gas giants

[404_Not_Found]

Look I know this is probably dumb but I just wanna fly through a planet with no landmass that is nothing but a ball of hyper-pressurized gas which probably requires some special equipment to not crush me.

Also easy source of gaseous resources. (If you can stand the pressure.)

[Tesityr]

This is a great idea... it's not really different than running to a location and using the mining laser on the way. Just a ship flying through a huge cloud, the slower you fly the more you gain over time, just as in mining

It could have 'storms' like lightning and plasma fields, maybe some kind of scorching flame rain that slowly makes you have to recharge your shields if you stay, or rainstorms of a rare material sometimes - I remember hearing that there may be "rainfall of diamonds" within Jupiter's layers some years ago

+1

[404_Not_Found]

Originally posted by Tesityr:

This is a great idea... it's not really different than running to a location and using the mining laser on the way. Just a ship flying through a huge cloud, the slower you fly the more you gain over time, just as in mining

It could have 'storms' like lightning and plasma fields, maybe some kind of scorching flame rain that slowly makes you have to recharge your shields if you stay, or rainstorms of a rare material sometimes - I remember hearing that there may be "rainfall of diamonds" within Jupiter's layers some years ago

+1

Honestly I think some mechanic that means you cannot lurk in a gas giant for extended periods would probably work really well, maybe the ambient pressure is enough to drive you off, but those weather effects could compound the stress on your ship on top of that.

Maybe some storms even mess with your navigation a bit, although it might be pretty terrifying to get lost in a gas giant and find yourself running right into the core...

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

First all planets have a solid core.... even gas giants

Second to make it usable as an easy source of gaseous ressource we'd need new tech that allow landing then building on gases, or something to gather gases from our starship.

Third gas giant are basically stars that didnt gather enough gas (yet) to ignite fusion in their core...
At the lower levels of such planets the pressure turn gases into liquids (so they're basically oceanic planets) then lower down they turn into metals....
In a "normal" enviroonnement (zero to a few thousands atmosphers) those gases, once turned into those states (liquid/metallic), usually go extremely cold (temperature is a kinetical energy, but at the moleculare/atmoic level, if you "freeze" gases to turn them into liquid you reduce their kinteic energy and so their temperature, close to the absolute zero), on a gas giant they actually stay extremely hot because of the pressure (talking in the hundreds for the liquid phase, in the thousands for the metallic one) while staying into those states (liquid/metallic)... the fusion engine didnt start yet, but the planet is still turning the key....
For example on most gas giants the pressure is enough to make it rain diamonds, and that's in the part of the atmospher where gases are still mostly gaseous (it doesnt rain under the seas...).
Even wihtout any knowledge about fluids mechanic, this should tell you enough to figure out what kind of constrain you'd encounter into those environnements.... you're basically asking to be able to fly trough the core of a fusion reactor while it's trying to start

TL;DR: it would be easier to make a starship that can fly trough the ground..... but now in NMS we can also fly trough blackholes which is way more un-imaginable.

[Tesityr]

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

First all planets have a solid core.... even gas giants
<snip>

First of all, no - and it is all theory anyway:

"Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn do not have solid surfaces in the sense that if you dropped in a penny, it would never land with a “clink.” These bodies are mostly composed of hydrogen at temperatures above the “critical point” for hydrogen, meaning there is no sharp boundary between solid, liquid, and gas regions" ~ Marc Kuchner
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

We can only theorize about the absolute center of massive planets and pressure as far as we can detect.

Second of all, it is a GAME as in FICTION as in, it doesn't matter what we 'know' about flying through a gas giant - it can be anything the programmers want to put in as development...

It could be that a ship can only withstand a certain amount of pressure before 'going nearer the centre' and it would actually be fun to have to craft multiple levels of Shields for the different layers of gases and material, as you go deeper to collect more rare chemicals/materials (it could be almost exactly like how we need different levels of Hyperdrives to go to different/farther Star Systems now in the game.

