Gas Planets

[mmyesrice]

Gas planets could be a place to go scoop up hydrogen or other gases to use for your ships and structures. Perhaps you could harness the power of their electromagnetic fields. It would probably take a bigger and more powerful ship to do so, and it would have to be balanced correctly. They could also harbor many moons which would provide an advantage for being close to each other, but maybe not have as many resources and be less likely to be habitable and have more rugged terrain. They would also just provide more diversity throughout the universe.

[Anaximander]

1) They are called Gas Giants

2) It's a good idea, only problem being they are Giants and have to be larger in volume than a planet. Besides that, the devs should first refine solid mineral gathering, before moving to gas extraction in the form of Gas Giants. The problem with the gathering part, being that the game has no water physics in the way you would expect, thus gas physics would be clunky (carved gas giant surfaces as you "mine" gas), which in the context of a voxel octree shape, means every time you mine, if the voxels were to adjust for removal of "volume", it would have to alter the entire of the gas voxel giant's shape by a certain margin per gathering cycle you perform.

3) The moons ideas is nice, only again, the size of the planets s very limited for the moment (100 km radius planets) so moons are quite smaller than you'd expect.

So, it's more of a cool feature to have Gas Giants, but not very crucial to the game? So it can wait for later on down the game's history I guess I mean, it's something the Devs have said already, that more features will come as the game goes on post launch, so, it's not that crazy to have Gag Giants come a year post launch

[yamamushi]

In the DU Explorers interview with JC Baillie, we asked him if there were going to be gas giants and he said no, at least not at release.

 

Before gas giants, I'd hope they'd add weather so that flying into one would be a little more dramatic. 

[Anasasi]

I believe Gas Giants would be an interesting source for large amounts of materials ungatherable through a standard planet. But as Twerk has said, it'd look and function oddly because of the fact that there are no water physics, or, very limited water physics  

I think it would be an awesome idea to be able to build a low orbit mining station that continuously mined the gas that you chose to mine after surveying the planets gas composition, or alternatively, had a ship that did the same thing (for safeties sake, of course). With the ability to mine gas giants, it would give them a use instead of just being celestial bodies that you use as navigational points.  

But, unfortunately, if they are to be in the game, it'll be later on down the track, post launch. As both these gents have stated above me.  

[mmyesrice]

1) They are called Gas Giants

 

2) It's a good idea, only problem being they are Giants and have to be larger in volume than a planet. Besides that, the devs should first refine solid mineral gathering, before moving to gas extraction in the form of Gas Giants. The problem with the gathering part, being that the game has no water physics in the way you would expect, thus gas physics would be clunky (carved gas giant surfaces as you "mine" gas), which in the context of a voxel octree shape, means every time you mine, if the voxels were to adjust for removal of "volume", it would have to alter the entire of the gas voxel giant's shape by a certain margin per gathering cycle you perform.

 

3) The moons ideas is nice, only again, the size of the planets s very limited for the moment (100 km radius planets) so moons are quite smaller than you'd expect.

 

So, it's more of a cool feature to have Gas Giants, but not very crucial to the game? So it can wait for later on down the game's history I guess I mean, it's something the Devs have said already, that more features will come as the game goes on post launch, so, it's not that crazy to have Gag Giants come a year post launch

 

Let me respond to your points:

 

1. I know that, and I have no excuse. They're gas and they're planets, so why not!?

 

2a. I am aware of the technical limitations. I may not be the best programmer, but I know some stuff and I have suggestions. Harvesting from gas planets could be more like filtering gas from the atmosphere, rather than mining it. The atmosphere could be just like the atmosphere on all planets, where the atmosphere would kind of just be there. It could function as a single element all together, and as ships collect gas from it, it would get smaller accordingly. It doesn't have to have fluid physics. And as long as the atmosphere is just a single object as I described, it wouldn't be too much of a problem to implement gas planets larger than 100km radius.

 

3. I just did the math and a moon the size of Europa would still be 25 km radius, which is plenty big for smaller cities and creations. Space Engineers, for example, has very small planets and moons, too, and it works out (or it would if the game would run right).

