The Strange Proc-Gen Helium Gas Giants

[Arcane26]

Howdy friends, Arcanic is still around

This post is gonna be about a topic that I've always found interesting in the exploration community, helium gas giants. Particularly involving something I've realized quite recently about them. To begin, I must state for people who do not know, Helium Gas Giants (henceforth HGGs) are not the same planet type as Helium-Rich Gas Giants. There is a thing connecting the two, however, and I will get to that later. Currently there are 17 confirmed HGGs known in the galaxy, opposed to the 140,000+ HRGGs known. They can be found to the far right side of the FSS frequency display, with their carrot ^ signature in the shape of an 'O', opposed to the HRGG's 'H'.

There is apparently a HGG in the HD 47246 system, evidence being brought about by the tourist beacon that exists there and (might still be (?)) given out as a mission to visit, even though the system is unfortunately shrouded in the bunch of permit locked sectors around that region.

Catalog Systems vs Procedurally Generated Systems
One thing that can be immediately determined from my little diagram above are the visible differences between HGGs existing in catalog systems versus systems that have been completely generated by the Stellar Forge, and that is there are multiple HGGs in the former systems. Their atmospheric composition reflects that of normal gas giants, as in it is just Hydrogen and Helium. Catalog systems, particularly those of higher mass, are infamous for their wacky system configurations and whatnot. This includes sometimes having an outrageous amount of Helium% in the gas giants of those systems. If you search for He% descending in Spansh, you realize there are a good chunk of catalog systems that have significantly higher He% compositions compared to the maximum discovered He% in proc-gen systems, which if I recall is just a bit above 37%.

So why are there only two systems with this variation? Well, the codex description actually gives it away, saying that they are gas giants with a higher percent of Helium in their atmospheres compared to that of Hydrogen. Seeing that 52 Herculis and HR 6870 are the only two systems that were generated where He% exceeds H%, that reason makes sense. But it seems to be the only criterion the game checks for to call a GG a HGG.

Moving over to the proc-gen HGGs, there is something interesting happening here. Their atmospheres are all over the place, 99.9% Nitrogen? On a Helium Gas Giant? How about the one in Swuemuia, where Helium isn't even listed as a major component? The planet in the Boeths sector seems the closest to a normal gas giant composition in the lot, save for Neon. This part about the planets always stumped me. That, and with the release of Odyssey, this planet type suddenly has a blue ring in the system map, like normal terrestrial planets with atmospheres do. Interesting how one version have them and the others don't! Let me tell you my conjecture:

The Catalog Helium Gas Giants represent the actual planet type. In other words, what they were meant to be, and what the system map and codex describes them to be. Gas Giants that have more Helium than Hydrogen in their atmospheres. These gas giants are so helium-rich that it flipped the switch for the game to call them HGGs. Unfortunately, however, their criterion to generate this way is never actually met anywhere else in the galaxy (which is why I wonder why they bothered creating this planet class to begin with?), with the aforementioned maximum proc-gen He% being around 37%.

The Proc-Gen Helium Gas Giants aren't real gas giants. The atmospheres of these planets make no sense in regards to what the game descriptions say (save for the one in Boeths I suppose). The helium white rhino in Ooch Chrea has baffled all of us for years, why 0.1% Helium? Well, because there is technically more Helium than Hydrogen, it passes the game's test for being an HGG. But still, it makes no sense when you think about them as gas giants.

But it makes more sense when you think about them as icy bodies.

@Sapyx mentioned last year when the HGG in Swuemuia was discovered, that the Stellar Forge for some reason really likes generating planetary atmospheres with a nearly even split between Methane, Ammonia and Nitrogen. An icy body atmospheric search with those three constituents on Spansh resolves a whole bunch of them out in the galaxy. But, okay, that's just the Stellar Forge being dumb, right? But my man dkO showed me something that made me feel the switch flip in my head:

This icy body has the EXACT atmospheric composition as the second helium white rhino in the Boeths sector (see first diagram).

(I also ran across one with 99.9% Nitrogen 0.1% Neon but I've misplaced the name)

This, and seeing that the proc-gen HGGs are eerily similar to Water Giants (blue atmospheric ring, generating far away in the system, usually the last body in the lineup), it makes me think.

1. Why aren't these Water Giants? Were they supposed to be? What went wrong in generating them?
2. What are the bounds that distinguishes an icy body from a helium gas giant? Can they be detected?
3. Why from a proc-gen standpoint are these planets so insanely rare? And how were two discovered in the same month? (Craazy luck)

Have I really discovered something new regarding this enigma of a planet type? No idea. Perhaps this isn't too significant that these planets share exact atmosphere compositions with icy terrestrial planets and I am REALLY overthinking this. I wish we had some data on that permit locked system so we can see what that HGG is like. Is it super helium-rich or an icy body with a super-thick atmosphere? We might never know.

