Gas Giants - Giant Resource Planet?

Is there anywhere that confirms what gas giants will play a roll in the game?
I'm optimistic that they'll primarily be for orbital conquest over resources, where you'd build orbital extractors for metal and/or energy. They'd be appropriately sized for orbital combat too. Planets with terrain are too small, it's easy to cover one with anchors, good luck trying that on a gas giant though. They should really drive games on a larger scale by giving orbitals more purpose.

Yes you use them for energy resources, or that's the plan. They gather energy from the gases of the planet.

But that's where I think things go unbalanced, where metal resources hit a ceiling mid-game. Here's what I mean:

Energy plant -> Advanced energy plant -> Solar panel orbitals -> Orbital Extractors
to
Metal extractor -> Advanced metal extractor

You get more energy than you ever need with advanced plants, but metal extracting falls off early on in games. Gas Giants are actually composed of a lot of metals, their cores are usually molten ore. It could certainly put more balance to resources.

actually Energy plant -> Solar panel orbitals -> Advanced energy plant ->

but I think they'll lower resource quantity and up the prices of hailleys for example, plus add more crazy expensive units.

Some people have proffered the idea of gas giants being air-enabled as well to make them more interesting, but any way you cut it, gas giants and death stars are some big missing pieces in terms of planetary interactions.

We know extremely little about what's to come with gas giants.

What we do know is that they'll be mostly orbital play, and they'll be a big deal for resources.

So I'm guessing there will be ways to get metal and energy from these things in a rather efficient manner.

Other than that... we'll see.

Knowing Uber, at any update they'll be thrown in the game.
They always crank out a lot of content with hardly any heads up on what is to come lol.

Involving giant straws.

I had envisioned a drill dangling down to the planet like in the Star Trek movie.

Gas giants have very dense cores after all.

Yup, either a drill, a tube, or it straight up sucks the gas up into it, sorta like:


However they decide to do it, it should look badass.

...same principle...

It was a joke that neutrino made in a live stream or a thread. A while ago; I don't remember exactly when though.

I'm not sure whether they'll be implementing 5-year-olds in the future builds, we'll have to see though.

Gas Giants would basically be a good place to hide a commander without ever landing him. I guess real Gas Giants have massive storms within it, and the surface is impossible to be colonized and resources must be harvested from space. I don't believe that many people would go to these sorts of worlds unless there is too good to be true rewards that could be game breaking or there is just lots of good resource points to be harnessed in a efficient fashion.

Maybe they can be there for just cosmetic galaxy look until they add something that would make these planets more useful.

I just hope they have Zeppelin islands we can build on the Gas Giants that allow us to build other things on them (think cloud city of Bespin.)

Have us build in orbit and send them down. Rather than the reverse. Then, and only then let us get resources Also give the Gas Giants currents, so the could cities are constantly being moved around (because why not) Posibly conect multiple structures in order to have larger bses, but have that be costly.

It is true that Gas Giants have very dense cores. However, a Gas Giant has a very dense core. The core of a gas planet is so dense that it would be all but impossible for anything to operate under those conditions.

Taking snippets from Jupiter's Wikipedia Page we find that:

Just for a reference, if you would like, you can find a Table of Melting Points of Common Metals if you google "melting point of" and it should be the first link: Engineering Toolbox Metals - Melting Temperatures.

If you are not familiar, add 273.15 to the Celsius temperature to convert from degrees Celsius to Kelvin.

At the "surface" of the planets atmosphere there are effectively no problems, machines could exist there. However it is important to note that we are not extracting metal from gas clouds at the very outer layers of the planets atmosphere. We would need to be be deeper near the core to find denser metals.

However, as we move down through the gas giant, we would eventually come to a phase transition at which gasses (in this case Hydrogen) is a solid metal. The boiling point of Hydrogen, the temperature at which it changes from liquid to a gas is in the ballpark of 30 Kelvin or -252 degrees Celsius. Mind you, 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) is the temperature at which water freezes. Hydrogen is a liquid at ridiculously cold temperatures, and it is a solid at even colder temperatures. This poses a simple problem: Hydrogen is a metal as you delve towards the core of a Gas Giant. This turns out to be due to the extreme pressures present which actually force it into a solid metallic state. (You can look at the wikipedia article for Metallic Hydrogen for more information on this)

The temperature at the transition phase, as cited from the wikipedia is approximately 10,000 Kelvin and the pressure is approximately 200 GigaPascal, which turns out to be 200,000,000 kiloPascal. One atmosphere of pressure is approximately 101 kPa. This means that at the transition phase, the pressure is approximately 1,980,198 times greater than the atmospheric pressure at the surface of the Earth that we experience.

For comparison, the Marianas Trench:

We have approximately 1,000 times the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, a trench at the bottom of the ocean at which the pressure is so great that we cannot explore it. Now with that comparison in mind, the transition phase of a Gas Giant bears pressures close to 2 million times that of atmospheric pressure, unfathomably greater than that of the Marianas Trench: pressure so great that it forces hydrogen to form a solid. This kind of pressure would easily destroy anything we used to try to drill for metal long before it reached this transition phase.

That is completely ignoring a few other problems: The temperature at the transition phase is so great (~10,000 Kelvin) that any equipment we could get to that layer to extract Hydrogen would simply melt. Assuming that for some reason we could access this layer safely to extract metal, the transition layer is only the layer in which we find metal hydrogen, not useful metals. Even if we were to extract hydrogen as a metal, we know well enough that hydrogen will be a gas at any reasonable temperature that we are operating in: meaning that even if we could extract it, it would cease to be metal and sublime directly into a gas, ceasing to be of any use to our War Efforts and leaving us with no metal resources at all. From here we would need to dig even deeper towards the core to even higher pressures and higher temperatures to reach rocky metals from the rocky core, something we already know is impossible.

Now, to my point: Therefore, I can fathom that there could be ways to extract energy from a gas planet, but it would impossible that we could endure the unfathomably high temperatures and pressures inside of a Gas Giant to extract any other sorts of resources. Metal would be absolutely impossible for us to extract, even with sci-fi conditions and technologies.

And in the case that there would not be such high pressures and temperatures, it is highly likely that the planet would simply not be a gas giant at all in the first place.



EDIT: Sorry for not posting links to my sources. Apparently as a New User I cannot provide any links in my posts.

EDIT: Grammer, phrasing, emphasis. Rough polishing, really.

EDIT: Underlined "Now to my point" to emphasize it as a loose TL;DR.

I`m thinking about a large round ball filled with N2,CO2,NH3 and H2.
Then u take out you`re very large knife and start sliceing it up in hopes for huge resources.PRRRRROOOOOMMP
But then.... you just thought about that u forgot you`re gasmask and now the whole system is filled
with this very odorerus stench and everyone dies.

NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

The point in Jupiter (as an example of a Gas Giant) that we could extract any form of useful metal is approximately 4,000,000 atmopsheres of pressure and about 6x the temperature at the surface of the sun. Nothing we send there could withstand that environment.

For reference: We live in 1 atmopshere of pressure and something along the lines of even 1,000 atmospheres crushes submarines. At those temperatures, metals are liquid (or gaseous).

Be nice.