[mmyesrice]

So yeah, this would definitely not be a high priority task for alpha, but I think that it would be a nice addition and create so cool scenery, even if they weren't all that functional. (though in my opinion I think they could have many uses)

[Anaximander]

Let me respond to your points:

 

1. I know that, and I have no excuse. They're gas and they're planets, so why not!?

 

2a. I am aware of the technical limitations. I may not be the best programmer, but I know some stuff and I have suggestions. Harvesting from gas planets could be more like filtering gas from the atmosphere, rather than mining it. The atmosphere could be just like the atmosphere on all planets, where the atmosphere would kind of just be there. It could function as a single element all together, and as ships collect gas from it, it would get smaller accordingly. It doesn't have to have fluid physics. And as long as the atmosphere is just a single object as I described, it wouldn't be too much of a problem to implement gas planets larger than 100km radius.

 

3. I just did the math and a moon the size of Europa would still be 25 km radius, which is plenty big for smaller cities and creations. Space Engineers, for example, has very small planets and moons, too, and it works out (or it would if the game would run right).

As Yama pointed out, the Devs build modularly on the game, literally from the ground up, either with Combat or Mining, they start fro  a player on a planet, and extrapolate the results into a larger scope.

 

That being said, a gas giant, for filtering and the such you suggested, would need :

 

1) a new system of mineral depletion other than voxel consumption : A gas giant has 1 billion metric tonnes of minerals, with percentages of them being "harvested" on every filtering cycle. That means, that for every, let's say, 1000 m(3) of minerals you mine, 1% of them will be gold, 3% of them will be iron and 96% would be silica - that's sand . That can be enhanced as a number, by "gas harvesting" skill training, making that 4% mineral you prospected out of the gas dust you gathered, into "10% of the total gas harvest is minerals" that in turn drains on a planet's collective pool of resources - as a gas giant is a swirling soup of mollecules, it's not like a planet, where veins of minerals exist. So, a gas giant harvesting group, would be making money due to "quanity mining" not "quality mining" as in asteroids or planet mining operations, not much different than oil-riggers IRL. And we need to get "quality mining" straight, before we move to Quantity mining

 

2) It would demand - as Yama pointed out - atmospheric physics, like buoyancy for floating a 'cloud city" (wink-wink nudge-nudge Lando is the man). That being said, the Devs would also have to introduce a radiation threat for survival, as Gas Giants are pretty much a star with a lot of particles around them. Stars are thermonuclear fusion explosions. They can bake you alive. So, here's a risk / reward sitatuino for people to actually find worthwhile harvesting gas.

 

It's not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when" for Gas Giants to be implemented. It's just that they need too many steps for them to be added properly and the Devs follow a "modular development" mentality, so they don't just bolt for one feature, then try to cram features around it for it to work. Which is why the game is built around the idea of voxel building, as it's about building in the game, before there's anything to destroy. Same goes for mining. You start from a solid world, so the Devs provide the players with tools to build and mine on those worlds first.

 

I mean, if an expansion came out, named "Stellar Frontier", it would be a fittng expansion for Gas Giants to be implemented, along with, hopefully, heavy gravity worlds, or denser atmosphere worlds, just so we can get that survival vibe going hard

 

 

So yeah, Gas Giants would be the "end-game" mining gameplay. You mastered ground, then asteroid and finally, gas-giant mining. No need to go out and harvest a vein manually, just let a machine scoop up minerals for you, you earned it by training up to that point

[Lethys]

As Yama pointed out, the Devs build modularly on the game, literally from the ground up, either with Combat or Mining, they start fro  a player on a planet, and extrapolate the results into a larger scope.

 

That being said, a gas giant, for filtering and the such you suggested, would need :

 

1) a new system of mineral depletion other than voxel consumption : A gas giant has 1 billion metric tonnes of minerals, with percentages of them being "harvested" on every filtering cycle. That means, that for every, let's say, 1000 m(3) of minerals you mine, 1% of them will be gold, 3% of them will be iron and 96% would be silica - that's sand . That can be enhanced as a number, by "gas harvesting" skill training, making that 4% mineral you prospected out of the gas dust you gathered, into "10% of the total gas harvest is minerals" that in turn drains on a planet's collective pool of resources - as a gas giant is a swirling soup of mollecules, it's not like a planet, where veins of minerals exist. So, a gas giant harvesting group, would be making money due to "quanity mining" not "quality mining" as in asteroids or planet mining operations, not much different than oil-riggers IRL. And we need to get "quality mining" straight, before we move to Quantity mining

 

2) It would demand - as Yama pointed out - atmospheric physics, like buoyancy for floating a 'cloud city" (wink-wink nudge-nudge Lando is the man). That being said, the Devs would also have to introduce a radiation threat for survival, as Gas Giants are pretty much a star with a lot of particles around them. Stars are thermonuclear fusion explosions. They can bake you alive. So, here's a risk / reward sitatuino for people to actually find worthwhile harvesting gas.

