Will Terraforming and Artificial Planets be an Option?

If you only used the gas giant as material for a new world, and didn't play with additional sources of matter or anything, then there really wouldn't be a gravitational effect on neighboring planets/asteroids/whatever. However, if you used high amounts of energy to do so, that would perhaps have an effect (remember, E=mc², matter and energy are both manifestations of the same underlying principle). On the other hand, a gas giant is massive. You have much more mass than needed to make a habitable world, what are you going to do with the leftovers? In the most extreme cases, trying to compress a gas giant until it was as dense as a terrestrial world would perhaps ignite fusion at it's core, and you'd have an ephemeral microstar instead of a planet.

 

That is actually one thing that dissappointed me in spore. They kind of just tossed in gas giants with out doing anything to them. You should of been able to harvest them for material and then use the core as a planet (if it has a core. Again, some gas giants that are x13+ the size of Jupiter just has so much pressure in which the core actually goes through fusion and it becomes kind of a mini-star).

 

I couldn't agree more, but its the little things in games that make you go " WOW I can't believe they would take the time to do something like that."

Interesting point, I wonder if it would affect the system.
Or what if you did such in a system with no other satellites?
what would be the efect then?

 

What if that was soemthing you could do?
From a safe distance i mean, create a star right by a system's star and watch the resultant effect on the other nearby systems

 

I think one of the 2001: Space Odyssey sequels had something like that. Well, if you could turn a gas giant into a miniature sun, somehow applying a constant, long-lived gravitational force that could overpower it's tendency to spread thin again due to the pressure from the heat and radiation at it's core, then you'd have to think what radiation output such a mini-star could possibly have; it would most likely affect the former gas giant's moons the most, and it would also alter the day-night cycle of all other planets in the system. It would probably have no effect on other star systems, since it's rather far; at most, astronomers there would notice an apparent nova-like increase in brightness of the star, before realizing they're now staring at a newly-born binary system.

 

I see, so what if a system naturally had multiple stars?
Let's say like a smaller one obiting the larger.
And will stars actually be anything more than a heatsource and clock?

 

It would depend on the distance. I don't know much about this particular subject, since I've always considered systems with more than a single, central, massive gravitational well too unstable to support themselves for long. Turns out I'm likely wrong, and a binary system could even have better odds of planetary formation. Now, everything depends on the nature of the binary system: if the stars are "close" together, in the range of our own solar system for example, then planets would have to orbit the center of gravity of the binary system, beyond the orbit of both suns, because otherwise they would have to orbit their star extremely close to avoid a disastrous gravitational disruption of their orbit due to the other star's presence, and this proximity would result in extreme temperatures.
On the other hand, if the other star were far enough, then planets could orbit only one of them at a reasonable distance for liquid water to exist; however, the other star would either have to be rather small for it to be close enough to look like anything but a particularly bright night-sky star as seen from the planet, and this is not a "cool-looking" scenario.
Now, a binary system with close suns could have planets orbiting both suns at the same time within the habitability zone, but the bigger sun would probably start eating away at the other. Since this is a process that takes millions of years, I consider this the best scenario for binary habitability.
Take all this with a grain of sand; I'm just a dilettante astrophysicist.

In-game? That's fertile ground for speculation, since I don't think anything has been mentioned in that respect.

EDIT: Here, have a trinary sunset from Wikipedia for eye candy:

 

Two words: Dyson Ring

 

I think if you could fly into empty space and build a space station or planet, that would be awesome. It would be awesome to pvp in a man-made space station. Just throw on an astronaut suit, mine some blocks, and watch the opponent die.

 

First of all, I suspect that something will be made with gas giants playability after release, in one of larger expansions. But I will throw one suggestion I just had.​

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Bespin-like colonization of gas giants, or, probably even better, giant zeppelin crafts is pretty obvious. But people above talked about terraforming of gas giants. I, too, had played Master of Orion 2 to death. Awesome game. The process of gas giants terraformation was extremely handwaved there, it just happened after some turns of unspecified work on your colony in the same system as a gas giant was. After this artificial planet construction, you had huge, but barren (moon-like) world with, interestingly enough, normal gravity. It had to be colonized and terraformed quite a bit before it was really terran-like (but huge).​

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Gas giants are mostly made of hydrogen. Just as stars. Actually, it goes like this on the scale of "add matter", and "matter" in universe is mostly hydrogen anyway: Earth-like planet → super Earth (larger but rocky) → Neptune-Uranus smaller gas giant → Jupiter-like huge gas giant → super Jupiter → brown dwarf → red dwarf → main sequence star.​

A red dwarf is a normal star, just much smaller than our Sun.

A brown dwarf is not exactly a star, it's something in between of huge gas giants and red dwarves: it is far too large to be considered a planet, and it is too small to start internal fusion reaction and become a true star that shines bright.

And other gas giants are even smaller.

It is well-known where do "solid" matter (as in harder than hydrogen and helium elements, especially carbon) comes from: it is born during various stages of fusion reactions in the depths of stars.

So, what do we have and what do we want to do with it?

We have a large supply of hydrogen and we want to make something solid of all this mass. Basically, all we need is to start a fusion reaction, using whole gas giant as a reagent.