No need to bog down games with such minutia of reality - again, it is all theory bases on 'detections' anyway; hell all images of space are faked and photoshopped from radio detection which has no visible colours. Don't forget one of many quotes saying so:

"it's photoshopped because...it has to be"
~ Robert Simmon, former Senior Program Analyst, Goddard Space Flight Center (Climate and Radiation Laboratory), NASA Earth Observatory

[Tesityr]

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

Originally posted by Tesityr:

First of all, no - and it is all theory anyway:

First of all: yes.

Second of all: Theory is the highest level of certainty in sciences (thus theorems, which are also called "scientific laws").
You probably meant "hypothesis" (which would also be wrong, the different states of matter is a well documented and recognized knowledge, enough to become a "theory"), but lack the knowledge to know the difference between the two...

And third. Tthe planet wouldnt have formed there wasnt a gravitionnal pull created the formation of a rocky core in the first place....

The universe isnt a video game where planet got placed here by a devellooper... (it isnt procedurally generated either... before anyone ask).

"Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn do not have solid surfaces in the sense that if you dropped in a penny, it would never land with a “clink.” ~ Marc Kuchner
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

[404_Not_Found]

Originally posted by Tesityr:

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

First all planets have a solid core.... even gas giants
<snip>

First of all, no - and it is all theory anyway:

"Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn do not have solid surfaces in the sense that if you dropped in a penny, it would never land with a “clink.” These bodies are mostly composed of hydrogen at temperatures above the “critical point” for hydrogen, meaning there is no sharp boundary between solid, liquid, and gas regions" ~ Marc Kuchner
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

We can only theorize about the absolute center of massive planets and pressure as far as we can detect.

Second of all, it is a GAME as in FICTION as in, it doesn't matter what we 'know' about flying through a gas giant - it can be anything the programmers want to put in as development...

It could be that a ship can only withstand a certain amount of pressure before 'going nearer the centre' and it would actually be fun to have to craft multiple levels of Shields for the different layers of gases and material, as you go deeper to collect more rare chemicals/materials (it could be almost exactly like how we need different levels of Hyperdrives to go to different/farther Star Systems now in the game.

No need to bog down games with such minutia of reality - again, it is all theory bases on 'detections' anyway; hell all images of space are faked and photoshopped from radio detection which has no visible colours. Don't forget one of many quotes saying so:

"it's photoshopped because...it has to be"
~ Robert Simmon, former Senior Program Analyst, Goddard Space Flight Center (Climate and Radiation Laboratory), NASA Earth Observatory

Gonna be honest, I've been on the internet so long that all I had to do was read half of the first sentence of that person's posts to know this was another "ummmm actually here's why we can't/should never have this EXTREMELY COOL feature and why YOU are in fact being super unreasonable for even suggesting it!"

I scrolled to your post right away and yep it was that lmao.

This game has random hexagonal worlds and bubbles/floating orbs on worlds, realism went out the window in favor of campy sci-fi a long time ago.

[beamupstc]

While the IRL scientific aspects are definitely complex and interesting, I'm going to loop back to the gameplay idea by noting that it is not particularly out of line with how fast and loose NMS already plays with astrophysics and planetology. (To say nothing of chemistry.)

I think it's a pretty cool one. An exceedingly difficult area to survive in, but the longer you can endure and deeper you can get, the better rewards you can reap. Surviving extreme storms to get storm crystals is a solid model to extend. Having in-ship challenges that extend beyond straight combat would be a rather interesting direction to go, and this one would suit NMS pretty well IMO.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

First all planets have a solid core.... even gas giants

This is not correct. The Juno space mission was sent to research the 2 competing theories of gas giant formation. One theory was that Jupiter had a solid core, the other theory was that Jupiter's core was soft and made primarily of gas and dust.

