Water Planets/Gas Giants

A asteroid hitting a gas giant will not do as much damage scientifically as the resistance of impact is much lower just a simple test so you can find out:

try to punch into dense air, say mist or even water...
then punch into a brick wall, you probably know which hurts the most...

yes the water will deform, but will return to its original state in less than a minute.
The water absorbs the energy of the punch more gradually than the brick wall, spreading the impact over a longer time, meaning less impulse (thus less pain) :ugeek:

gas giants have a rocky core, but those are so deep inside, the radius of the blast won't reach the outer atmosphere.

I kinda like these kind of mechanics, as gas planets would be less useful than earth like planets, but have other advantages

There was a nice book that is called "Dark as Day" where the story is about a Gas Giant and a old Superweapon from the War in the Solar System, where a Scientist invented Nano-Size mashines that are able to instanly change Hydrogen from Gas-state to Liquid-state.

The idear was that when they are fired into Jupiter or Neptun, all the Gas would instantly change to Liquid state, the Planet would shrink and then in a big boom with a intanse flash of heat and gravity get back to normal size, in witch the intense gravity waves would sweep clean the entire solar system, because of the extreme mass-shifting.

Would be deadly! xD

Would you even need "mountains" in the Gas Giant scenarios, just have buildings float like reinforced dirigibles, similar to Bioshock Infinate, or cloud city in Star Wars.

that would generate little difference between water planets and gas planets, because whats the difference between floating buildings and... well floating buildings? Each planet type should present what unique challenges it can

Yeah, it seems like thats what they intend to do, but the following makes me a bit confused.

Anyway, no opinions on underwater (though not ones that float on top of water) units working in the denser portions of gas giants' atmosphere?

Also, I have nothing against floating cities as well.

A more realistic focus on gas giants would be as valuable resource mines. I mean, if most of your army is powered by fusion reactors, you'd need massive amounts of H3 as fuel, and there's no better place than a gas giant.

Look at it strategically - a gas giant would be huge resource boon, but its atmosphere, temperature, and wind speeds would make normal combat almost impossible. However, as someone else mentioned, gas giants tend to have many moons. In that manner, a fight over the gas giant's resources would *actually* be a fight for control of the orbitals. That would make gas giants enormously valuable to secure, but extremely difficult to do so: even minus combat on the gas giant itself, if I've got refining stations in the upper atmosphere, and you snag a moon or drag an armed asteroid into a low orbit, you can obliterate my resourcing operation without actually directly assaulting the planet, forcing me to use a huge chunk of that resource bonus to fend off opponents.

In larger team games, it could turn gas giant orbitals into massive battlegrounds - you can't afford to let the other team simply control that fuel, but you also can't ignore the heavier elements (ie, mass/metal) that would be far more abundant on the terrestrial planets.

Hell, a large enough gas giant with a half dozen large moons (even Earth-like or Jovian style moons) would support a sizable match by itself.

e1701, that sounds really interesting! One can even look at it that if gas giants do have lots of moons they are also a good source for KEWs and Asteroid ships as you kinda mentioned as well.

Mike

It would be better for structures to float on the surface of the gas giants rather than use mountains imo.

Jupiters core is metallic hydrogen, the fact Jupiter can do this also means it is a murderous place. A submarine could not survive the core.

A gas giant would not be similar to an ocean, its basically an incredibly dense core surrounded by a gaseous atmosphere. Cloud city style would be the best way too do combat and resources with such a planet type. The clouds contain a vast array of resources and as someone earlier stated H3. H3 could easily make the world go round and you could create a centralized use of it. You can produce it through technosorcery or you could mine it on a gas giant. Resources balance is important when you are designing the stellar bodies. Otherwise you could end up with players responding in an entirely different fashion then you intended to particular situations, which can create strange meta's. If a developer can't anticipate a meta in some form he can't balance it. For example a gas giant could create a soft counter to complete resource/terrain destruction. Encase anyone is feeling that ultra late game.

Moons are another abundant resources of gas giants that would be fun too work into it. Due to their mass they have a spectacular number of orbital bodies.

Unless they do anticipate that of course, I certainly believe they are know what they are doing. These kind of topics would only help with their thinking process, giving new insights in their design, so they could either allow, or restrict certain actions. I personally see the forums a bit of a think-tank at the moment.

That does NOT mean we should suggest as much random features as possible, as that will only take them time to read all of it.

On your ideas on moons, I agree, moons of gas-giants would make interesting outposts to defend and manage the mining operations (and possibly have mines themselves).

Why the **** would a planet's gravity change with its density ...?

one-on-r-squared relationship?