 

It's not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when" for Gas Giants to be implemented. It's just that they need too many steps for them to be added properly and the Devs follow a "modular development" mentality, so they don't just bolt for one feature, then try to cram features around it for it to work. Which is why the game is built around the idea of voxel building, as it's about building in the game, before there's anything to destroy. Same goes for mining. You start from a solid world, so the Devs provide the players with tools to build and mine on those worlds first.

 

I mean, if an expansion came out, named "Stellar Frontier", it would be a fittng expansion for Gas Giants to be implemented, along with, hopefully, heavy gravity worlds, or denser atmosphere worlds, just so we can get that survival vibe going hard

 

 

So yeah, Gas Giants would be the "end-game" mining gameplay. You mastered ground, then asteroid and finally, gas-giant mining. No need to go out and harvest a vein manually, just let a machine scoop up minerals for you, you earned it by training up to that point

 

Problem with this is: you can't implement such a thing at release (besides all the other constraints) because everyone would just go as fast as possible for a gas giant. Why run around for hours, search, dig, mine, rinse, repeat when you just get it automatically? Yes it won't yield as much as normal mining but still: players are lazy as fuck.

 

For end game (years down the road) and if it's well balanced, I see no problem with it.

 

I'm all in for more diversity in planets too

[mmyesrice]

Well I wasn't suggesting that you should be able to get rare materials. I was thinking just hydrogen for your ships, like maybe people could go and scoop up hydrogen from the atmosphere and bring it back to a processing plant on a moon to be sold. People can then go there and buy fuel for their spacecraft. Scooping equipment should be expensive to make so that you have to be committed to the job and can't just strap one on your ship and have infinite fuel.

[Anaximander]

Well I wasn't suggesting that you should be able to get rare materials. I was thinking just hydrogen for your ships, like maybe people could go and scoop up hydrogen from the atmosphere and bring it back to a processing plant on a moon to be sold. People can then go there and buy fuel for their spacecraft. Scooping equipment should be expensive to make so that you have to be committed to the job and can't just strap one on your ship and have infinite fuel.

You can get hdrogen in the vacuum, not to mention, you can get hydrogen by things like.... electrolysis. And the starting planet has a pretty good supply of hydrogen. >.>

 

You don't actually harvest gas giants for things you can find on planet surfaces or seas, like hydrogen isotopes. You can find a lot more hydrogen isotopes in asteroid belts than on gas giants, by virute of one being naked to radiation from a star 9asteroids). So as you see, asteroid mining = fuel harvesting, if hydrogen isotopes are the fuel.

 

Gas giants would simply have to be that form of "get a lot of resources, but you need high skills training to make the effort worthy".

 

Otherwise, as Lethys pointed, why bother mining on planets?

 

It could be a combination of both asteroid and planet mining, doing so on a Gas Giant, but again, it would have to be "scoop up a large volume, prospect it, get the minerals you need out of it, most of the things you harvested are dust though" which would make for a good balance between planet miners, asteroid miners and gas giant harvesters, at least, in my opinion.

[mmyesrice]

I think the main point of a gas giant would be to have stuff orbiting it. Rings. Moons. Captured asteroids. It could be a very interesting place. You don't need to go into the atmosphere to unleash their potential. Sure there could be floating bases and stuff. I think that that would be really cool. However now that I think about it, since gas giants are composed mainly of hydrogen, there isn't any gas light enough to make stuff float so that wouldn't work I guess. Unless it was heated. I don't know.

 

Getting off topic. The whole point of gas giants is that they're like mini solar systems where you can travel from moon to moon very quickly. That's the main reason I like them.

 

Also, metallic hydrogen! I have absolutely no idea what you would use it for, but it exists in planets like Jupiter. Maybe it could have some use. However retrieving it might be slightly unrealistic.

[Anaximander]

I think the main point of a gas giant would be to have stuff orbiting it. Rings. Moons. Captured asteroids. It could be a very interesting place. You don't need to go into the atmosphere to unleash their potential. Sure there could be floating bases and stuff. I think that that would be really cool. However now that I think about it, since gas giants are composed mainly of hydrogen, there isn't any gas light enough to make stuff float so that wouldn't work I guess. Unless it was heated. I don't know.

 

Getting off topic. The whole point of gas giants is that they're like mini solar systems where you can travel from moon to moon very quickly. That's the main reason I like them.

