I then read that Triton orbits in the equatorial plane of Neptune which made me think that from the surface of Triton, Neptune would appear 'horizontal' as usual.  Am I missing something?
(There's an illustration in Orbital showing something of it's size in the sky, but Neptune is shown as just a sliver of a crescent so the banding is virtually impossible to see.)

(I was going to ask about angular diameter but have found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter and if my maths is correct Neptune would appear to be about 16 times the size of the moon from the earth).

I know Triton's orbit is retrograde and I assumed that would mean Neptune would rise in the West and set in the East - until I read that it's locked and keeps one face to the planet.  OK, so can I just double check that the only thing that would affect where Neptune is in the sky is the location of your base?

Would anything of Neptune's rather paltry (I understand) rings be visible from Triton?

Am I right in thinking that the gravity figure for Triton given in Orbital of 0.78 is wrong and it should be 0.078 G?  (I.e. PCs from Luna would find it lighter than home, but not that much).

Using something like the Palomino Heavy Lander (p.72) of the setting (i.e. no anti-grav) what are reasonable transit times from a base to, say 100km away, 1000km away, somewhere on the opposite side of the moon?  (I'm rather assuming no one has shipped an Expedition Rover (p.69) out there yet.)

"Around half of the moon’s landscape is covered with frozen nitrogen, with water ice comprising one quarter and dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) forming the remaining quarter."  Are these three components thoroughly mixed rather than patches of one and clumps of another?  That's what I thought at least until I read about the 'cantaloupe terrain' (wikipedia) which is "mostly dirty water ice" which suggest patches.

Would the Nitrogen geysers simply be venting the Nitrogen to space or would it (or some of it) fall back to Triton as Nitrogen "snow"?  The wikipedia article seems to suggest it comes back as 'dust' and forms surface streaks so I'm unclear on what this would look like for those on the surface.  Too small/insignificant to be visible?  Something which occasionally reduces visibility?

If there was a sub-surface ocean on Triton (I'm assuming this means liquid not frozen) are we talking water or something else?  (I'm presuming that if it was liquid water it would be warmed from frozen by the 'solid greenhouse effect' of the frozen Nitrogen (etc) above.)

Hmmm, that's more than I meant to ask but thanks in advance for any clues (I have read the wikipedia article on Triton but am happy to be pointed to other sources that might help.)

cheers

tc