It was raining on Mongo one morning - so Jerry Pournelle heard from Emperor Ming’s court, which assembly cared nothing for the world outside. Let’s talk about a world where Ming is right. Let’s set up the idiot-mode for SF authors.
The monocosm planet is a panthalassa with small continents and a functioning tectonic dynamo. Also the landmasses, if in tropical zones, won’t feature high mountains.
Panthalassa’s small continents and islands, by sheer luck (or mischance), drift into some other latitude and dry out (or freeze – read on). This drift, periodically, slays most life on land. The desert-example looks like Bellerophon in Firefly episode “Trash”. Or maybe the tundra planet in Battlestar Galactica’s last episode. (There were only two seasons of that. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP)
Small-continent panthalassae are the “swamp world” when all relevant landmasses drift back into the rain zone. I’ll allow we can get ferns, mosses, and bugs to leave the seas there as here. As for jungle-(continent-)world, I’ll accept any reasonable explanation of how land plants evolved and survived past the tree-fern stage where imprisoned by the angry gods.
A panthalassa with only an Antarctica might as well be Hoth, as far as colonists care – note that Hoth supports a kind of polar-bear, likely having evolved by itself.
If we are looking to a world of craggy badlands, with oceans or not: in the tropics, these will trend to microclimates in each valley. Such are monocosm only geologically. So our lazy worldbuilder will not be thinking of Hawaii, northern New Zealand, or New Guinea. He will model his badland on SOUTHERN New Zealand and on Iceland, closer to monocosm - because they are cold and isolated. So this planet is probably a snowball too, elsewhere; and if not, it’s a young planet recently terraformed.
These worlds are uninteresting, aren’t as common as are snowballs or young Damocles-worlds, and as you can see here can even be redundant with snowballs. It takes a lot of work to justify (likely post facto) a lazily-designed planet – in fiction, as in life.
But these planets are out there; so once the interstellar network gets large enough, Planet Australia will hove into the viewscreen eventually.
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