Gas Giant Gameplay

sidereal6

S
This is a sci-fi short (three minutes long) from ten years ago, but it popped into mind today.



I was thinking about what it would be like if FDev gave us gameplay loops inside the atmospheres of gas giants.

First thing: gravity. If you were floating in a balloon high in Saturn's atmosphere, gravity would be 1.08 G - so, quite tolerable. Jupiter would be 2.5 G, but there are landable planets in that range.

Obviously, if you go too deep, you're crushed by the pressure. There could be new flight mechanics, where forward speed is required to maintain lift.

What would we do in the atmospheres? Well mining, obviously. There could be sensors that find clouds that are high in tritium, or whatever. We could mine them with something like a fuel scoop.

Or the object could be to hunt living things. There are giant lifeforms already in the game - living things bigger than condas. Some of them are even inside of clouds - Lagrange clouds.

So there could landable stations, high in the clouds. From those bases, you take your ship into the deep to gather resources. Seems pretty cool.
 

imski

imski
sidereal6 said:
This is a sci-fi short (three minutes long) from ten years ago, but it popped into mind today.



I was thinking about what it would be like if FDev gave us gameplay loops inside the atmospheres of gas giants.

First thing: gravity. If you were floating in a balloon high in Saturn's atmosphere, gravity would be 1.08 G - so, quite tolerable. Jupiter would be 2.5 G, but there are landable planets in that range.

Obviously, if you go too deep, you're crushed by the pressure. There could be new flight mechanics, where forward speed is required to maintain lift.

What would we do in the atmospheres? Well mining, obviously. There could be sensors that find clouds that are high in tritium, or whatever. We could mine them with something like a fuel scoop.

Or the object could be to hunt living things. There are giant lifeforms already in the game - living things bigger than condas. Some of them are even inside of clouds - Lagrange clouds.

So there could landable stations, high in the clouds. From those bases, you take your ship into the deep to gather resources. Seems pretty cool.
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It’s long been suggested this would be the next step, before ELW’s.
 

Hank

H
For anybody who's old enough to have played Evochron, you could suicide into a gas giant or skim along the upper atmosphere. There was one green gas giant that had a station in its upper atmosphere and it was a rough ride but possible since I docked at it a couple of times ... "Scotty !!! more power the engines !!!" was going through my mind at the time.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
That has nothing to do with taking over systems on the galmap so will never be considered. The game is not about being a commander doing commander things. It's about being space emperor; that's the direction now.
 

Vardaugas

Vardaugas
Doing gas giants bring two fundamental features:

1. A pressure mechanic, which would be needed for planets with water/liquids deep enough to immerse a ship and/or commander. While it may seem easy to implement, it needs a position/situation measurement to determine the current pressure, which gets checked against stats of the actor and then appropriate consequences are applied.

2. Precipitation. With the advantage that there is no need to figure out where the liquid falling from the sky needs to go. But, it's not just a graphical representation for the canopy, ship surface (that has to adapt to the velocities and vectors involved) but also requires the implementation of global weather patterns, which are shared among everybody in the system. As gas giant weather may be more slow to change, this could be used as a first step to implement static weather maps instead of dynamic one needed for other planets.

So, implementing gas giants would be a useful step towards implementing all the game mechanics needed for earth like planets, the final boss of Elite: Dangerous engine development.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
The problem for me is that while everything needed to do this is in game now, it will make no sense at all.

I can park next to a black hole or star and sip tea, why would a gas giant bother any ship that could withstand that? It would lack consistency.

But saying that you could do it by using fuel scoop mechanics coupled with nebula clouds- the lower you go the thicker they get (to approx. upper layers). By making the crash boundaries a lot lower (as in, you can get closer) and the upper boundary higher you create a space for scooping. Add in Horizons planet approach readouts and its a fair approximation.

