Asteroids hitting gas giants

As we approach the strech goal of adding gas giants, I see the asteroid is getting ever closer to colliding with the gas giant. However, I am curious as to what effect if any this will have on the gas giant. A 100 km wide asteroid hitting the earth could wipe out life as we know it and cause catastrophic global upheaval. A 100 km wide asteroid hitting a gas giant such as jupiter would go... blip? Will gas giants be made relatively immune to the effects of asteroid impact, unless the asteroid directly impacts on or very near the structures floating on the gas giant surface?

From real events like the meteor that hit Jupiter it left a dark spot on the planet.

Nothing else really as it's gas. Maybe sending a asteroid towards a gas giant wont work, it just burns and falls endlessly :geek:

Perhaps the rockets could ignite the atmosphere

Perhaps sending an asteroid towards a gas planet has more to do with trying to destroy orbital structures around the planet. So someone has set up a base of orbital structures and as the asteroid strikes the planet it effectively punches a hole in the collection of structures in orbit.

And perhaps the point of impact's "dark spot" could render resources ungatherable at that spot (the gas is useless). Not only are structures destroyed but resource gathering at that spot becomes pointless.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 (a comet) did a lot more than "just leave a dark spot." After it split apart due to the gravitational pull of Jupiter, it created several giant fireballs that left spots as large as Earth.

I just looked it up and the fireball was 24,000K and explosions of up to six million megatons (largest detonated fusion bomb was 50 megatons). The surface temperature of the sun is under 6,000 Kelvin.

But yeah, since you can't really build a "base" on a gas giant I don't really know what a meteor would be hitting.

Unless someone comes up with something really interesting, just having asteroids kick up a huge storm with the same same effect on game play as lava makes sense.

I like the idea that KEWs aren't just a "one size fits all" solution to planet wrecking, or more simply put not having the same effect on the different planet types.

Mike

I have been thinking about this as well and initially it did not make sense...although lets face it the effect of asteroids will depend on the planet type. Ideally we'd want different asteroids or the ability to produce the necessary components on that asteroid to produce the catastrophic results needed for the planet type. Basically we would just need asteroids of different compositions.

Earth type planets can be wiped out on the surface by a moderately sized asteroid, although a larger, metallic/superdense asteroid could be used to destroy the planet outright, also depending on wether the asteroid strikes land or sea would result in a different outlook for the people on the planet.

Water planets will be the easiest, asteroid of a moderate size alone will result in a tsunami that will destroy everything on the surface, although actually destroying the planet itself would be much harder as the water can act as a shock absorber over several kilometers, much like the crumple zone in a car on a much bigger scale. Ideally we'd want a way to part the several kilometer deep water or an asteroid big enough to where that is not the issue anymore.

Gas planets could just have a compressed oxydizer within the meteor, causing mass ignition of the gas, or could be destroyed outright by destroying the planet core, although harder for something so massive, maybe make it so that we have to reinforce the asteroid core for this job, or coordinate a dual strike to take out the atmosphere and a followup to kill the core of the planet. Either that or a way to increase the gravity to collapse the planet outright and cause it to ignite like a star, which would have significant effects on other nearby planets.

How they depict the gas giant asteroid impact in the stretch goal image is pretty unimportant, but it also has to be dealt with in the final game. Here's my solution: The asteroid creates a shockwave of hot gas much higher than the normal atmosphere that travels around the gas giant and engulfs all the orbiting structures and units, whose orbits then degrade and fall into the gas giant, never to be seen again. This deals with the "asteroids should destroy stuff" behavior, and is functionally similar to having a large tidal wave on a water planet. As for "big enough asteroids should make target planets useless", the gas giant could afterwards be wracked by huge storms (continued atmospheric upsurges/tidal waves, electrical storms, etc) that make near orbit around the planet unbuildable.

