Gas Exoplanets

[evandorf]

With the removal of certain gas isotopes from the atmospheres of existing exoplanets (https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/22509), we should add gas planets to allow for the extraction of these resources. 

Hurdles to overcome:

- How to map the “ground”: my first idea would be that the general turf would be open air, like the rooftop holoprojection. It would need to be decided how dangerous these planets would be, since I would assume falling into the skies would be a quick descent into the high pressure gasses and death. You could try to overcome that with mandatory jet packs on these missions, but I’m open to ideas if you want to make it safer.

- I’m not sure if the gas isotopes were removed because of planetary fires or they were not balanced or lore accurate or something. If they are meant to be no longer an option for resource extraction, let me know.

I'm sure I'm missing some things so feedback is welcome. 

[Arbiter_Ambrose]

I believe the removal of it is both planetary fires, and realism which is essentially lore yea as after all it is a bit silly to have Chlorine-Tritium-heilium-3 atmospheres, and maybe a bit of balance though that is more a issue of how it works, I personally would be really open to this, as it opens yet another type of place for awaysites and resource extraction, perhaps very very minimal phoron atmospheres could be added to these on a very very rare chance too though on that end, lore likely prevents it.

In terms of ground mapping, a dedicated turf could be created, it would likely need to be a fairly dangerous place, maybe lattice could be used but not as expansively as in space? could be a bit too difficult to code limits there though.

I'm not batra who made the PR though, so don't quote me on those reasons for removal.

[zha everything broken]

100% good subjects to raise! TLDR: they are intended to no longer be resource extraction targets from exoplanet atmospheres, and this is prelude to More Stuff.

GAS GIANTS
Way way way outside scope of this PR. Sorry. Neat in principle but trying to actually play on one in SS13 sounds like a giant pile of jank to me.

RESOURCE EXTRACTION
I was quite surprised to see this post; there are currently no mechanical applications for Deuterium, Tritium, or Helium-3 in-game outside the INDRA and BSD. Yes; they were intentionally removed as extraction targets from exoplanet atmospheres, largely because it was more than a bit of nonsense, and because I'd rather have more interesting means of extracting those resources in the future. I originally was going to type up a whole paragraph about the science behind it, but probably no one else cares lmao.

PLANETARY FIRES
Exoplanet atmosphere generation (/obj/effect/overmap/visitable/sector/exoplanet/proc/generate_atmosphere()) randomly picks from the pool of allowed gases; if a fuel gas is chosen, it disallows oxidizing gases from being introduced to the mix from thereon, and vice versa. In 0.1% of cases, it allows a flammable atmosphere. If this is not the case in-game, then that is a bug!

Trust in the Plan.

[evandorf]

2 hours ago, zha everything broken said:

trying to actually play on one in SS13 sounds like a giant pile of jank to me.

I think it might be simpler than it seems, but I wasn’t intending this post to try and shoehorn the gas exos into the existing PR. 
 

I personally enjoy very dangerous planets and I could see a zlevel that is basically in the clouds, with floating platforms for extraction, and as long as you are wearing a jet pack you’re fine. Things like lava already check for flying vars, so I imagine it could function like the abyss tiles. I don’t think it would be especially jank.

I imagine that, especially in NBT2, resource extraction will be an important part of a ship being self sufficient. I love the lone spacer ship’s atmos collector, and we’ve done similar setups retrofitting the Intrepid. 

[zha everything broken]

I wouldn't turn my nose up at "landable" gas giants if someone pulled them off in a way that played well! My current thinking on them is for gas extraction there to be abstracted. One of my big desires for NBT2's engineering goals is developing interesting material refinement processes; that PR linked before is the first step in porting a lot of Nebula's materials code; this basically unifies solids, reagents, and gases into a single framework.

This means that ships can- say in an abstracted gas giant harvesting scenario- fill a massive reservoir of gas, then decide how they want to process it. All the water vapor they can crack into hydrogen and oxygen, and sieve deuterium from the distillation of hydrogen deuteride. Break heavy organics into smaller ones, do all sorts of chemistry that we can't support now. If you're in a sector where substances XYZ are in demand, you should be able to mine for, skim, trade for, or steal the chemical precursors that'd let you synthesize a bunch of XYZ.

That materials code also lets do a shitload of pretty foundational Other stuff, but uh. Yeah. I'm really excited about resource extraction and management lmao.

 

[evandorf]

12 hours ago, zha everything broken said:

I wouldn't turn my nose up at "landable" gas giants if someone pulled them off in a way that played well! My current thinking on them is for gas extraction there to be abstracted. One of my big desires for NBT2's engineering goals is developing interesting material refinement processes; that PR linked before is the first step in porting a lot of Nebula's materials code; this basically unifies solids, reagents, and gases into a single framework.

This means that ships can- say in an abstracted gas giant harvesting scenario- fill a massive reservoir of gas, then decide how they want to process it. All the water vapor they can crack into hydrogen and oxygen, and sieve deuterium from the distillation of hydrogen deuteride. Break heavy organics into smaller ones, do all sorts of chemistry that we can't support now. If you're in a sector where substances XYZ are in demand, you should be able to mine for, skim, trade for, or steal the chemical precursors that'd let you synthesize a bunch of XYZ.

That materials code also lets do a shitload of pretty foundational Other stuff, but uh. Yeah. I'm really excited about resource extraction and management lmao.

 

That sounds amazing! Is part of this plan to change how turfs or zlevels work? I might tinker with a proof of concept for the planet but it’ll be good to know if there will be changes to exo and turf generation.

The abstracted resource collection you mentioned; are you envisioning actual interaction with the atmos system on the planet or something more remote from space nearby?

[zha everything broken]

Not at the moment! Right now there's a lot of unsexy foundation code that needs to be written to start with. I don't have any concrete plans for gas giants at all yet; I can't do anything with them until we have all the machinery in place to handle the sort of chemistry I described above.

That said, if you or someone else can code "landable" gas giants, there's no reason they can't have deuterium in them in the absence of hydrogen deuteride. Tritium doesn't appear in nature outside EXTREMELY trace quantities though, and the richest source of helium-3 we know of is the lunar regolith- and that is still measured in parts per billion.

None of these substances should ever exist in an atmosphere above even ~0.01%... but by the same token, no machinery should require the insane amounts they currently do. That's a longer term balancing act anyway.