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[MeatyBoii]

Gas giants are, like name implies, a gaseous planets. It isn't really a good idea to try to land on it, when we know already that plunging into Jupiter, Saturn, Uran or Neptune will be end of you due to pressure, and unless we make major improvements in both survivalibity, everything sent down there is on suicide mission.

In StarSector however, it's a bit different. Currently, when creating a colony on a gas giant, colony is just... kind of there. I know we're not striving for biggest realism, but I think it would be good to think about other options. How about orbital stations?

Instead of creating colonies, if player wishes to estabilish a colony on a gas giant, he'd be forced to build an orbital habitat. It could take some time, be expensive, but increase accessibility greatly, and have rather small population, which limits it to only single industry (mining). To increase that, player would need to enlarge the station, which would in turn be rather expensive, etc, etc.

I could think of specific mechanics of that, assuming it's even possible in the game.

Thanks for your attention.

[Deathviper]

I know it's a late reply as I'm new to game and forums, but I really like this idea. Just throwing it out there.

[Alex]

Instead of creating colonies, if player wishes to estabilish a colony on a gas giant, he'd be forced to build an orbital habitat.

That's already what happens, conceptually! In fact, if you pay careful attention to the industry icons, some of those are different to reflect their orbital nature.

A boost in accessibility sounds like a good idea, though, both for helping convey what's going on and just for general flavor, hmm.

[Megas]

I thought that gas giant colonies were copies of Cloud City from Empire Strikes Back.

[Plantissue]

I wonder what it is about building a colony on a gas giant that for some people it breaks the suspension of disbelief in a space game? If colonies can be built on an atmosphereless planet, for me it doesn't seem that much of a stretch that a colony can be built on the various depths of a gas planet's atmosphere. We literally have a space station in low earth orbit.

[SCC]

It would be nice, if colonies big enough had visible orbital rings, especially on the dark side of the planet.

[Serenitis]

I was kinda in the 'Cloud City' camp for a while, but after playing with boggled's station mod for a while I've started to think that maybe colonising a gas giant might be a little easier to grasp conceptually if it automatically generated an orbiting station which essentially is the colony.

If colonies can be built on an atmosphereless planet, for me it doesn't seem that much of a stretch that a colony can be built on the various depths of a gas planet's atmosphere.

The atmosphere of a gas giant could possibly be described as "a bit more turbulent than you're thinking right now".
Hard vacuum is likley a more forgiving place to build stuff.

[Plantissue]

The top of the clouds of a gas giant shouldn't be turbulent, lacking in much of an atmosphere and is essentially not that much different from a lack of atmosphere. The force of turbulence would be proportional to the density of the atmosphere hitting it. Modern large airliners can travel through severe turbulence quite safely. I would imagine the colonies would be travelling with the wind and so wouldn't have much adverse forces acting on it anyways much like how pilots happily ride the transatlantic jet stream. I remember reading how a plane was riding in a 200 mph jet stream recently. There are manned submarines which can withstand 1000 atm pressure, so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the fantastical science of starsector to be able to have colonies in quite adverse conditions.

The "easiest" "fix" would just be to make gas giants non colonisable, and diffuse its volatile resource to one of its moons for the sake of placating those whose disbelief breaks.

[IronBorn]

There is already a mod that does this. It also allows players to build stations in asteroid belts and recolonize abandoned stations around the sector.

Player Station Construction:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17094.0