This is where it gets tricky. There aren't much sources of energy powerful enough to burn fusion-hot. And even less on this scale. Basically, it's only one: gravity. But gas giant planets lack it in proper amounts by definition.

Warning: soft "science" fiction below.​

Not a hard one.​

It has same sort of softness as other Starbound physics, in my opinion, so it kinda fits.​

So, in my opinion, fitting soft-scientific approach to constructing an artificial planet out of gas giant will be... a DEATH STAR. A source of thermal energy powerful enough to blow up an Earth-like planet is on the scale of about E+37 or even E+38 joules, if I'm not mistaken. But is it enough to blow up a Jupiter? Probably not. On the other hand, is it enough to start a fusion reaction inside of it? Well, because we are discussing it in the context of soft sci-fi game, I'd say hell yeah.

Process of conversion will be extremely flashy. Basically, it does turns a gas giant planet into a small star. Star, really. Shining and all that. Don't come close. Continuous external power supply is probably not required, it makes the process both too controllable and too costly (continuous death ray beam for a months, are you kidding me). But, after some time, when our small and far too hot (it should be classified as a blue ultra-dwarf or something to burn fast) star finished its' unnatural stage of life and throws most of its' mass into outer space as a small planetary nebula, what we will have inside is... a rock. Probably a big one, and still hot. But perfectly landable empty world.

 

Beautiful concept there. Soft science, sure, but it sounds cool enough not to look too closely; you could write a story about it. Or even better, why don't you elaborate on the concept and make it a suggestion? Destruction of a gas giant to make a regular planet; why not?

 

Thanks. Maybe I will somewhat later, although I don't know what else needs to be said; as a concept it is already pretty fleshed-out. Makes no sense to elaborate more without context of the game, because I can spend hours to describe layout of Death Star gas-giant terraformer, and then we'll find that space ships will be abstract.

 

it is unlikely gas giants will be able to be converted to a habitable planet, restrictions of the procedural generator and such. you can however take an inhospitable rock planet and make it habitable.

 

I don't see that working for gas giants, nor making planets from scratch, but it'll be nice if there was atmospheric conversors.

Get to planet with unbreathable atmosphere, place some atmospheric conversors around, and the atmosphere changes to breathable after a point... and most life in the planet dies, and you have to bring life from other planets, like trees, if you want to have anything alive in the planet.

 

I am not to sure the deathstar approach would work well due to the single massive pulse of energy that was used. More likely would be the destruction of the gravitational core of the planet and its probable dispersal and reformation over the next couple hundred million years. Instead you would more likely need to proceeded in one of three distinct ways.

1. Single Source Ignition: A low and slow collimated beam of energy that could heat the metallic hydrogen to the point of ignition/fusion.

2. Multiple Source Ignition: A web of satellites that create multiple beams of energy that focus on the core of the planet. The purpose of the beams is to not only increase the temperature of the core, but also the pressure in the core. Eventually the core will reach the point of fusion and ignite.

3. Increase of planetary gravity: By increasing the planets gravity well, the same effect can be achieved as number two. The planets core will reach a point where its hydrogen will undergo fusion. The benefit to this is the gravitational field could be adjusted to keep the new sun alive and to adjust the rate of fuel consumption.

Mmmm...Super Science...gotta love it.

 

The main reason I used the Death Star approach was to simplify things, that's all. I love making things as complex and close to realism as possible, and simplicity is kinda difficult concept for me to use/master, so here's that.

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As an addition to your ways, there is a small expansion on mine: the ring/web of satellites, generating powerful electromagnetic field, which prohibits superheated fusion plasma from temporary star to fly everywhere, leaving weak gravity well of ex-gas giant.

I also thought about increasing of gravity, but in my opinion this is even softer sci-fi than death ray of ridiculous energy level, be it burst or continuous one.

 

SPORE murdered my ability to get hyped about anything. I think the two things that pissed me off most about the space stage were:

1. You couldn't have a space navy. Every other empire could, but your empire was a giant lazy asshole and had just one semi-advanced ship commanded by an immortal captain that they bossed around all the time.

2. There was only one major resource in the entire galaxy, and it was spice. SPICE! I mean what the hell is that? SPICE!??!?!? Who honestly sits down and says "We need a resource to base the galaxies economy on, I propose spice."!?

Thats my rant about SPORE for today.

 

It was an homage to Dune. The Spice must flow!!!

Actually, gravity manipulation is in the works right now as an alternative to centrifugal gravity generation. As it stands in Starbound it look like there is an understanding of artificial gravity already in the game. To get the power to generate a large enough field, all you need to do is tap into the gas giants own electromagnetic and radiation emissions. Gas Giants put off ALLOT of energy, if you can tap that...things get interesting.

 

Well, it's been speculated that gas giants do have solid cores. And I mean that's kinda logical since it needs some sort of gravitational field or else it would just float away or get scattered due to the gravity of every other planets fields that pass close enough. So I can see there being something to do with them aside from scanning for resources and stuff, which has been confirmed if I remember right. So they aren't useless even if you can't land on them.

Right from the front page.

I don't remember if there's going to be terraforming though. I don't believe it has been mentioned.

 

What if you had a planetary net that was resistant to heat and other phenomena that would surround the planet converting/compressing the gas and over time the net would shrink and eventually you could land on the solid mass, or the planet would explode from all the compressed hydrogen making a really pretty picture in space