Gas Giants in KSP.

[Talisman]

How large would a Gas Giant be in KSP? I assume pretty smaller since the KSP sun is technically a brown dwarf but it would be pretty large compared to Kerbin. Anyone want a Gas Giant/Jovian planet to be added next? I\'d love to do a mission exploring it, seeing it\'s giant mass envelop the screen and descending into it\'s surface until I reach plasma layers and are incinerated and crushed from pressure/gravity.

[Luigibro606]

You truly embody the spirit of Kerbal exploration. :b

[illectro]

Planets I want are pretty much clones of our solar system - there are unique quirks and possible missions for almost any body in the SS. But most of all I just want to be able to design my own bodies and orbits. I\'d like to see more hazards added though - dust clouds that will tear your ship apart if you fly through them too quickly - comets, ring systems, volcanos and ice guysers

- Radiation belts that make getting too close to that big gas giant a fatal proposition for the crew.

- planets with a surface so deep inside a crushing atmosphere that landing isn\'t possible.

[SiliconPyro]

With the current code, I can just picture my frame rate in the atmosphere of a fully realized gas giant. I\'d love to see it if they could get it done correctly though. I\'m really looking forward to seeng an asteroid belt with a few Minmus sized bodies in it. THAT would be a challenging landing.

[Bekiekutmoar]

How large would a Gas Giant be in KSP?

I think somewhere between 3000 and 8000 km diameter. Kerbin has a diameter of 1200 km, Mun 400 km and Minmus 120 km.

[illectro]

If they ever go beyond 1 gravitating body i\'d really like to see an analog of Phobos, where the moon is so close to the parent planet that the Hill\'s sphere is inside the body, so there\'s no such thing as a stable orbit around the body.

[Markus Reese]

I am really looking forward to if we get gas giants too. More though for atmospheric moons!

[Khrissetti]

If you wanted a kerbal Jovian system in the right sort of scale to Jupiter it would need to have an equatorial radius of approx. 6,500km compared to Kerbin\'s 600km and orbit at a height in the region of 70.8 million kilometers (Kerbin orbits at 13.5 million km)

While it would be possible to put in a scaled Jovian system the devs would really need to sort out the navigational problems which start occurring at high speeds first

EDIT: Included is a scale picture of the difference between Jupiter and a hypothetical 'Kovian' (Sorry for you \'K\' phobics) planet and a visualisation on its orbit

[Dielos]

Crap, is the real difference between Earth and Jupiter really so big? We are really nothing down here...

[hunter558]

Even though the sizes of the planets and the sun are small, i believe much of the solar systems physics work identical to our own solar system, therefore Kerbol and the Sun are almost identical in terms of gravity and so forth as is the Earth and Kerbin, and the Mun and Luna. Correct me if im wrong. Therefore a gas giant would behave almost identical to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune. One of the few unrealistic things about the game is the size of the planet and moons and sun in accordance with their characteristics. A gas giant in KSP wont ever be as large as those in our own solar system but they will act pretty much the same as ours do in every other way.

[SovietShark]

Crap, is the real difference between Earth and Jupiter really so big? We are really nothing down here...

Think it\'s around 100 earths to make up Jupiter, and around 1 million earths to fit in the sun. :-*

[HAIL_Probe101]

Think it\'s around 100 earths to make up Jupiter, and around 1 million earths to fit in the sun. :-*

'Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Jupiter is so large that all of the other planets in the solar system could fit inside it. More than 1,000 Earths would fit inside Jupiter.'~ NASA

Also over 1000 jupiters would fit in the sun, but you are correct that 1 million earths would fit in the sun

[samstarman5]

Gas giants are coming, and they are going to be awesome to fly to. But they are going to require a lot of work to happen, which is why you will only be seeing the rest of the rocky worlds getting done next.

