In order for some context, I need you all to remember 2010 Space Odyssey. Now, its been established to some degree that you will be able to mine Gas Giants for resources for fuel for technologies, ships, and even for your generators. The intent of this game above and beyond everything is to annihilate planets. Thus, if at any point a player or players realize that another player, faction, group, alliance, what-have-you is utilizing a gas giant to fuel their economies, can the existing players take a planet/moon/asteroid and slam it into the Gas Giant. In doing this, depending on the scale of the planetary body crashing into a hydrogen DENSE celestial body, will the system appropriately react to this? In other words, if an asteroid crashed into a gas giant, would the system display scar marks that would trail across its atmosphere for hours in-game? We've seen this happen in real-life where a comet slammed into Jupiter and for weeks it left a scar in the cloud wall from the impact. Equally, if we were to drive a moon or even something equivalent to Io/Mars/Earth into a Gas Giant, would the impact + mass cause the Gas Giant to ignite into a miniature sun? If so, would this destabilize the system due to a sudden increase in radiation and CMEs. Further, if this occurs, would there be any technology that exists that a player can research & unlock that allows him/her to channel the energies of this micro-star/proto-star against other players in the system like a cosmic flamethrower? After all, if all celestial bodies are dynamic in game with the exception of the sun itself, this SHOULD, by the name and intent of the game, be part of the gameplay right?
In theory, you could turn a gas giant into a star, but not simply by lobbing a moon, or even a planet the size of Earth at it. There just wouldn't be enough mass added. Maybe, maybe, if you were able to make it collide with another gas giant. I suggest you look up Universe Sandbox, though I don't know if it can simulate star formation.
A dozen Jupiter Masses (Mj) for a Brown Dwarf... 6 Dozen (70-80 Mj) for a Red Dwarf. If you're interested in Stars and Gas-Giants in the scientific sense then we've got a cool thread you can totally geek-out in. Let's keep this topic focused on Combat around (and potentially within the clouds of) Gas Giants
Well we've seen flying engineers in the preview. Maybe an advanced flying engineer that you can land in the upper layers (the surface) of the gas giant that makes flying structures? Flying wind turbines that generate tons of power. A flying airbase. Maybe even a flying aircraft carrier for gas giants only.
I can't think of any way to have land units participate in a fight between two giant flying death forts. Unless you could build bridges between your base and your opponent's.
While you can't turn Jupiter into a star, it is not ruled out that you could turn Jupiter into a catastrophic thermonuclear bomb. The limitations to this was calculated at Lawrence Livermore in the 1970s, as a continuation of the work done to check to make sure Earth's oceans wouldn't ignite due to the deuterium content of water. Necessary Conditions for the Initiation and Propagation of Nuclear Detonation Waves in Plane Atmospheres by Weaver and Wood, couldn't rule out a self-sustaining ignition shock-wave in a planetary atmosphere at a deuterium concentration of more than 1 percent at ordinary liquid densities. Although this makes the oceans safe, Jupiter is big, and it might have segregated a deuterium layer deep inside which has a high enough concentration to allow a self-sustaining nuclear ignition. Then if you drop a configuration of plutonium designed to detonate the deuterium by a nuclear explosion at the appropriate depth, you could get a detonation wave that ignites the entire deuterium layer within a very short time, the time it takes a shock wave to encircle jupiter. The energy output could convert a non-negligible fraction of the deuterium in Jupiter to He3/tritium, and release enormous amount of energy. If 1 Earth mass of deuterium is ignited by the ignition shock wave, the energy release is 10^38 J, over a very short time, perhaps an hour or two and this is already 10,000 times the energy output of the sun in a full year. The resulting explosion would destroy that part of the world facing Jupiter, and probably bake the rest. I don't lose sleep over this, though. If there is a natural trigger for such an explosion, perhaps the collison of a rocky planet with a gas giant, one might experimentally observe such plantary mini-supernovas somewhere. SOURCE: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questi ... nto-a-star
