Would have been funny to let players “try” to land on a gas giant, just before dying from the enormous magnetic field/wind strength/pressure. A hard lesson in astrophysics right?
Honestly he halfway has a point. It wouldn’t be very interesting, but there’s no technical reason you couldn’t go near the cloud layer of a gas giant, at least in game fiction terms.
You can (sorta) explore gas giants in Dyson Sphere Program, for example.
I had forgot about those, the ones on Jupiter were mostly corpus steel halls and chambers with windows out to the orange outside, and also some open platforms.
DSP allows “landing” on gas giants (aka leaving sail mode), but it just forces you into permanent flight where the only things you can do is collect gases from it slowly or fly off back into sail mode
Discovering this was one of the most unsettling things about that game. I find gas giants fantastically scary for reasons I can’t entirely put into words, and the idea of getting lost flying around one was sketchy. Didn’t keep me from completely ringing a couple with collectors, though. :-)
I experienced the same thing in DSP. There’s something super creepy when you’re floating on a gas giant and also on the dark side of the star with no light. It’s like you’re in this void while you’re subjected to cosmic forces far bigger than yourself.
I experienced something similar going to the gasy planet in Outer Wilds too. I highly recommend it if you haven’t tried that game yet.
Isn’t this the moron idiot that stole copies of Starfield and posted the leaked content on his personal social media or was that a different moron idiot?
I’ve seen some SciFi media with floating cities on planets with thick atmospheres, such as gas giants or Venus. It’s a neat concept imo that I’d like to see more.
Indeed. If I’m recalling correctly there was one somewhat obscure little film a while back that had something like that. It was called something like Empire Fights Back or something, can’t quite recall. Not sure if anyone has seen that one or not.
The problem with that really is that on a gas giant the physics are a nightmare- gravity is unlivable, by the point in the atmosphere you get to dense-enough fluid to float anything, it’s extremely hot and turbulent. If you dropped a modern submarine into Jupiter’s atmosphere, by the time it got there it would be molten and well beyond its crush pressure.
On Earth, the pressure/density point (in water) that will float a boat occurs at a low enough pressure and temperature to be survivable by life as we know it- but on Jupiter when you’ve got to the point that it’s dense enough to float anything, it’s also hotter than the surface of the sun.
Cloud City on Bespin is a super-cool concept but realistically nothing like that can work on a gas giant unless your sci-fi universe also provides magic antigravity to keep the gravity-well from crushing you lifeless.
Maybe if it were a civilization of creatures with exoskeletons, low height, and a low surface area to volume ratio (think fleas, ticks)? Probably still not. It’s just completely unfeasible for humanoids.
Gas giants are more like the Sun than the Earth. You cannot really stand on them for instance as they don’t really have a terrain in which to do so. They are primarily gaseous, which is why they are called gas giants.
Also, having a floating city on a gas giant makes no sense either. It’s similar to suggesting that a star could have a floating city hovering directly above its atmosphere. That’s not possible IRL, and it’s confusing for a science-fiction video game to have that kind of element while striving for realism.
Overall, I feel more confused by the idea that people think this makes sense than to yell “confidently incorrect”. Interesting though.
Well, gravity in a gas giant means if you’re floating, your vessel will be under pressure scaled to the gravity factor. This means you’ll weigh multiples of what you do in Earth’s gravity well- and it means your floating vessel would have to be able to withstand atmospheric pressure scaled accordingly.
If your floating city is an airship, it couldn’t very well be pressurized; it would have to equalize pressure to that of the atmosphere or else be crushed. That would in turn require spectacular engineering to make life support feasible; you’d have to breathe a gas mix that avoids the toxic effects of breathing pressurized air and that’s all in addition to that the pressure:temperature curves involved probably make your floating elevation into a very hot place.
There’s some pretty interesting ideas for floating cities on Venus. There’s a part of the atmosphere that’s both the right temperature and pressure to make it work.
it’s confusing for a science-fiction video game to have that kind of element while striving for realism.
There is nothing realistic about this game. It is not striving for realism. What is the real life basis for faster than light travel? There is none.
This is one opinion about fiction vs another. The OP is not wrong for wanting a fictional universe where he can fly to a floating city on a gas planet. It’s fiction. And it’s just as valid as your version of fiction.
Spacial distortion! A physicist once proposed that by the laws of physics there is nothing preventing faster than light teavelling but what needs to happen is that space itself need to distort and push the objects forward.
Now we only need to discover a way to harvest negative energy.
Because the game itself tries to follow science as closely as possible, and gets an exception only when strictly necessary (no faster than light travel -> no game). There is a difference between Interstellar type of settings and Star wars ones
They are more like the sun than the earth, but they also do have solid cores. It’s just that the solid core is under a layer of metallic hydrogen, which is under a layer of liquid hydrogen (not liquid because it’s cold, liquid because it’s under high pressure).
They’re actually not primarily gaseous, they’re just made mostly of elements that would be gases on Earth at typical surface temperatures and pressures. Metallic hydrogen isn’t a gas, and it’s the bulk of Jupiter.