The answer provided by the Juno space craft was that neither theory was correct. Jupiter's core was larger and more diffuse than was expected. Juno's information gives us a planetary center that is neither solid nor gaseous. The core is dilute. Perhaps a fluid with some solid bits.

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

Third gas giant are basically stars that didnt gather enough gas (yet) to ignite fusion in their core...

This is also incorrect. You are confusing gas giant planets with brown dwarves. The process by which each object forms is entirely different. Brown dwarves are failed stars that didn't gather enough mass to start and sustain nuclear fusion. They form at center of the disk of gas and dust. Gas giant planets form in the proto-planetary disk.

While it is theoretically possible for multiple gas giant planet collisions to create a low mass M type star the total amount of available mass in the proto-planetary disk is insufficient to do so. What would be more likely to happen is that a gas giant and a brown dwarf collision could create a low mass M type star though no examples have been found so far. It is far more likely for 2 or more brown dwarf collisions to create a low mass star as both scenarios require some form of mass ejection to conserve angular momentum and get the objects into proximity where a collision is possible. In the case of gas giant collisions (yes, it would take multiple collisions) this mass ejection further reduces the mass available to create a low mass star.

Most star systems contain multiple stars. At least 2 and often 3 or more. Our star is unusual in that it has no stellar companion.

[Spoodie Bob]

Originally posted by Tesityr:

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

First all planets have a solid core.... even gas giants
<snip>

First of all, no - and it is all theory anyway:

"Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn do not have solid surfaces in the sense that if you dropped in a penny, it would never land with a “clink.” These bodies are mostly composed of hydrogen at temperatures above the “critical point” for hydrogen, meaning there is no sharp boundary between solid, liquid, and gas regions" ~ Marc Kuchner
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

We can only theorize about the absolute center of massive planets and pressure as far as we can detect.

Second of all, it is a GAME as in FICTION as in, it doesn't matter what we 'know' about flying through a gas giant - it can be anything the programmers want to put in as development...

It could be that a ship can only withstand a certain amount of pressure before 'going nearer the centre' and it would actually be fun to have to craft multiple levels of Shields for the different layers of gases and material, as you go deeper to collect more rare chemicals/materials (it could be almost exactly like how we need different levels of Hyperdrives to go to different/farther Star Systems now in the game.

No need to bog down games with such minutia of reality - again, it is all theory bases on 'detections' anyway; hell all images of space are faked and photoshopped from radio detection which has no visible colours. Don't forget one of many quotes saying so:

"it's photoshopped because...it has to be"
~ Robert Simmon, former Senior Program Analyst, Goddard Space Flight Center (Climate and Radiation Laboratory), NASA Earth Observatory

you need to do your research, the gas giants in our solar system all have a solid rocky surface with a thick atmosphere, NASA has already proven this.

[Lystent]

Only probe I know of to parachute down Jupiter (launched from the Galileo probe) was baked to death at a relatively high altitude, I'm assuming due to high exterior pressure. Later, Galileo was itself plunged into Jupiter as a means of cleanly disposing of its RTGs. In the end, we can only tell what is inside Jupiter through other observations because it is remarkably inhospitable.

Originally posted by Spoodie Bob:

...you need to do your research, the gas giants in our solar system all have a solid rocky surface with a thick atmosphere, NASA has already proven this.

I checked; NASA doesn't know if the core is rock or ultradense gas.

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

Originally posted by Tesityr:

"Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn do not have solid surfaces in the sense that if you dropped in a penny, it would never land with a “clink.” ~ Marc Kuchner
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

Errr...

"Al Kuyper
Clive, Iowa

A: Gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn do not have solid surfaces in the sense that if you dropped in a penny, it would never land with a “clink.” These bodies are mostly composed of hydrogen at temperatures above the “critical point” for hydrogen, meaning there is no sharp boundary between solid, liquid, and gas regions.