What do you guys think?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Why aren't these Water Giants? Were they supposed to be? What went wrong in generating them?

That's plausible - are they perhaps water giants with a higher (trace) helium than hydrogen percentage, so the HGG designation accidentally takes priority over the Water one?

 

[marx]

A minor note:

Unfortunately, however, their criterion to generate this way is never actually met anywhere else in the galaxy (which is why I wonder why they bothered creating this planet class to begin with?) [...]

Probably because the Stellar Forge was reworked quite extensively during the beta period (at the very least on the galactic level), and planet designations were also modified once after launch. HGGs either fell through the cracks during the first galaxy rework(s), or they were "victims" of the post-launch planet designation rework. Unfortunately, we don't have records of either of them, so we can't really tell now.

What I can tell you is that before the planet designation rework, ELWs were likely much more common than after, as the game had rather lax requirements for them. Take a look at Caer Itar A 1 and A 2: those used to be classified as ELWs. (Here's a screenshot.) They aren't even candidates for terraforming now. So, it's likely that there were many more ELWs in that short time than there are now.

It could be that HGGs were in a similar situation, but the rework had some errors left in there, and said errors were just simply not noticed because HGGs were less interesting than ELWs. During that time, players' knowledge of the Forge was quite minimal, and the journal didn't exist yet either. All the data we could get was from screenshots. Perhaps somebody could dig up an old one that showed a HGG then, and we could compare it with today's. (Unfortunately, I don't have any such shots myself.)

 

[Sapyx]

1. Why aren't these Water Giants? Were they supposed to be? What went wrong in generating them?
2. What are the bounds that distinguishes an icy body from a helium gas giant? Can they be detected?
3. Why from a proc-gen standpoint are these planets so insanely rare? And how were two discovered in the same month? (Craazy luck)

1. and 2. : The main problem with the answers to these two questions is the underlying assumption: that planet types are assigned after the planets are created by the Stellar Forge. They are not, and we know they are not because of certain ridiculous outliers.

Take the idea of an Icy world, or any other terrestrial-type world, with a super-thick atmosphere. There are examples where you have an "icy" planet that's got an atmosphere tens of millions of atms - that's a dense enough atmosphere to be considered a gas giant, by any reasonable definition (Jupiter's core has a pressure of about 100 million atms, for comparison), and such a planet in real life would certainly look like a gas giant from orbit. Yet, the game does not consider them to be truly "gas giants", nor render them as such. Why not? Because planets are generated first, and planet classes are assigned - and then atmospheres are added to the terrestrial planets. The game does not then go back and recheck its calculations and reassign planet types based on the newly created atmosphere, it just runs with whatever it's generated.

As an aside, another side-effect of this is that Stellar Forge also does not take into account the mass of a terrestrial planet's atmosphere when calculating its total mass. For real-world terrestrial planets like Earth, or even Venus, this is a reasonable assumption to make, because the atmosphere is only a tiny fraction of the planet's total mass - but for those wacky outliers, like the Earth-sized planet with a million-atmospheres thick atmosphere, the atmosphere would contain hundreds of times more mass than the solid part of the planet, and the total mass of the planet should be much higher.

So a planet is either generated as a Helium Giant, or it isn't. A large Icy world with a thick, helium-rich atmosphere has no chance of turning into a Helium Giant, even if from a practical real-world viewpoint that's what it ought to be.

3.: We don't know why they're rare. If I had to guess, I'd guess they were much more common in an earlier iteration of the Stellar Forge, but something about that iteration that didn't make sense (maybe planet formation generally was too scarce, or something), so the laws of the ED universe were tweaked - and helium, overall, became much scarcer, and thus Helium Giants reverting to a near-impossibility.

As for the question, "why bother creating such a planet class in the first place", I suspect it had something to do with fuel scooping. Prequel Elite games had the concept of scooping hydrogen fuel from gas giants, and it would have been reasonable gameplay to do so in ED as well, since gas giants, like stars, are mostly hydrogen. But if you're scooping hydrogen fuel, then scooping from a high-helium gas giant (or a water giant) would probably have not been viable (just like how in ED you can't scoop from protostars etc). So there would have been a logical in-game reason to distinguish between hydrogen-based and non-hydrogen-based gas giants. But by the time ED's gameplay was figured out, the galaxy was already set in stone and uneditable - so, we end up with planet classes with no real purpose.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

1. and 2. : The main problem with the answers to these two questions is the underlying assumption: that planet types are assigned after the planets are created by the Stellar Forge. They are not, and we know they are not because of certain ridiculous outliers.

