Gas Giants - Giant Resource Planet?

I am aware. I wasn't trying to be a jerk, I was attempting to be silly. I actually did read, and it's information that's nice to know.

That being said, gameplay > lore/balance/physics.
Not that having massive metal extraction on a gas giant is a good thing in the first place.

Depending on how asteroid belts are implemented the most valuable resource of the gas giant might be it's rings.

uber said that Gas Giants will b orbital play have you harvets stuff out of the planet with orbit

Sure, but that doesn't mean the KEWs in (celestial)orbit around it won't be more valuable than the metal or energy available in it's orbital layer.

I don't know if anyone else is thinking this but I honestly have trouble imagining how Gas Giants (GGs) will work in the context of gameplay. If they are a huge resource bonus that means it will be most likely be a mad scramble to get to that planet in every game with a GG in the system.

I don't know if that really creates the gameplay style I want. I don't want to "have" to do anything in a particular game. I like that theoretically you could currently just focus on one planet and still pull out a win even if the other player gets another planet in a system.

If a GG is a super resource generator I fear that it will be required that everyone gun for it and I dislike that. I know I am speaking without any evidence here but that seems to be the general tone of conversation concerning the GGs. I don't recall seeing anything substantive from Uber regarding the GGs so it is possible that I have just missed it. If anyone wants to link me to something I missed I would appreciate it. Thanks!

Well here's what has been discussed in the past, an idea @neutrino seemed to like : anchored hover platform squares with which you build a surface on top of (and a little bit amongst) the gaz. On these you could build the complex structures that harvest energy from the gaz giant. you could also as a result have some land battles atop those platforms. (the idea being that they aren't destructible once built and can be used by either party).

as for harvesting metal I was very interested to read fandhab's post and I must admit the facts are undeniable.

however I raise a question : one of gameplay and one of Fun vs. Realism. Isn't extraction of metal a necessary ill? the unbalance this would throw into the game of having too much energy and not much to do with it would make the dev's development time a waste as noone would use them much.

I propose this : we're two billion years into the future right?
how about the robots manufacture a big-as s drill complete with a body energy shield generator so as to hold off successfully the high temperatures and pressure. with an added combo of liquid nitrogen and extremely resistant alloy to counter the pressure and heat that manage to seep through the energy shield.

It would have the added bonus of being very impressive when the towering drill is finally completed and a sight to see it disappear into the mists. Let alone when you have an army of them.

I imagine all of this would be very late game, since you have to first get to the planet build the platforms first then either towering structure of the cost of a hailley.

But the way i see it Gaz Giants will serve to provide a longer phase of the game for those week-long games.

I think being able to ignite one into a star like 2010, would be an awesome way to annoy someone if they got to the Gas Giant first.

That being understood, we can instead look at other ways of getting metal from a gas giant. Does there exist chemicals within the gas clouds themselves around the core which, when combined in say an orbital laboratory, can result in metal? How efficient would these chemical ways of getting metal, if they indeed exist, be?

Could we apply a magnetic field to the gas clouds of the Gas Giant, attracting bits of metal from the clouds to an aforementioned orbital laboratory?

Even though my ideas might flat out wrong and unrealistic, my point is there are more sources of metal in a gas giant than just its high density metal core. There must be some research or something that might allow one to reasonably explain how metal might be harvested form a Gas Giant.

On a separate note: getting energy from a gas giant is easy enough. Simply harvest the rotational energy of the gas clouds as they move around the metal core. This rotational energy is easy enough to convert to other types of useful energy (mechanical, electrical, etc.) as is done all the time in real life. Harvesting rotational energy to serve other purposes that is - no energy has been harvested from Gas Giants yet, as per my knowledge.

EDIT: what if the rotational energy of the gas clouds is harvested first, slowing down and eventually stopping the rotation of the gas cloud. Would this cause the metal core to fracture or segment itself in any way? If so, will the pieces float apart from eachother in space, easily allowing a robot or something to pick up and at that point harvest it for metal? This idea could certainly fit with the whole planetary-annihilation idea. You basically destory a Gas Giant for a massive short term influx of important resources.

EDIT 2: what if the anchored platforms among the clouds take the place of the orbital laboratories? You now have a place to gather resources (the platform) as well as a reasonably / hopefully realistic manner in which to gather both energy and metal.

You'd need to be removing a lot of energy to halt the rotation of gas on a GIANT GAS PLANET.

And no, it wouldn't cause it to self-destruct.

Better off stripping away the lighter elements and using them for fusion. I think that would be more efficient, but I haven't done the math, and I'm not going to because frankly I can't be bothered.

