Oolite Bulletins

El Viejo wrote:

... but hard to explain.

But this is Oolite! We don't even try to explain things, we just wave our hands around a lot

(I do agree with you though)

It's not implausible. If the sun can be skimmed for fuel then it wouldn't be a problem to farm the atmosphere of a gas giant. Provided anything can grow there to make it worth farming... It would be great to descend thru the atmosphere and experience flying thru the different layers... not that that has anything to do with the price of bread.

Greyth wrote:

It's not implausible. If the sun can be skimmed for fuel then it wouldn't be a problem to farm the atmosphere of a gas giant.

I don't think the farming is the real problem. It's where the planet's inhabitants would live.

Commander McLane wrote:

Greyth wrote:

It's not implausible. If the sun can be skimmed for fuel then it wouldn't be a problem to farm the atmosphere of a gas giant.

I don't think the farming is the real problem. It's where the planet's inhabitants would live.

No more of an issue, necessarily, than where they live on an ocean world (assuming an air-breathing species). Lots of artificial structures built to have neutral buoyancy at the chosen altitude. If the gas giant is at a suitable sun-planet distance, then its atmosphere will provide a partial shield against solar radiation and meteorites, and a usable - and relatively consistent - ambient temperature, which is superior to putting the habitats in free space or even on an airless planet. And it's a gas giant so population density isn't as much of an issue. Easier to hide a habitat or two under that sort of thick atmosphere, for those who don't want to be discovered - whether that's smugglers and producers in an Anarchy, or nervous high-tech research labs in a Corp State.

Raw materials shouldn't be too much of an issue since the gas giant will tend to attract asteroids which could be mined more conveniently than having to search an entire system, and while you can't mine the primary it might well have attracted substantial moons (some of Jupiter's are easily the size of a small planet)

It's not the most comfortable idea, sure, but in 2000 systems, there's probably room for it to happen now and then as being better than the local alternatives. (And they're really pretty, so I don't mind them being slightly more common than that, either...)

cim wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Greyth wrote:

It's not implausible. If the sun can be skimmed for fuel then it wouldn't be a problem to farm the atmosphere of a gas giant.

I don't think the farming is the real problem. It's where the planet's inhabitants would live.

No more of an issue, necessarily, than where they live on an ocean world (assuming an air-breathing species). Lots of artificial structures built to have neutral buoyancy at the chosen altitude. If the gas giant is at a suitable sun-planet distance, then its atmosphere will provide a partial shield against solar radiation and meteorites, and a usable - and relatively consistent - ambient temperature, which is superior to putting the habitats in free space or even on an airless planet. And it's a gas giant so population density isn't as much of an issue. Easier to hide a habitat or two under that sort of thick atmosphere, for those who don't want to be discovered - whether that's smugglers and producers in an Anarchy, or nervous high-tech research labs in a Corp State.

It just highlights the complete absence of this kind of habitats in Elite/Oolite. According to the back story a planet is surrounded by dozens of Coriolis (or other) stations, of which we only ever see one. I've gotten used to the factual absence of something which is there in abundance over the years. However, surrounding the planet with hundreds or thousands more objects which are all factually completely absent makes the problem worse by magnitudes.

Thus I prefer not to have uninhabitable planet types as inhabited main planets.

How about what Star Wars did with the planet Bespin!

In Famous Planets 2.5 there is Zarece. The people from that planet are in fact colonists who adapted their way of living to the planet. Zarece is famous for it's cloud cities. Bespin is indeed the inspiration used it.

IMO opinion Each galaxy could have 2/3 Gas planets. But not more. They should be a rare but nice occurrence.

@ Smivs and @Submersible.

Yest light maps, and emission maps would be great!.

Galaxy1, Rilace. Described as having been terraformed into a rich and fertile world... the texture looks a bit like Jupiter's IO would look if sulphur was pinkish?
Galaxy1, Ontimaxe. Mainly agricultural but looks muddy brown. When I hyperspaced there... the texture seems to have changed? Now it looks a bit like Europa
Galaxy1, Ontiat. Desert texture but is average agricultural
Galaxy1, Esesla. Desert texture but is average agricultural

Sometimes I get different textures... just before I rammed another ship (trying to beat him to a cargo pod) and died Esesla was showing a desert texture, now it's completely different...

Greyth wrote:

Sometimes I get different textures... just before I rammed another ship (trying to beat him to a cargo pod) and died Esesla was showing a desert texture, now it's completely different...

Now that is interesting. Certainly sounds like a bug to me. I will try to reproduce that for sure. Did you have any other planet-y OXPs loaded at the time ?

No, I have no other OXP's currently loaded that might explain the change - but I have had. I used to have systems redux loaded. The cache has been rebuilt since it's removal...

Umm... I have Famous Planets loaded! Right on Commander!

[Edit] After a little spring cleaning I now have >50fps - so... thanks! Interestingly running the Chupacabra HUD seems to cost me about 8 fps! [edit] shame - I really liked that HUD! [/edit] [/edit]

Now that I've temporarily unloaded FP2.5 if I start a new game and hyperspace straight to Zaonce it doesn't appear to be textured to the normal quality? Certainly nothing like the other desert textures I've seen from your Povray output. Just to be clear - I think your Povray textures are absolutely wonderful!

Galaxy 1, Encereso. Agricultural gas giant
Galaxy 1, Ribiso. Desert planet but is average agricultural
Galaxy 1, Maxeedso. Desert planet but rich agricultural