I realized I could as geologist answer some of your questions about planets, but i am wondering if you would find better answers at ES exchange when they are not fantasy worlds as bloody oceans and so as in this one:
In an Earth-like planet with no history of carbon-based life forms, would there be limestone?
They are not only going to receive better answers, but also scientists could evaluate answers helping the poster is my guess.
We are asking ourselves the reversal question:
This site is Worldbuilding, not Fantasy Worldbuilding. While, yes, many of our questions are completely unscientific, we also have many questions about real science applied to new worlds. Some of these are among my favorite questions on the site.
Some of these questions are also on-topic on other sites. Stack Exchange has sites with overlapping scopes (it's not just us). For example, there's an entire site about Emacs, but you can ask Emacs questions on Stack Overflow. There's an entire site about biology, but you can ask biology questions here (with an eye toward creature design). There's an entire site about astronomy, but many astronomy questions fit here.
I'd love to see more "crossover" among sites; I hope you and others from Earth Sciences will consider answering questions in your fields that are asked here. (You're probably going to want to follow some tags and ignore others.) It's fine to point out the existence of other sites in comments; with 175 sites on the network, "oh, there's a site for that?" is not an uncommon reaction. But let's not try to drive questions that are on-topic on one site to another one instead. The person chose to ask on a particular site; let's honor that (unless the question is out of scope).
Besides, even when scopes overlap, sites sometimes have different rules about what makes a good question (or answer). Your site might expect askers to have more background knowledge and/or have done more scientific research before asking, for example. (I'm not saying that's so; I don't know your site.)
Let's work together to help each other.
The short answer is "yes"
A great many questions asked here, even when purely within a worldbuilding context, would probably receive more authoritative answers more quickly if asked on other, more appropriate Stacks.
The long answer is "if you want"
There is a substantial, natural overlap between worlbuilding and the sciences. At a rough guess, 80%+ of the questions asked here could be asked elsewhere with better results.
If the question can be reworded to meet that other Stack's rules.
If the question's context isn't perceived as too silly for the other Stacks.1
Etc.
That's the problem we've generally had over time: Sure, the Earth Sciences stack can answer questions about geology, oceanography and meteorology. But the moment you mention it's for a fictional planet (or the moment they figure out it's not a question about Earth as it is today), you have a high probability of closure. The other Stacks are fundamentally biased (and rightly so) on here, today not there, tomorrow.
Thus, the "real-world questions" decision was made
Almost a year ago (time flies when you're having fun), the mods introduced a proposal to finalize the "are real-world questions on-topic debate." The simple answer is yes, they're on-topic.
Therefore, the basic rule is this:
If you can word your question to meet the expectations of a Stack more dedicated to that field of expertise, you might2 get a better answer more quickly using that Stack. Nevertheless, you're always welcome here, never forgetting that we have expectations, too.
1 I once posted on Electronics.SE a question about whether or not you could self-charge the sound effects used for a potato gun by running zinc and copper rails down the barrel. It took forever to be answered, by one person in comments, because it was perceived as a silly (read: not serious) question.
2 We've experienced the condition where a perfectly sensible question was asked on the more appropriate Stack and didn't receive an answer within a time the OP felt was reasonable, so the question was brought here — which is an example of the simple truth that nothing's perfect.
From one of the close voters on the last hypothetical/worldbuilding type question I saw on the Earth Science exchange: "the real world we know is more than complex enough without asking hypothetical questions on this exchange" or words to that effect. That attitude may have changed but I wouldn't bet on it. Worldbuilding is a good place for hypotheticals of all sorts mainly because of the attitude, assisted by the wide knowledge base, of the community.