Increasing density implies a reduction in volume (and hence radius). Smaller radius means higher surface gravity.

well the distribution of gravity would change, as well as pressure

^^ This, if the earth became a blackhole, the moon would be totally unaffected (ok, well, it might recive slighly less light presure, but the effect would be close to none)


lets look at that "superwepon" to turn a gas into a liquid, there are two ways to do it.

1) Chill it, if you cool it enough it will naturally condense. after you stop the planet will SLOWLY heat up, and SLOWLY expand, Useless as a wep unless you are trying to kill thoes on the planet.

2) You could apply brute force, which would take a LOT of energy.. as in Solar Days worth of energy. this WOULD create a massive explosion the instant you stopped compacting it.. but it would be directly comprable to the total energy you put in.. less the ammount of energy the explosion takes to escape the gravity well...


so.. in all, this is as close to a useless wep as you will get.. honestly, it would be easier to make singularities and chuck em at neighboring planets!




Additionally, crashing astroids into a gas giant should destroy all buildings/units ON the planet (provided that you build on the planet, and not in orbit) and make it uninhabitble for a short period of time (IE 5-10 minutes) but thats it, it should cause the planet to explode of "glass" or anything!

Hate to break it to you guys... but all the gas giants have gravity that would crush any pretty much any kind of manufactured device we can currently make... if not all of them.

The only way you could build/operate around planets like Jupiter is to build in zero-g orbit... and then drop a straw down to the upper atmosphere to suck up fuel.

I made suggestions related to this in another thread, but there's no reason to re-post, I'll just link it. viewtopic.php?p=515203#p515203

I really like the "drink your milkshake" approuch to the cloud mining. I wanted to suggest orbital elevators, but felt it didn't fit with the space gun, and rocket transport systems, and would be too vulnerable; but used to transport liquid or gas, it makes sense to me. It think it would fit very well as a step above the use of sky skimming resource collecting planes, and in-atmosphere, balloon supported, sky filtering stations.

On the matter of a hydrogen ocean in gas giants, I don't like the idea of having units use it. The pressures and gravities of such a sea would be excessively higher than any Earth like ocean. I hope gas giant surfaces are purely sky based.

For water construction: instead of floating all buildings, what if they get built under the ocean surface, so the water acts as a shield?

I'm pretty Saturn has 1 g with Earth like pressure at a certain altitude. The issue should be tidal forces, but that should only effect big, weak objects, like rubble asteroids. Radiation would also be an issue, but we're dealing with armies of robots. I don't mind either being a non-issue, for sake of rule-of-cool.

I am all for the idea of expanded options for orbital units. I am much more excited about this possibility than I am for a navy.

Just take a care that the idea of orbitals doesn't end up overshadowing the concept of interplanetary conflict, moon cannon bombardments, etc.

The advantage of orbitals is plain out convenience. You can build on any side of the planet without having to worry about orbital paths or any of that nonsense.

The disadvantage is scale. A cannon placed on the moon for example should be much bigger and stronger than anything that you could possibly build in orbit.

Yeah, great post (in the other thread)!

I was thinking subterranean oceans on Ice-worlds like Europa, rather than on gas giants. And... otherwise, agreed!

Oh cool, I didn't even notice Saturn was that low-G! So yeah, on certain gas-giants, it should be possible to build in the upper atmosphere.

I think orbitals includes starships that can travel between planets, but that should be clarified by Uber.

That said... orbital structures can be moved, a big advantage compared to static ones.

Also, it may be conceivable to build thrusters and basically move an orbital base from one planet's orbit to another's...

When gas giants were announced as a stretch goal, I immediately thought of Bespin.

A floating city/base in the upper atmosphere where gravity is normal, atmospheric pressure is normal, and sucking up the denser usable gasses from below, while launching air attacks and even moving around the gas giant and using it's base defense towers and such to attack other Bespin style city/bases on the planet.

That is what gas giant combat and resource utilization should be like.

For orbitals, on the small end, I'm seeing sensor satellites, then defense sats, Orbit to ground Ortillery sats, orbital shipyards, large defense stations, trade stations that connect the planetary economy to the solar system economy, etc.

And then mega-structures, such as O'Neill cylinders, which are basically heavily armored space bunkers that you can build bases inside of, using materials either shipped up from the planet through the trade station or some sort of space port, or from the asteroid mining bases.

It can build and store that army, and then it can be mobile to deliver that army.

Also, it being mobile makes it good for Colony Drops.

They can also be taken over, either by attacking the air lock and forcing your way in and fighting for it, or by taking the engines and Colony dropping the whole thing on your enemies base with their own O'Neill Cylinder.

Then you have things like ring worlds and Dyson spheres.

There's a lot that can be done in space with the resources of a solar system or three.

lol wut?

(was that sarcasm?)