But gas giants do have layers. For example, if you could somehow endure the high temperatures, pressures, and radiation levels and survive a dive into Jupiter, you would first swim through a stormy atmosphere of hydrogen. You would pass through layers of ammonia clouds, sulfide clouds, and then water clouds. You would probably even begin to float when the density of the gas around you matched that of your body.

But if you could weigh yourself down, you could keep sinking and enter a thick layer of metallic hydrogen, where electrons and protons move separately from one another. The temperature would get hotter and hotter as you kept diving — up to about 20,000 kelvins (35,000° Fahrenheit).

Finally, in Jupiter’s core, the metallic hydrogen would give way to heavier elements like silicon and iron. Here, your body, crushed to 1/25 its size and stripped of most of its electrons, would probably rest forever.
Marc Kuchner
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland " [sic... all of it, not just cherry picking of one sentence that make it look like it proves your point]

And it wont *clink* because that penny would be crushed into oblivion before reaching the metallic core by atmospheric pressure....

[Lystent]

Originally posted by Lystent:

...

Originally posted by Spoodie Bob:

...you need to do your research, the gas giants in our solar system all have a solid rocky surface with a thick atmosphere, NASA has already proven this.

I checked; NASA doesn't know if the core is rock or ultradense gas.

Ok, I read the page wrong. They are saying it could be(?) iron and silicates (or that it is iron, silicates), but don't know if it is hard or "soup".

[beamupstc]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

Third gas giant are basically stars that didnt gather enough gas (yet) to ignite fusion in their core...

This is also incorrect. You are confusing gas giant planets with brown dwarves. The process by which each object forms is entirely different. Brown dwarves are failed stars that didn't gather enough mass to start and sustain nuclear fusion. They form at center of the disk of gas and dust. Gas giant planets form in the proto-planetary disk.

I was SO trying not to get sucked into this, but sometimes statements are Just Too Wrong. (I'll still seek to speak at a widely accessible level of technicality.) Also, please note that I'm granting this claim the status of Just Too Wrong as opposed to Not Even Wrong. (If you fail to grasp the reference, you might want to bow out now.)

The process by which each object forms is identical. NO object forms at the "center" of a protoplanetary disk - just closer or farther from it, depending upon the radial mass distribution among other things. Taking the Solar System as the most widely-understood example, the Sun is NOT at its center. See "barycenter," which for the Solar System is inside - but NOT at the center of - the Sun. And the Sun in fact does orbit said barycenter, albeit with a small enough radius that we can usually ignore it.

Extending that, for many purposes, it's "good enough" to approximate the Solar System barycenter as the center of the Sun, so you can find plenty of references which don't bother to distinguish them - e.g. saying that the Sun orbits the (bary)center of the Milky Way. It'd be more accurate to say that the Solar System's barycenter orbits the Milky Way's barycenter, and the Sun orbits the Solar System's barycenter. But it's only very rarely relevant to make that distinction, so usually it isn't made, especially outside of scientific journals. (Just to preemptively head off any such references which laypeople might find relevant, but experts can clearly distinguish.)

In the great majority of stellar systems, there end up being (at least) two objects which each aggregate enough mass to cross the 1H fusion threshold to become "stars," i.e. a binary. Both are, in general, substantially offset from the barycenter... with that barycenter being generally outside any object, aka there is truly nothing at all at the "center."

Vary the mass of one of those objects just a bit, so that it falls below the 1H fusion threshold but above the 2H fusion threshold, and you get a brown dwarf.

Vary it a bit more so that it falls below the 2H fusion threshold, and you get a gas giant.

Now consider that there's no inherent limitation to only two such mass concentrations, and you get trinary+ systems, binaries orbited by a brown dwarf, binaries orbited by a brown dwarf and a gas giant, trinaries orbited by three brown dwarves and two gas giants, etc. (I did get pretty far out into the tail of the distribution by the end there - I'm certainly not aware of any characterized system fitting that last description. But it probably exists somewhere in the Milky Way, given the number of, as it were, "shots on goal.")

