Make Gas Giants Useful!

I think having gas giants and not being able to do anything with them is a huge bummer.
I suggest classifying these planets like any other and making some of them a fuel source for your ship. You may want to make them useful only by first creating some high level equipment to be able to mine them though, but at one point these planets could become an easy and reliable source for fuel in your travels. (Makes more sense than using coal in my humble opinion). I'd be open to suggestions on how to balance these infinite sources of fuel though...

 

Or just make it so these planets always feature at least one moon? I don't mind the empty planet myself, it's the lack of anything useful when I click on the dot and find only the fat gassy guy that bugs me.

 

Like him?


But Yeah I agree.

 

How does someone MINE a gas giant?

 

With a straw?

 

wait until they add "tanks" so we can land on gas giants and collect gaz and use it for anything we need to , be it engine , fuel or blowing another planet away

 

Or! Or! There could be an item, that extracts fuel over time from a planet whenever your ship is on a planet that orbits the gas giant!!!

 

Because you can land on a dense cloud of gas which is compacted and possibly will turn into a protostar.
There would also be some physical problems with this, but the fuel conecpt is cool, I would like some way to "harvest" them!

This would cause some issues though, such as mining a gas giant with multiple planets around them, what happens then? The gas giant will have a weaker gravitational pull, meaning the other planets *physically* wouldn't stay where they were originally, their orbit would change and stuff...

 

It looks pretty, isn't that enough?

The only thing you could practically do with a gas giant is enter its rings maybe, and I guess that could be an easier way to experience the asteroids already present

But yeah you could do some fuel crap with them. Too wonky balance-wise, though

 

Alright,
Theoretically a ship could refuel by skimming the surface of the gas giant in a slingshot orbit with an intake scoop. In real life gas giants are compositions of many gases. It stands to reason that bodies have different percentages of gas which can actually be used for fuel. Compared to mining for ores this method is far more efficient. Done realistically it would significantly change gameplay, after all the player at the start of the game arrives at a planet out of fuel and not a gas giant.

In Asimov's novels ( I think?) gas giants are the main source of fuel for interstellar travel. If starbound becomes more ship oriented this mechanic would be far more realistic and efficient.

The player could build orbital siphon thingies (adv. technical term lolol)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_outer_Solar_System

I think it boils down to current game mechanics. If space and the player ship become more than just a medium to travel in gas giants are definitely viable. Until the devs create more stuff to do in space I doubt refueling at gas giants will do much more than undermine the current mechanics.

 

@Semtioc I agree with you completely. The idea that involves placing aerostats in the jovian atmospheres to extract the useful gasses over time would push this whole idea towards becoming a balanced fuel source.

The player should be creating a device that they would have to launch into the atmosphere of these gas giants. There should be a chance that a powerful storm destroys the gas extractor. The progress of filtering and compressing the useful fuel gas should be slow too. But the technology should be researched and improved further to allow faster and more reliable fuel extraction.

 

What the heck im the one who said it? XP

 

Sorry Mate! You're right! The credit goes to you!

 

They could also introduce a greater likelihood of moons spawning around a gas giant, just like real life.

If we want to get really crazy at ultra-high tiers, we could have Dyson Spheres... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Sphere
But I think just sticking with probes/remote gas gathering bots is a cool idea.

 

or you could have a station or multible spawn on most gas gigants witch you could get fuel from and explore

make some inhabitet by pirates some with traders & "villages" and you got something more to to on them

 

Mining satellite ... Mining Robot? Heck yes alternative energy.

Great suggestion, Skold. I like it.

 

There's whole planets made from methane, ammonia, and other gaseous liquids, so you could extract from them. You can't really "mine" a gas planet, but you use machines to suck in the gas and store it as liquid.

 

The sheer amount of matter you'd have to harvest to affect a planet's gravity in a noticeable way is unimaginable. A single ship should would have a negligible effect on a gas giant.

 

I'm pretty sure what we see currently is just a placeholder, We won't be able to land on Gas Giants, but I think I remember seeing somewhere that "mining" them from orbit for fuel was something the devs want to implement, but it's not very high on their todo list right now.

Do your homework before you post, Gas Giants are mostly Hydrogen, a small percentage of Helium and very minute amounts of other gasses. It's these minute amounts of other gasses which give them their colours. But it's very feasible that the hydrogen could be siphoned and used to fuel a nuclear fusion reactor.

 

You build a cloud city and harvest tibanna gas.


in general, gas giants are not the kind of place to find ores. you'd get gaseous and liquid chemicals of various sorts from them, and the primary application would be fuel, i should think.