A floating something on a gas giant does make sense. You obviously wouldn’t float “above” the atmosphere – there’s nothing to float on above the atmosphere, that’s where space stations would be. Instead you’d float inside the atmosphere. Depending on what depth you “floated” at, it it would be more like a submarine than an air balloon though.
In the range of atmospheric pressures that seem reasonable to deal with (say 0.1 atmospheres to 10 atmospheres) the temperature of Jupiter is about 200K, slightly colder than the south pole. At higher altitudes it’s hotter than that, but the atmosphere is really thin. But, since the planet is a “failed star”, there’s no nuclear fusion going on, so nothing other than solar radiation (and a tiny bit of convection from the depths) to heat it up.
It seems like the biggest difficulties with setting up a gas giant city would be the “weather” and the gravity. Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is known for its violent storms. Storms so violent that they make record-setting hurricanes seem like a breeze. Maybe there’s a safe space to put a city where it wouldn’t be affected by the storms? Who knows. Maybe the center of the great red spot is calm, like the eye of a hurricane on Earth. And since storms last centuries, it would be a relatively stable place to build.
Gravity would be the other issue. At the cloud tops, gravity is 2.5x Earth’s gravity. People could withstand that for minutes, maybe hours, but not for days or weeks, let alone years. Plus, all that gravity means it’s much, much harder to get out of the planet’s gravity well. With sci-fi thrusters and warp drives or whatever, maybe getting out of a planet’s atmosphere is no longer a big deal, but with our current real-world technology, getting into Jupiter’s atmosphere is easy. Getting back out would be much harder.
I mean, arguably we’re liquid already. There are some bags keeping the liquid in, but for the most part we’re bags of liquid with a few solid parts and a few air pockets.
You being a little pedantic. These are relative facts stated by astronomers and scientists who have studied these planets,
and soooo sorry, I may have incorrectly included Venus ( technically a rock planet when I meant to include Neptune and Saturn actually… )
The planets being closer to the sun is true… for humans to visit above the planets, in a prob, we still.encountsr problems… because we would be way closer to the sun and that would change the elements we (humans) are used to, just to observe the planets…
But hey thanks for the condescending corrections… it really helps
You are obviously excited about the solar system, which is great! However there is a pretty specific order in which the planets revolve around the sun (although that can have exceptions!). Pointing that out is not pedantic.
Perhaps the video you watched was mentioning that the effects from the sun have a greater influence on these planets?
I think by "close to the sun" they meant "similar to the sun" rather than "proximate to the sun." In other contexts this word substitution wouldn't cause confusion (e.g. "a plantain is pretty close to a banana" would not lead most people to look around them for the subjects) but the context of space makes this word choice a little prone to this confusion.
Really? How? There’s like no light, millions of bars of pressure, temperatures that rival the sun, and, if I’m not mistaken, once you go low enough you should just end up in a big sea of liquid hydrogen. Not to mention the huge amounts of radiations you’d be subjected to, the thousands of km/h winds and the extreme storms inside.
Thinking about it, entering a gas giant would be pretty terrifying.
once you go low enough you should just end up in a big sea of liquid hydrogen
Which is a thin layer over the metallic hydrogen, which goes mostly down to the (theorized) solid core. But why go down there?
Not to mention the huge amounts of radiations you’d be subjected to
You’d probably be much safer from radiation than even at home on earth. Jupiter has a massive magnetic field and so it would shield you from the sun’s radiation. Since it’s a gas giant, not a star, it’s not emitting any radiation.
The storms would definitely be an issue though, as would the gravity. But, maybe there’s a place where the storms aren’t as bad? Maybe the center of the Great Red Spot is like the eye of a hurricane on Earth and is relatively calm.
Whenever people “land” on gas giants in Sci-Fi, it’s floating cities. That makes sense because there’s no “surface” at any reasonable survivable pressure. There isn’t even a liquid surface, even though there’s a liquid hydrogen layer, it just gradually changes from gas to liquid as the pressure increases.
A floating city is still probably an impossibility based on the violence of the atmosphere, but the temperatures and pressures of the top of the atmosphere really aren’t too bad. It’s just the weather and the gravity that would be a problem (oh, and of course that the atmosphere is not only poisonous but corrosive). But, that can all be hand-waved away for some fun sci-fi floating city building.
Yeah, I was thinking about going into a gas giant, walking on it and exploring it. It didn’t occur to me they were referring to Bespin-like floating cities
There is no surface to stand on per se, but there is still a swirling, liquid core. If you parachute and it fails, you almost never want to land on water due to the surface tension not being able to break on time so falling at a certain speed it will feel like landing on concrete. I am thinking flying through the core would be similar and impossible.
Also, we as a people, saw what happened to a submersible under high pressures. True, it wasn’t well built, but with how large the gas giants are, the pressures it experiences should be beyond the extremes.
Sure, but why would you spend resources on that when there’s other things to develop?
Edit: Downvoted? Really? What piece of the game would you remove to add this, because something else doesn’t get made because resources were spent there.
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