Floating colonies in gas giants

[Lyneira]

On 5/3/2023 at 5:43 AM, Nicrose said:

Perhaps you can tell me how a floating colony would add anything to the gameplay? How do you propose rewriting the game to get rid of orbital mechanics as they are and allow for ships to stop in the middle of an atmosphere to land on a floating and stationary ship? Is it really worth it to put all those resources into changing the game for "it is cool"? I personally don't think so and I know that anyone in charge of managing man hours and funds would also agree.

It could be a way of harvesting unique gases from a gas giant. Would certainly create challenges attempting to land kerbals and cargo ships on the limited space.

As for implementing them: Colony parts are almost certainly going to be treated differently by the game's physics than normal vessels. I would expect them as static objects with no physics done between colony parts. When colonies get large and knowing how much the game already struggles with part counts, there's far too much performance gain here to not do this. Maybe catastrophic collisions would temporarily set them to be treated as dynamic with regular physics while things are falling apart, like we see in the trailer on the ice moon. Surface colonies in particular will remain stuck to the terrain and in one position relative to the planet. A floating colony can be the same, just without being attached to terrain. No rewriting of orbital mechanics needed. If catastrophic collisions happen and some parts of the colony become treated as dynamic: too bad, some parts of your colony will fall into the clouds, never to be seen again. If you break your balloons, your whole colony will fall.

Edited May 4, 2023 by Lyneira

[AtomicTech]

3 hours ago, Lyneira said:

Maybe catastrophic collisions would temporarily set them to be treated as dynamic with regular physics while things are falling apart

That's one heck of a lag spike there!

[Nicrose]

10 hours ago, Lyneira said:

As for implementing them: Colony parts are almost certainly going to be treated differently by the game's physics than normal vessels. I would expect them as static objects with no physics done between colony parts. When colonies get large and knowing how much the game already struggles with part counts, there's far too much performance gain here to not do this. Maybe catastrophic collisions would temporarily set them to be treated as dynamic with regular physics while things are falling apart, like we see in the trailer on the ice moon. Surface colonies in particular will remain stuck to the terrain and in one position relative to the planet. A floating colony can be the same, just without being attached to terrain. No rewriting of orbital mechanics needed. If catastrophic collisions happen and some parts of the colony become treated as dynamic: too bad, some parts of your colony will fall into the clouds, never to be seen again. If you break your balloons, your whole colony will fall.

I respectfully disagree with almost every part of this. Ultimately I see this being a whole lot more work than you are mentioning and thus not worth it for a single planet. Especially needing to create a whole new part (a balloon) that may or may not even work with the current physics system and which would then need to be tested to be working perfectly for all planets with an atmosphere and that just seems sort of pointless in the entire game. Personally I wouldn't appreciate if they even spent time considering this while the game is in the state that it's in due to how niche of a part it would be. However I do want to point out that yes, it would be cool if there was infinite money and infinite time to develop the game. 

[Lyneira]

10 hours ago, Nicrose said:

I respectfully disagree with almost every part of this. Ultimately I see this being a whole lot more work than you are mentioning and thus not worth it for a single planet.

I would indeed not expect to see this in the first iteration of colonies. And I won't be disappointed if they never get around to it. However, Nate has said that the team wants each planet to bring a unique physics puzzle to solve to conquer it. A floating colony definitely qualifies for this. Consider also that Jool is not the only planet with a thick atmosphere (there's Eve as well) and we know there is at least one more gas giant (the one that the ice moon in the trailer orbits) planned to be added as part of the current roadmap.

In general, I see enabling the creation of aerostats, whether normal or colony, as something that will add an entirely new dimension to the game. If the devs don't get around to it themselves, I look forward at least to mods adding it.

[dr.phees]

20 hours ago, Nicrose said:

Especially needing to create a whole new part (a balloon) that may or may not even work with the current physics system

That physics system is already there: In the seas. And in atmospheric density. It should be relatively simple to add. (I mean, there is already proof-of-concept in form of a KSP 1 mod).