Conversely, when Frontier made Green Gas Giants canonical, that didn't involve any changes to the planets, just a retyping of the existing bodies with no change to their appearance or properties. So far as we know this didn't destroy any existing GGGs or add new ones, which would be tricky to explain as a purely pre-creation stage.

A possible compromise between the two is that:
- the stellar forge picks "terrestrial" or "gas giant" before creating the planet
- it then creates the planet
- it then assigns the planet to one of the subtypes of "terrestrial" or "gas giant" based on some sort of if/then ruleset.

 

[MattG]

Conversely, when Frontier made Green Gas Giants canonical, that didn't involve any changes to the planets, just a retyping of the existing bodies with no change to their appearance or properties. So far as we know this didn't destroy any existing GGGs or add new ones, which would be tricky to explain as a purely pre-creation stage.

A possible compromise between the two is that:
- the stellar forge picks "terrestrial" or "gas giant" before creating the planet
- it then creates the planet
- it then assigns the planet to one of the subtypes of "terrestrial" or "gas giant" based on some sort of if/then ruleset.

I actually think it's as Sapyx suggests - an anonymous body is created, it then assigned a planet type based on it's characteristics, and then any additional detail for that planet type is added as necessary (so colors for GGGs) etc.
I think KOI 1701 1 is an example of a body being mis-classified because the parameters used to create it just fall outside of the expected. KOI 1701 1 should have been a gas giant but for whatever reason it fails outside the criteria expected by Stellar Forge and ends up the chonk of a body we all know and fear love

For GGGs, they weren't even re-typed. They remain their base type but get a slightly different text in system map, and (sometimes) a Codex entry - but still for the base type. And we can determine at least some GGGs, so FDev can certainly detect them post-creation.

 

[marx]

Conversely, when Frontier made Green Gas Giants canonical, that didn't involve any changes to the planets, just a retyping of the existing bodies with no change to their appearance or properties.

Originally, certain gas giants had glowing clouds, of various colours - white, magenta, green, and so on. This was due to a render bug, and in extreme cases, they glowed brighter than anything else, even washing out the HUD. (For example, see this post.) So, once the bug was fixed, their appearances certainly changed, but the properties of the bodies themselves didn't. I think this fix was also when green gas giants were "made canon", but I'm not quite sure. It was another silent change IIRC, not mentioned in the patch notes.

They also changed the surfaces of Water Worlds earlier on. Those used to have landmasses, at times even significantly more dry land than bodies of water, but it was... well, see for yourself, here. Today's ELWs have better-looking lands than those did, the Water Worlds are (almost) entirely covered in water, but nothing other than their appearances had changed that time.


As for how the game classifies gas giants as the GGG sub-class, that's probably quite easy: check the surface after it's rendered (or perhaps during), and if there's green in there, then bam, the gas giant gets a GGG stamp. There would no need for the game to make any extra calculations when the phenomenon existed originally, after all. They weren't new content that was designed and added, but an interesting (and extremely rare) minor bug.

Well, even now, the only place where GGGs are more than a cosmetic thing is when they are a requirement for spawning K10-Type Anomalies, in just two galactic regions. Other than that, the green gas giants get their own Codex entries (except when that's bugged), the extra text for the system map description, and that's it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I actually think it's as Sapyx suggests - an anonymous body is created, it then assigned a planet type based on it's characteristics, and then any additional detail for that planet type is added as necessary (so colors for GGGs) etc.

My understanding of Sapyx's post was that they were suggesting the opposite: a planet type is selected, and then a body is created to that selection which limits the characteristics (but sometimes insufficiently tightly to be plausible).

So, if I'm correct about what everyone is suggesting:
Sapyx: select planet type, generate characteristics
MattG: generate characteristics, determine planet type
Me: select terrestrial/gas giant category, generate characteristics, determine planet type from those within that category (which in the case of GGGs is a very late determination)

The ones where the planets are really implausible tend to be ones where they're plausibly on the wrong side of the terrestrial/gas giant divide.
So:
- HMCs, etc. with ultra-dense atmospheres; would be perfectly normal gas giants.
- high-G "Ice" planets with 500K surface temperatures (and often no "atmosphere"); should have been a water giant

But you don't tend to find e.g. Class IV gas giants with the characteristics of a Class I gas giant, or - hand-edited systems aside - rocky and icy moons out of strict "temperature order".

 

[ORANGEORANGE]

It's defintely worth looking at distributions of various attributes of gas giants to see if there's any correlation. We have millions of bodies in EDDN so it could be possible to test your theory.