On 5/25/2011 10:31 AM, Onno Meyer wrote: > Johannes replied to me: >>> Both fuel skimmers and SDBs hide regularly in gas giants, and >>> many ordinary ships skim their own fuel as well. That means a >>> lot is going on within the gas giants of industrialized >>> systems. How about specialized salvage or strike teams, then? >>> >> >> Are they actually landing or going to the surface of the gas giant? I was >> always under the impression that theese operation happen in comparably >> high places in the athmosphere of the gas giant. > > In our games, there were plenty of opportunities to operate in > gas giants, usually down to a few bars of pressure. Ships with > contragrav find it easy to operate in the atmosphere much like > a submarine or a blimp. Going lower was usually the result of > technical failure at a critical moment or an attempt to hide. > > Pressure was no problem for the ship, but the composition of > the atmosphere was -- all that hydrogen leaking in. > > Most ships would stay so high that the pressure outside was > less than the pressure inside, even if that won't stop all > diffusion. It might be possible to set up stations or ports, > but the benefits are not worth the problems. Instead, the > stations would use their contragrav to hover above the > atmosphere. Not in orbit, since they's fall without CG. > > Slightly lower depths, below the usual commercial traffic, > would be home to system defense assets and the odd derelict > starship. Going really low would rapidly overwhelm not just > our trader but even armored warships.
I think that you could design a special type of ship for high pressure gas giant operations. As a quick idea, give it two hulls. Inside the outer hull, put equipment that is dedicated to gathering and liquefying the incoming hydrogen. In fact I doubt if gaseous hydrogen will penetrate a layer of liquid hydrogen, so keep the outer hull filled with the liquid and dedicate the equipment to keeping it chilled and under pressure. These dedicated ship types could serve as military defense forces. Deep in the atmosphere they'd be difficult to attack. They could also be mining some exotic material. I don't know if they could survive deep enough to get to the theoretical metallic hydrogen core, but that would be interesting and could maybe be a high-TL plot element. On the topic of ships "crashing" in a gas giant: I believe that if the pressure hull is intact, the ship will reach a depth where it will float like a balloon because the outside pressure will become so much higher than the inside pressure. If the hull can survive that for a limited time, it might be possible to mount a rescue operation before the crew is killed by the rising pressure or hull collapse. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