One point that I have not seen here is, that gas giants really earn their names. They are just that. Diving into atmospheric pressures that make floating balloons work means diving deep! If you want to ascend from that, you will have to move through a lot of atmosphere until you leave air drag behind. I think Jupiter's atmosphere's scale height is about four times that of earth. That means: If you could build a floating city in earth's atmosphere, you would have to go through 4 times as much atmosphere to gain orbit as on earth. Speaking for Kerbin/Jool that would be about the same I guess.

So, four times the atmosphere to go through. And in the end we need roughly the same orbital speed as on earth. You would have to launch quite a rocket, obviously dependign depending on your floating city's height. But I am pretty sure we are talking Earth/Kerbin sea level pressures at least, so, quite a job.

Edited May 5, 2023 by dr.phees

[Nicrose]

3 hours ago, dr.phees said:

One point that I have not seen here is, that gas giants really earn their names.

Oh yeah, speaking of that, with the gravitational pull of Jool I can only imagine the size and amount of light gas required to hold up even a simple space ship, let alone a colony. The balloons would have to be something like 100-1000 times bigger than the colony just to keep if afloat, and I have absolutely zero ideas on how to launch that into orbit around Kerbin, let alone all the way to Jool or another solar system eventually. Basically I feel this would end up becoming the absolute hardest task in the entire game. Not to mention the amount of drag that you get from even just entering the atmosphere. I went to Jool yesterday actually and before I knew I was in the atmosphere my ship started freaking out due to the amount of drag and it was not capable of stabilizing. Granted I didn't have wings but it was still impossible for me to exit or do much of anything other than fall into the abyss. If they happen to put this in the game, I would be very interested in how they propose to achieve this because it's so far out of the realm of possibility that it would need a very creative solution that I've never seen or heard of before. 

[Lyneira]

You can't actually float anything with a normal blimp type balloon in a gas giant, because gas giants are pretty much entirely made up of hydrogen and helium, the lightest gases. The only things that could displace the hydrogen and gain static lift are a vacuum or a hot air balloon filled with the gas giant's own atmosphere. Both have problems:

• Vacuum: An envelope strong enough to resist the pressure and light enough to not undo any potential lift is to my knowledge not possible with any current technology.
• Hot air: You'll need to constantly use energy to keep the air  in the balloon hotter than the air outside. One ideas I've seen for this is a balloon designed to absorb maximum sunlight from above during a gas giant's "day", and any reflected light from the atmosphere below. And of course the balloon has to keep as much of that heat in for as long as possible rather than lose it to the atmosphere. The balloon would rise during the day and sink during the night.

Either way, because the air being displaced is mostly hydrogen which is the least dense gas, there is much less lift available per displaced volume than in a nitrogen/oxygen atmoshpere, so the balloon volumes would have to be gargantuan to lift anything substantial.

Edited May 6, 2023 by Lyneira

[kspnerd122]

Ok, so they are actually possible in theory, it's just that you would need to hang them off orbital rings instead of floating them in the atmosphere, floating colonies are much better for places like venus where the air is made of dense stuff like CO2 and N2

[Strawberry]

1 hour ago, kspnerd122 said:

Ok, so they are actually possible in theory, it's just that you would need to hang them off orbital rings instead of floating them in the atmosphere, floating colonies are much better for places like venus where the air is made of dense stuff like CO2 and N2

You can do them in gas giants too with hot air and it works okay that way

[Emanuel01]

Well, as far as my understanding goes, the only required parameters for buoyancy are mass and volume. So if you build a vacuum filled structured that is rigid enough to withstand the outside pressure, you could theoretically make it float in a pure hydrogen atmosphere. We typically use lighter gases to accomplish the objetive of generating an opposing pressure from the inside, but I don't see why the same effect couldn't be achieved by sci fi materials or active structures.

But please correct me if I'm wrong