 

Also, metallic hydrogen! I have absolutely no idea what you would use it for, but it exists in planets like Jupiter. Maybe it could have some use. However retrieving it might be slightly unrealistic.

That's not the case. Gas Giants are called as such because they are a collection of mollecules, like their rings is a collection of mirco-asteroids. 

 

A base could float on the surface of a gas giant, similar to how a boat sails on water, since oxygen is lighter than the dense mass of mollecules it "floats" on.

 

You could have a gas giant that's iron rich, with the iron existign in the form of dust, thin enough to be swirled around within the gas giant itself.as its winds rage.

 

 

[mmyesrice]

That's not the case. Gas Giants are called as such because they are a collection of mollecules, like their rings is a collection of mirco-asteroids. 

 

A base could float on the surface of a gas giant, similar to how a boat sails on water, since oxygen is lighter than the dense mass of mollecules it "floats" on.

 

You could have a gas giant that's iron rich, with the iron existign in the form of dust, thin enough to be swirled around within the gas giant itself.as its winds rage.

 

 

 

That's true.

[mrjacobean]

Adding my bit into the discussion, you could attach the amount of minerals in the atmosphere to the gas giant itself as data. When a 'filtering' operation takes place, it takes away from that value rather than taking away voxels. I would say that extracting minerals from a gas giant should be a slow process, and that there could be gas pockets that have a higher percentage of a certain material and it moves around the 'surface' over time.

[Anaximander]

Adding my bit into the discussion, you could attach the amount of minerals in the atmosphere to the gas giant itself as data. When a 'filtering' operation takes place, it takes away from that value rather than taking away voxels. I would say that extracting minerals from a gas giant should be a slow process, and that there could be gas pockets that have a higher percentage of a certain material and it moves around the 'surface' over time.

That's what I said really. You mine a quantiy of mollecules until you feel the bankms, prospect the collected ammount of mollecules (ID tied t o the gas giant), the minerals extracted are removed from the Gas Giant's total resource counter.

 

It's a good system in any way it's implemented, it's the fact that gas giants actually need more niches to get to them code wise that's the issue with them.

[Limyaael]

A base could float on the surface of a gas giant, similar to how a boat sails on water, since oxygen is lighter than the dense mass of mollecules it "floats" on.

 

Not really. Air doesn't work like water.

 

You can get hdrogen in the vacuum, not to mention, you can get hydrogen by things like.... electrolysis. And the starting planet has a pretty good supply of hydrogen. >.>

And electrolysis just so happens to be the manner in which we produce oxygen for spacecraft fuel. Hydrogen is also a byproduct produced in a lot of industrial applications of electrolysis too.

 

As an unrelated sidenote, electroplating something via electrolysis is really cool.

 

You don't actually harvest gas giants for things you can find on planet surfaces or seas, like hydrogen isotopes. You can find a lot more hydrogen isotopes in asteroid belts than on gas giants, by virute of one being naked to radiation from a star 9asteroids). So as you see, asteroid mining = fuel harvesting, if hydrogen isotopes are the fuel.

There's a lot more fuel to be found in a gas giant though. And as they have enormous magnetic fields too, they've got lots of excited isotopic structures aside from all the really weird stuff lurking thousands of kilometres beneath their "surfaces'. However...

 

Otherwise, as Lethys pointed, why bother mining on planets?

Because it would be a horrible nightmare.

 

Ignoring the high gravity that would require a ton of constant thrust aimed downwards just to stay afloat, the gas giants are probably the most dangerous part of the entire solar system, and that's including the hellscapes of Venus and Mercury. The winds on any of them are insanely high (Jupiter has ten hour days but has a radius 10x larger), so much so that NASA have concluded that any such mission wouldn't be able to be accomplished by setting down some massive ship with a scoop and having a refinery on board to pass off to smaller vessels to carry away. Any mining ship will have a very limited operating life set mostly around diving into the planet's atmosphere and then returning to orbiting vessels to take the materials elsewhere.

 

There's also the problem that in the most diverse giants we know (Neptune and Uranus) it's theorised that their atmospheres are actually full of rocks and chunks of ice.

 

These planets also have pressures that ramp up pretty quickly, temperatures that are enormous (Jupiter's core is hotter than the surface of the sun but with 4 trillion Pascals weighing you down, approximately 40 million atmospheres of pressure).

 

Of course this stuff is science-reality, not the science fiction of the game. But if a mining company's just able to set down a ship they built three minutes ago, load it with some fuel and a refinery and set up shop permanently I'd be pretty annoyed.