You could then add fuel scoop engineering that allows gas giant scooping, perhaps at the expense of other types of star.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Rubbernuke said:
I can park next to a black hole or star and sip tea, why would a gas giant bother any ship that could withstand that?
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Though that works the other way round too, and would probably be mostly ignored if the outcomes were fun enough. You can park your ship on a landable planet with a temperature of 1100k and you might run a bit hotter than normal but your ship or SRV won't take heat damage. Stick yourself in close orbit around a Y-class dwarf with a surface temperature of "colder than the ship's pilot" and you'll start melting.
 

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
Rubbernuke said:
The problem for me is that while everything needed to do this is in game now, it will make no sense at all.

I can park next to a black hole or star and sip tea, why would a gas giant bother any ship that could withstand that? It would lack consistency.

But saying that you could do it by using fuel scoop mechanics coupled with nebula clouds- the lower you go the thicker they get (to approx. upper layers). By making the crash boundaries a lot lower (as in, you can get closer) and the upper boundary higher you create a space for scooping. Add in Horizons planet approach readouts and its a fair approximation.

You could then add fuel scoop engineering that allows gas giant scooping, perhaps at the expense of other types of star.
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I seem to remember fuel scooping in gas giants was a thing in previous games and was considered to be the safer option compared to stars.

Dense clouds and radiation could add other aspects of gameplay though. Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn Mutara nebula style hunting comes to mind. Maybe having USS locations with goodies galore at certain spots, but you're always watching your back for heavy duty pirate ships suddenly finding you.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Dillon Fallon said:
I seem to remember fuel scooping in gas giants was a thing in previous games and was considered to be the safer option compared to stars.

Dense clouds and radiation could add other aspects of gameplay though. Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn Mutara nebula style hunting comes to mind. Maybe having USS locations with goodies galore at certain spots, but you're always watching your back for heavy duty pirate ships suddenly finding you.
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If I was feeling a bit evil I would add mechanics that require shields to block radiation in ships when exploring- the better the shield, the more you can stand.

Then I'd hear the 'but what about the explorers out in the black?'

To them I'd just send sunscreen and laugh....but I am evil.
 

Arioch

Arioch
Dillon Fallon said:
I seem to remember fuel scooping in gas giants was a thing in previous games and was considered to be the safer option compared to stars.
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It was indeed - from my experience scooping from a star was practically impossible (I managed it once) and was much easier with gas giants, whose atmosphere you could fly through and eventually reach a layer so dense it was practically solid 😁

Edit: the Lost In Space remake did a good gas giant fuel scooping bit - including a rescue scene that had something like Elite’s heat mechanic at one point:
Source: https://youtu.be/tW34nTuWw3U?si=_-wk7oLUQuqXnHFo
 
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metatheurgist

metatheurgist
Rubbernuke said:
If I was feeling a bit evil I would add mechanics that require shields to block radiation in ships when exploring- the better the shield, the more you can stand.

Then I'd hear the 'but what about the explorers out in the black?'

To them I'd just send sunscreen and laugh....but I am evil.
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Oh please. If you were really evil you'd fix the conda's hull mass with immediate effect, regardless. :devilish:
 

Kamiyoda

Kamiyoda
Rubbernuke said:
If I was feeling a bit evil I would add mechanics that require shields to block radiation in ships when exploring- the better the shield, the more you can stand.

Then I'd hear the 'but what about the explorers out in the black?'

To them I'd just send sunscreen and laugh....but I am evil.
Click to expand...
Man.... I would love it if just being in a wolf rayet system made things toasty. I'd love me some space weather.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Kamiyoda said:
Man.... I would love it if just being in a wolf rayet system made things toasty. I'd love me some space weather.
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Its a bit like a mission in Homeworld where you have to cross an area bathed in solar radiation- you had to use dust clouds as parasols. Shields could act like that or you have to use asteroid belts (which are useless) or shadows of planets.
 

nemolomen

nemolomen
It seem to me that flying inside a gas giant would be similar to the Maelstrom clouds but with more instability/bumpy ride due to the atmospheric effects and gravity.

The exclusion zone around the planet would be lowered.
 
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