Since we don\'t have a model for Kerbol, yet, it is hard to judge where it will stand in comparison to the rest of the planets as they come. Remember that this is practically a whole other universe kerbals live in, where a terrestrial planet can exist that is smaller than our system\'s Mercury. The Kerbol system\'s largest gas giant might turn out to be as large as our own Earth. That would be pretty dang huge when you consider what we already have. Also, I would hardly consider Kerbol a brown dwarf. It\'s too bright.

[Pluto100]

I would love to see gas giants in KSP! In fact, I have already built ships that are meant to fly in a very low orbit around one !

[Twinky827]

I wanna land on the core and blow it up. I\'m very Kerbal too.

[GeneralIssue]

Something like this?

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=9955.msg155268#msg155268

[Rocketscience101]

Crap, is the real difference between Earth and Jupiter really so big? We are really nothing down here...

Well being that it was calculated, that 10,000 earths could fit inside jupiter, and it makes up a good quantity of planetary mass in our solar system. We are pretty small here. But hey, we are the only intelligent life form in the solar system.

[Randox]

Am I the only one envisioning special components that will be able to handle the substantial pressure and other conditions of a gas giant planet? Perhaps one day, a long way in the future, it will be possible to sent a mission to a gas giant to collect samples, or perhaps to use as fuel for some sort of engine that can be used on super long trips.

[samstarman5]

Am I the only one envisioning special components that will be able to handle the substantial pressure and other conditions of a gas giant planet? Perhaps one day, a long way in the future, it will be possible to sent a mission to a gas giant to collect samples, or perhaps to use as fuel for some sort of engine that can be used on super long trips.

Are you kidding? The gasses in any of the gas and ice giants are a treasure trove of resources. For one, they would be a great source of water without having to go out to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Water in turn giving us valuable hydrogen and oxygen. Then there would be the more exotic gasses that might open up even further avenues.

There\'s just that whole gravity well thing to deal with. You thought getting from Kerbin to the Mun was taxing. It would be like the Great Wall of China. It was built not to keep the barbarians out, but to keep them in. Not so easy to make a quick escape from a pursuing army when you got a wall to get past. Same with dealing with a gas giant. Easy to get to, but to get away from?

Yeah, I hope there\'s a way to refuel our ships mid-trip.

[Khrissetti]

Crap, is the real difference between Earth and Jupiter really so big? We are really nothing down here...

Yup, Earth would be lost just in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Several of its moons are roughly Earth-sized like Io and Europa.

Jupiter is basically a solar system of its own, the moons receive more energy from Jupiter than the sun.

[Fridgecake]

Do we even know what the \'core\' of our own gas giants look like? Isn\'t there a fair amount of debate around whether there is a solid surface to stand on or whether its just a monumentally massive ball of gas/other components?

Will be interesting to see how the KSP team decide their gas giants \'work\'. Plus trying to take off from the surface where there is the kind of wind speeds that occur on Jupiter, landing on that planet just screams Kerbal!

[Khrissetti]

The immense pressures mean that anything at the centre would be \'solid\' but nothing you could stand on, there probably wouldn\'t be a fixed transition from \'gas\' to \'solid\' but a blurred line as the gas became thicker and thicker, denser and denser.

Jupiter has a gravity (at the tops of the clouds) of approx 2.54 times as much as Earth which isn\'t huge, but consider that means that all the gas you have on top of you also weighs 2.54 times as much. There should be a point in any kerbal Jovian when the atmospheric pressure would simply destroy your ship, regardless of how many struts you gaffa-tape on!

[SiliconPyro]

I am reeally looking forward to something more like Saturn and its moons (muns). Beautiful rings, a mun with an atmosphere and surface gravity that is only slightly more than Earth. I know rings would be another complication, but when it\'s implemented, I\'m heading that way as fast as I can.

[RedDwarfIV]

Kerbol is supposed to be a red dwarf.

[Phoenix Aerospace]

Am I the only one that wants to make an aerostatic habitat in order to mine helium-3, instead of blowing it up? Once interstellar missions are possible, we\'re going to need some source of fuel.