I'm not sure that either: a) you could make a warhead capable of functioning at the pressures required to hit any hypothetical deuterium layer; 200GPa is the start of the liquid metallic hydrogen layer, and that goes up to an estimated 3+TPa if you can get to the "core" boundary (for comparison, the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana trench 11,000 metres below sea level is approximately 1,100 atmospheres, or 0.11GPa) b) or that there would be enough of a concentration of deuterium in any layer (either "atmosphere" or the superdense liquid-metallic hydrogen) that even managing to get a warhead into place would lend itself to a self-sustaining reaction Those are based upon the assumption that any proposed deuterium layer would be inside the (pretty huge) metallic hydrogen envelope, probably towards the bottom if you allow for gravitational separation, and also make the assumption that there are not enough internal currents to carry the deuterium out and continually mix it with the rest of the hydrogen. I can't think of a warhead structure that would allow it to remain intact enough at 1TPa to not have already triggered, but still remain viable as a warhead for when you hit 2+TPa. Standard fission just needs pressure to trigger (put greater than the critical mass of fuel together and it explodes by itself), but those numbers are just too big for my feeble understanding to envisage a viable delivery method
I added my two cents on another post, but I guess I'll toss another two in here as well... I like the idea of gas giants hosting modular orbital platform pieces, which can then be built upon as though they were land. I envision players building huge mobile floating bases, filling them with guns and air factories, then propelling the whole base around the planet like a giant battleship. Base v. Base! Ground units could be used also if there were a way to board the enemy platform. Maybe a cool use of the unit cannon would be possible here. If the bases moved slowly enough, the asteroid strike option would still be relevant here.
That sounds cool, though I do wonder if it might be simpler and more feasible to be able to engage in combat using space-travelling units, such as starfighters, orbital transports and perhaps even starships/capital ships. I'm sure this has been discussed in detail throughout the forums but I havn't seen a definite post stating if 'space combat' will be an element in PA. Combat around gas giants seems to be a good example of how/why it might be worth considering.
There will be no 'Deep Space' combat in PA as per the Confirmed Features List. Don't forget, the Gas Giant itself might not require any land mass itself, and the 'combat' would take place across the multitude of Moons normally found in orbit, our own Jupiter has 67 'moons'. Admittedly this is Dependant on how they implement Interplanetary travel, but it would be something that works well with the core gameplay(fighting on a planet) but still stand out as it's own thing. Mike
As Knight said, I imagine combat around a Gas Giant to be similar to an Island Hopping campaign where the players will fight across the planets moons to gain ground from which to harvest/siphon the planets resources. Of course the more moons you can control the more secure you'll be able to make the Gas Giant. Simply because I imagine it'll be easier to move between the moons than it will be to get to them from another planet, smashing asteroids into some of the moons etc. Combat for these planets though will come down mostly to how the Gas Giants are utilised, if you can build something in their atmosphere the harvest them, or if something is built on its moons which siphons from the planet. Once something like this is finalised, which I believe it hasn't been yet, then it'll be easier to work out how we might fight for them. Of course I look forward to all the planet types and the different ways to exploit them, and naturally how I'll be able to wrestle them from my enemies cold robotic hands!
This is a very good point as well, Mechanics like these often tend to be very dependant on other things, which is why Uber is focused right now on making things work on a single planet, as that is the 'Foundation' layer of Combat that needs to work before you can build the rest of the 'combat house' on it. Mike
The reason I asked was because if the multiplayer matches can get up to 40 people, what's to stop 20 people from lobbing hundreds of asteroids at a gas giant to ignite the hydrogen atmospheres of the gas giant and cause problems for the opposing alliance? Or, if they do include the ability to put massive engine on planets and move those or even moons, what happens when you launch 20 moons at a Gas Giant?
Fun? Dwarf Fortress style? But if they may make it so moons are useful to take resources from the gas giant then you may not want to use the moons like that since you remove our resource supply.
I highly doubt the availability for hundreds of asteroids to be on one map, also I imagine the resources required to even move the bloody thing through space would be huge, so I think it would be a rare thing to happen tbh.