 

1) a new system of mineral depletion other than voxel consumption : A gas giant has 1 billion metric tonnes of minerals, with percentages of them being "harvested" on every filtering cycle. That means, that for every, let's say, 1000 m(3) of minerals you mine, 1% of them will be gold, 3% of them will be iron and 96% would be silica - that's sand . That can be enhanced as a number, by "gas harvesting" skill training, making that 4% mineral you prospected out of the gas dust you gathered, into "10% of the total gas harvest is minerals" that in turn drains on a planet's collective pool of resources - as a gas giant is a swirling soup of mollecules, it's not like a planet, where veins of minerals exist. So, a gas giant harvesting group, would be making money due to "quanity mining" not "quality mining" as in asteroids or planet mining operations, not much different than oil-riggers IRL. And we need to get "quality mining" straight, before we move to Quantity mining

I like this, it describes my general thoughts about how the mining would work too. Keep gas giants looking much the same (considering that they're enormous and would take even longer to mine were they regularly voxel planets) and restrict a lot of their elements to mostly simpler mathematical calculations. Want to know how big it should look? Take the planet's original volume, subtract mined volume, set new radius for the swirling clouds. How much of your mined gases are actually useful? Just a number.

 

Stuff like wind speed and its damages could be pre-calculated stuff - devs plug in some ranges for the speed to be, its particle density (you didn't think all that gold and iron you found wouldn't damage you if you didn't pick it up, did you?) for each giant to a formula that dictates how much it damages shields, treat it like a regular weapon hitting armour.

 

2) It would demand - as Yama pointed out - atmospheric physics, like buoyancy for floating a 'cloud city" (wink-wink nudge-nudge Lando is the man). That being said, the Devs would also have to introduce a radiation threat for survival, as Gas Giants are pretty much a star with a lot of particles around them. Stars are thermonuclear fusion explosions. They can bake you alive. So, here's a risk / reward sitatuino for people to actually find worthwhile harvesting gas.

Gas giants don't have dangerous radiation for the same reason stars do. Stars have it because they're nuclear fission factories spewing it across the cosmos. Gas giants have it because their cores are enormous balls of magnetic hydrogen producing radiation belts larger than the Earth. Stars make, giants trap.

 

And buoyancy physics won't be needed because stuff just can't float in a gas giant.

 

So yeah, Gas Giants would be the "end-game" mining gameplay. You mastered ground, then asteroid and finally, gas-giant mining. No need to go out and harvest a vein manually, just let a machine scoop up minerals for you, you earned it by training up to that point

The ultimate end game. It should be an expensive, dangerous endeavour only the most well organised crews can put together. Gas giant mining shouldn't be an easy venture - it should be hell, but a hell absolutely full to the brim of money-making opportunities.

 

---

 

All the stuff about numerous moons is also pretty fun. Gas giants could make for interesting local bases in a system - you've got a dangerous but profitable mining operation, and a HQ spread out over a system of moons that could really showcase the seamless planetary transitions. Easy place to setup detection radar too.

[FD3242]

1) They are called Gas Giants

 

2) It's a good idea, only problem being they are Giants and have to be larger in volume than a planet. Besides that, the devs should first refine solid mineral gathering, before moving to gas extraction in the form of Gas Giants. The problem with the gathering part, being that the game has no water physics in the way you would expect, thus gas physics would be clunky (carved gas giant surfaces as you "mine" gas), which in the context of a voxel octree shape, means every time you mine, if the voxels were to adjust for removal of "volume", it would have to alter the entire of the gas voxel giant's shape by a certain margin per gathering cycle you perform.

 

3) The moons ideas is nice, only again, the size of the planets s very limited for the moment (100 km radius planets) so moons are quite smaller than you'd expect.

 

So, it's more of a cool feature to have Gas Giants, but not very crucial to the game? So it can wait for later on down the game's history I guess I mean, it's something the Devs have said already, that more features will come as the game goes on post launch, so, it's not that crazy to have Gag Giants come a year post launch

What if there small ?

[5p34k3r]

I'm sure they could utilize a similar system to what elite dangerous did with the fuel scoop. High orbit around a sun, collecting particles from the corono sphere (probably wrong, not sure on the actual atmospheric level of the sun it's gathering from)

 

Would need a ship that can absorb or otherwise nullify/divert the electromagnetic field. As well as some dm good thrusters! The said module, hardpoint would deploy from the ship that's in a lower orbit, that only certain ships with the structural / technological fittings could do.