How Might I Design Mountains for My Tidally Locked Planet?

In a story I'm writing, the setting is a tidally locked planet with a moon a fifth its size in a binary system of a mature red dwarf and much smaller second sun. I haven't decided the planet's exact orbital period (30-40 earth days) at 0.5 AU from the larger sun, but its inhabitants experience slightly stronger gravity than on earth, and it is larger than earth with a large molten iron core for a protective magnetic field and tectonic activity.

While designing a map of the planet's surface, I've hit a point in my internet research where I can't decide how to go about placing mountains, which impacts flow of rivers, ice build up, terrain lighting, wind, etc. I've been looking up plate tectonics and found that the mantle could flow away from the sunny apex, sliding the crust along through convection toward the sub stellar hemisphere, and the crust might buckle and fold along the way. I thought this would make the mountains on the planet look like they were leaning away from the sun but also wondered whether this scenario creates so many mountain ranges parallel to the twilight band so as to interfere with the water cycle and air currents.

So I dug farther, looking for a planet tectonic simulator I could enter valid information into. If there is one out there, please link me to it. I found one, but the poles are set like Earth's, so I improvised and attempted to slide the equatorial region to the base and the poles to the top...which is difficult to describe, so I'm including a drawing of this and the first model I found.

Up to this point I've had a pretty good feeling about all my research in planet building where the laws of physics are at least fairly realistic. But I'm at a loss as to how to plop mountains about the planet surface, unless I should just pick any ol' environmentally ideal, plot strategic or even scenic location. Usually I stem my creativity from factual research conclusions.

posted almost 7 years ago

Jes L.‭

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