Because really, having the gas giant suddenly gain a molten, semisolid surface (what happens to rocky planets hit by asteroids) would be confusing and stupid. It's a gas giant, there isn't really a "surface" to speak of.

So a giant explosion, dwarfing any nuke, upon impact? Sounds good.

Any HE3 mine close or on planet should be toast, but the stuff in orbit? I feel that would be pushing it, because if you're in orbit, then you're not really in the gas of the gas giant where all the ouch is happening.

Of course if the gas giant was big enough and was very almost a star, a nice compresion/heat wave could ignite some fusion, for a tiny bit I think...

There's my bad idea for the day

What if when an asteroid collided with a gas giant it would change its orbit path so you could essentially nock a gas giant into a slowly decaying orbit into the sun or simply move it further away from planets the enemy controlled. doing this enough times could also possibly change a gas giants mass and thus gravitational pull. This could be used to maybe cause bodies in orbit around it to fall into the gas giant as well forcing players who want them to put resources into moving them into safer orbits.

Although this does not hold up very well with reality as an asteroid colliding with a gas giant would make so little a change to the orbit of such a large body that it would be almost undetectable and significantly changing the mass of a gas giant would probably take a lot more mass then could be harnessed in game, But I don't think uber is trying to replicate reality either either that or maybe the player could need something bigger then an asteroid.

The asteroid should sweep everything from orbit within a certain radius of the impact.
Bigger the asteroid the more destruction, big enough and it'll knock everything out of the sky, but the gas giant itself should remain unharmed.

This way you can 'sterilize' one then move in an setup your own He3 operation.

I believe the whole gas giant thing is getting off hand... kinda blame uber for this

Gas giants and thick gassy atmospheres are not the same, I think Uber should put an end to it. Gas giants are useless unless you can harvest the gas itself from orbit, the core is so small and under so much pressure its nearly useless to land on it. You cant even leave once you're in. I know realistic is off the table.

Gas giants wont be made entirely of gas as far as we know, they will have a lot of high mountains.... still that could change later on.

If gas giants have floating structures a KEW would cause storms which could destroy them depending on the scale of the impact, but destroying stuff in the orbital layer doesn't make a lot of sense.

It can if the impact is big enough to change the boundary of the atmosphere significantly, possibly by a giant wave of heated gas passing around the planet like a tsunami. I guess it's a question of how high your orbit is, but if you're close enough to harvest resources from the atmosphere you'll be wrecked by any sudden shockwave that reaches well above the normal edge of the atmosphere.

I guess that's the main thing we don't know well enough to address: Are these units floating in the atmosphere, or orbiting just outside it?

So I was watching the Total Biscuit interview and I got the impression that planets would have some sort of hit points or a similar mechanic. Or that when an asteroid hits it paints part of the planet with "damage", lava or whatever, and when a certain percentage of the surface area gets painted with damage it explodes. So it'd make sense that it would take more asteroid hits to blow up a bigger planet.

Granted this is just complete guessing. I know we have all been going over every bit of official information on this game like it's the Kennedy assassination or something.

given the massive scale of the typical gas giant, it would take an asteroid of unheard of scale to actually cause any serious damage to a gas giant.

Realistically, the most that is likely to happen is an impact will rearrange the storm systems a bit on your gas giant. Actually breaking a gas giant, I'm perfectly okay with that one being simply impossible for the scope of PA. As for it happening in the real world, It would take an asteroid of a scale never before seen by man. Not sure they even make 'em that big.

To a gas giant, nearly everything is an asteroid.

If you can make rocky planetary engines, you can probably also make gas giant planetary engines (I'm sure I saw them nicknamed 'candles' somewhere, but I can't find the source right now). In fact, those engines may even be (slightly) easier to make.
Basically, yo have a long tube with one end in the low atmosphere and the other in orbital space. The tube pumps hydrogen from the atmosphere and fuse it on both ends. The low end maintains it where it is, the high end pushes the planet around.
Sometimes, realism is more awesome than you would think.