gas giants

Well it would likely take lots of years, but eventually all those asteroids and comets and meteors will make a surface, I guess it would depend on how long it has been a gas planet and how often it has been bombarded. Which I would assume be very little and not so quite often for land.

but i won't say i do not want a Cloud City, but i will not be sad if not.

 

Unless we can find a gas giant with an oxygenated life zone like Bespin it's doubtful. Apparently the OP isn't aware that Gas Giants don't technically have a surface and that all that gas gets heavily pressurized.

 

Gas giant does not have to be "landable" to make it playable.

Just make it have "cloud cities" or even "cloud islands", leftovers of long-dead civilisation, they might be just simple mining (hydrogen/helium for fuel) or super-secret military or research installations (hard to find becaouse of the interference)

Players would have to have their ships equipped with advanced scanners to find them and some good survival gear to get thru it

Potentially some of those installations would be at least partially working so player could find base which only have it's gravitron generator working (else it would just fall down long time ago) but player could:

• get to "dungeon" and fix oxygen generator inside base (and have a "talk" with new residents of base about why they murdered it's previous owners)
• get some materials beamed down from and build new oxygen generator
• sabotage gravitron generator to make island rip itself apart and salvage whatever is left
• disable it and make it fall down (in pvp for example)

 

Realistic like tentacle planets? Or going swimming on lava worlds? ;']
Ed

 

It's made of gas, with maybe a smidgen of metallic hydrogen at the bottom. Not going to land anytime soon.
Floating islands in an oxygen pocket though...

 

Gas giants have more in common with stars then they have in common with planets. They are basically stars that did not quite get massive enough to ignite fusion and become a star. The reason I mention this is because trying to land or even occupy one space on the surface of the gas giant (for the sky cities) would probably be impossible due to the massive gravity of the planet. Its a failed star and it is truly massive, anything shallower then a orbit around a gas giant will doubtlessly end in tears. However that being said it is fiction and I personally would love to see a sky city with some antigrav tech. Landing on the core of the planet would be a little dubious, it still science fiction and as a science fiction fan I prefer for the fiction to at least be plausible in some way. But in conclusion sky cites are totally in the realm of science fiction I would be able to suspend my disbelief and I would love to see one and learn about how it got there, but landing on the core? That would be breaking it for me unless there is a very good lore reason for it to be possible.

 

How about building a floating gas mining station on the atmosphere of gas giant? Players could place an anti-grav platform, and then build off that...

Edit: now that I've read the thread properly, this idea has been mentioned like every other post already.

Re: The science - the crushing gravity is the main issue here. Assuming its not so bad in the upper atmosphere, the location would be a challenging environment, but would make for some cool secret bases. You could fight giant flying monsters in the atmosphere as well. Go go sci-fi.

 

Yup, not bad at all. The gravity on gas giants is not all that bad because they are much less dense (though more massive) than Earth. On Uranus the gravity felt could actually be LESS than 1G, Saturn and Neptune slightly higher than 1G and about 2.3G on Jupiter. These gravities are calculated at the generally agreed apon radius of the planet, which is defined as the radius where the atmospheric pressure = the surface pressure on Earth. Check out http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/.
Considering that our spaceships have what looks to be Earth normal gravity, there appears to be at least enough gravity control to bring even Jupiter's gravity in a floating habitat to something very comfortable for humans.

Edward

 

The hurricane winds would be a bigger problem, but it could also be used as a power source and actually use wind power to keep city afloat, basically a giant airship/glider

It could have some nice mechanics, like "you need to have active beacon on it or scan it during 'good weather'" to get coordinates to teleport there, for semi-stealthy base for say PvP server

 

and thus... i begin to recreate cloud city!