GAS PLANET TWO

[UranianBlue]

SOMEBODY SHOULD MAKE A NEW GAS PLANET!!!!

AND A GAS DWARF!!!

[sal_vager]

7 minutes ago, UranianBlue said:

SOMEBODY SHOULD MAKE

Moved to addons

Have you seen this? You might like it.

[eddiew]

There are a number of planet packs with more gas giants, and they regularly pop to the top on this forum - pick one   

Gas dwarf is a cloud... needs enough material to actually hold it together with significant density. A blob of gas the size of Earth will blow away on the solar wind  

[UranianBlue]

by gas-dwarf I meant a super-earth with an extended atmosphere. Consider Uranus, it techincally isn't a gas giant because it doesn't form metalic hydrogen, and it isn't known whether or not it has an ocean. If Squad made something a little bigger than Eve with an extended atmosphere (surface pressure is 20 atm), that would be great.

I want Squad to do it because I don't like the idea of making planets with Koperincus. I tried it before, and I can't figure out how to make textures for terrestrial planets.

OPM and other Kerbol extension systems only make Gas-Giants, these you can't land on anymore because it will blow up your spaceship and possible crash your game :(.

On 3/21/2017 at 6:22 PM, eddiew said:

Gas dwarf is a cloud... needs enough material to actually hold it together with significant density. A blob of gas the size of Earth will blow away on the solar wind  

Jool's actual size is similar to Earth's. Jool, being a full-blown gas-giant, would be even harder to hold together? Also, when have you ever encountered the "solar wind" in KSP?

[eddiew]

25 minutes ago, UranianBlue said:

by gas-dwarf I meant a super-earth with an extended atmosphere. Consider Uranus, it techincally isn't a gas giant because it doesn't form metalic hydrogen, and it isn't known whether or not it has an ocean. If Squad made something a little bigger than Eve with an extended atmosphere (surface pressure is 20 atm), that would be great.

I want Squad to do it because I don't like the idea of making planets with Koperincus. I tried it before, and I can't figure out how to make textures for terrestrial planets.

OPM and other Kerbol extension systems only make Gas-Giants, these you can't land on anymore because it will blow up your spaceship and possible crash your game :(.

Jool's actual size is similar to Earth's. Jool, being a full-blown gas-giant, would be even harder to hold together? Also, when have you ever encountered the "solar wind" in KSP?

Closest things I know of to "gas dwarves" are in Galileo's Planet Pack. I think Tellumo is something crazy like 2g and 10 atm, and Catallus is around 5-6atm. You can also try Tekto from OPM, which I think is over 2atm and very low gravity. But bear in mind that the KSP engine doesn't do much with this other than make it incredibly hard to move around in. There's no visuals, or lightning storms, or hurricanes... just slowness and running out of fuel slightly below orbital speeds. The experience may not be all you're hoping for... Which may be why most planet packs have only 1-2 such bodies, and some authors haven't bothered at all.

GPP, OPM and others add many non-gas-giant bodies that are landable - although you are correct that what they consider to be gas giants are un-landable. KSP doesn't have a mechanism for "crushed due to pressure" so it just explodes your ship at 0m above the "surface". It's a weakness of the game engine, but it reflects the fact that it's technologically impossible to get down to the solid core. There are however a number of atmospheric small bodies that can take advantage of lifting surfaces and provide interesting means of ascent and descent!  

With regards to scale, Jool isn't practical in reality. Kerbin is 1g and 1/10th Earth's radius, and apparently made of something denser than nickel-iron. We can assume that it contains a core with the density of Kerbin, hence holding onto it's atmosphere. That said, being made of gas or rock doesn't really relate to whether you get a planet; it's about how much mass you have in a small area. Jupiter may or may not have a solid iron/diamond core down in the depths, but it doesn't need that to stay together because it's so darn heavy. The problem with a small gas planet is that you don't have much mass - if you did, it would be a big gas planet. Or a rocky planet with a thickish atmosphere  

Try Tellumo from GPP. It's probably the closest thing to what you're looking for. If you can beat that, then you have a right to ask for something bigger  

Edited March 23, 2017 by eddiew

[JetJaguar]

The problem is that gas planets, even the smallest ice giants, aren't realistically landable.  I've been doing research for a ~10 Earth-mass planet I'm about to start working on, which is just on the dividing line between a huge super-Earth and a small gas giant (note that even though I talk about Earth sizes, the planet would ultimately be scaled to Kerbin sizes for the game).  For comparison, Uranus is the lightest giant planet in the Solar System and is a bit less than 15x the mass of Earth.

I really wanted to make it a large super Earth, but the numbers just don't work out.  The best case scenario, with a modest but realistic atmosphere and a low-density core of more ice than rock, surface pressure is something on the order of 70,000 atmospheres.  The bottom of the Mariana Trench is "only" a little over 1,000 atm.  So I'll end up making it a gas giant because that's the most realistic given the limitations of the game engine.
 

Edited March 24, 2017 by JetJaguar