Gas giant, brown dwarf, binary companion, single star - they're all simply different ranges of mass along the very same continuum of accretion. There is no difference in the process, and no practical meaning to the "center" except that it's the spot around which ALL objects - of ALL classifications up to and including supergiant star - orbit.

For that matter, rocky planets are ALSO formed by the very same process. And again, there's absolutely no difference in how it works beyond what the mass turns out to be.

Asteroid belts are considerably more interesting, in that they would've become rocky planets if not for the tidal interference of a nearby other object or objects (in the Solar System, this mostly means Jupiter, but Saturn did meaningfully contribute). It's probably not helpful to get into Trojan clusters here, but they're another very interesting case.

But all concentrations of mass at any radius from the system barycenter that ultimately mostly aggregate into a single object are subject to the exact same processes and mechanics. The mass they end up with affects what type of object we ultimately call them, but there's zero difference in the accretion (and potentially ignition) process.

(And yes, I do in fact hold a relevant BS/PhD combo.)

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

Originally posted by 404_Not_Found:

Gonna be honest, I've been on the internet so long that all I had to do was read half of the first sentence of that person's posts to know this was another "ummmm actually here's why we can't/should never have this EXTREMELY COOL feature and why YOU are in fact being super unreasonable for even suggesting it!"

I scrolled to your post right away and yep it was that lmao.

This game has random hexagonal worlds and bubbles/floating orbs on worlds, realism went out the window in favor of campy sci-fi a long time ago.

If you dont even bother reading the post, why d'you bother answering it at all ?

You find it cool... I find it ridiculous.... different points of view

But that's also why I also mentionnned:

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

..... but now in NMS we can also fly trough blackholes which is way more un-imaginable.

That you probably missed because you didnt bother reading before answering....

But now to elaborate a little more on that precise point:

Going trough blackholes as a mean to travel trough space and time, while it's scientifically ridiculous, is a very old Sci-fi trope so it's acceptable in space fantasy setting...
Also one could imagine that what's called "blackholes" in NMS arent really blackholes as we know them IRL... they just happen to be named the same (scientific are well known for being bad at naming things too), and this is a computer simulation.... so they are more relevant as "glitches in the matrix" of that universe disguised as or mistaken for blackholes.

Flying trough a planet is also scientifically ridiculous but isnt a trope of any kind...
It could also be another "glitch in the matrix" (looks like there's a planet but there's actually none because it's a glitch), but I think there would be better things to do with this idea....

Make gas giant but with all the real life hazard of such a planet.... you cant go below a certain altitude or your starship get obliterated by the conditions (wwith "pull up" warning and damages before the game over screen).
There could be flotaing island in the upper atmospher (there's already such landscapes) so we could land to do our stuff, some specific fauna and flora (mostly floating obviously), and we of course couldnt see too far below because of the premanent storms occuring closer to the core.... that would be a nice new type of extrem biome where the danger would be below.

They could also add stars.... not as a background image but as a physical object that would destroy starships if they come too close to them (like it was in "Freelancer" for those who remember that game).

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Originally posted by Guh~hey~hey~♫:

Third gas giant are basically stars that didnt gather enough gas (yet) to ignite fusion in their core...

This is also incorrect. You are confusing gas giant planets with brown dwarves. The process by which each object forms is entirely different. Brown dwarves are failed stars that didn't gather enough mass to start and sustain nuclear fusion. They form at center of the disk of gas and dust. Gas giant planets form in the proto-planetary disk.

Not incorrect...
Brown dwarf are just another step forward into becoming a star., but with still not enough mass...
Everything kinda form the same way in the universe, under the effect of the gravitationnal pull... what makes a difference is the amount and type (density) of materials gathered
Then if/once there's enough mass/material the fusion start and make it a star... unless there's too much aded mass too fast (like in a collision between 2 big enough bodies) and it turns into a blackhole before it could turn into a star.
All descriebed by Scharwzschild equation.