What if gas giants could be mined out? At that point it might be a more strategically sound decision to take over a moon or two while everyone else fights over the gas giant because once that gas giant is mined out, they lose the resource income while you still have your comfortable metal/energy income from your extra moon or two.

haha yah I have dabbled in fusion ideas and all that. The calculations would be annoying as none other. Darn. I was just trying to get inspiration about ways to crack / get at the gas giant core from thinking about what might happen if the Earth stopped spinning / how we might get at our metal core.

Ultimately getting at the metal in Earth's core and that in a Gas Giant's core isn't drastically different, is it not?

EDIT: I'm not so sure we couldn't remove that much energy from the Gas Giant winds. Remember, we are a race who invented Halley's which are basically capable of changing the rotational energy of large moons, small and medium planets, at will in a short period of time, directly impacting their orbits and allowing us to aim planets pinpoint accurately at a distant celestial object. That takes a serious amount of energy transfer in the planet(oid)'s orbital system. And yet we can do that. With this as something to provide a benchmark for the limits of the commander's technology, why can we not meaningfully impact (maybe not stop, but cause a non-trivial effect in) the rotational speed of the winds in a gas giant.

I'm going to ask this again because it is essentially what the crux of my argument lies upon, if the rotational speed of the winds in a gas giant was reduced by a non-trivial, meaningful amount could there be any side effects to the metal core of the gas giant that might allow the commander to harvest the recently released/available metal? This is a question for you just as much as I because I think you have a better grasp on these sorts of celestial mechanics and whatnot than I could hope to have.

How do you plan on slowing these winds exactly?

If the winds did slow, I suppose it is possible that heavier elements (metals) would fall toward the core, but I imagine the scenario would be something like:

Massive layered fog over the entire surface reaching up toward space
Ocean made up of whatever is heavier than the fog
Core made up of whatever is heavier than the ocean.

Not exactly ideal and in reality it's not going to happen. This is very "spherical cows in a vacuum".

You could definitely use fusion to step up the element chain to get to metals. I'm sure a race of intergalactic immortal war robots could pull it off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis

Explain the bit where they wait for the supernova and catch all the heavy elements.

there is no need to. What you need is a big-*** fusion reactor that turns it into iron or heavier elements. As a game-play bonus, either such a fusion reactor emits energy but no metal, or it emits metal but no energy (or even costs energy). The reason is that iron is -in nuclear terms- quite an ideal metal. heavier metals require an energy input, lighter elements generate energy.

If you want to get two-billion-years-into-the-future sci fi, you could use a Weylforge (props to Orion's arm) where you basically use a black hole as a fusion generator to forge heavier elements. (remember that the accretion disk of a black hole can get hot enough for fusion).


TLDR:
So yea, metal production is very possible, but it'll generate no energy (break-even) or even costs energy. Alternatively it can produce tons of energy but no metal.

What element is the metal that is used in this game?
It looks to be in a gaseous state and is condensed to form a robot. This is a fantasy world so lets assume that this element is undiscovered or just plain imaginary. We can just call it Energon for now. So we can assume that energon would exist naturally somewhere in the universe in a gaseous state, why not in some layer of a gas giant. We could then build special orbital collectors to "reclaim" it. Granted it should not be as efficient to reclaim it as a gas as it is as a solid. The extractors would cost energy to run so they would be comparable to TA metal makers.

I always got he impression that the lathe is 3D printing the unit rather than spraying it as a gass.

I thought it was a nano swarm plus the raw materials.

The stuff is not built with gas. What looks like gas is actually supposed to be a cloud of nano-particles which conglomerate to build the structure / unit in its entirety. It looks kinda similar but the nano-particle keeps the building more or less localized whereas the gaseous build method would not.

Well.... the fusion system that is currently used in natute is essentially one big fusion chain which culminates in the production of iron & other metals towards its end. I'm not sure exactly where a graph/flowchart of this fusion path is shown. However, I believe only small batches of metal could be made at a time on account of the vast amount of energy released by the reaction. I guess in that way a fusion reactor could produce both metal and energy - energy in huge, huge amounts and metal in medium or small amounts?

Additionally, the actual threat of creating your own personal supernova is negligible provided you know how much hydrogen/helium/whatever is being fused. Through that, you can figure out energy released in whatnot... just because you fuse elements to create a metal towards the end of the fusion chain does not equal supernova.

Could be wrong on this, but pretty sure I have my facts correct this time

in my post a few posts above i outline how this can work.