Curious question for acutian lovers

[PokerChen]

What happens when you launch a moon at a gas giant? Does it explode like a plain-old rock planet and produce debris?

Because I might have thought, e.g., that it would just make another blip like Shoemaker-Levy and be ineffective at producing an Alderaan phenomenon.

[I-KP]

Planets don't orbit the star; comet's tail is pointing in the wrong direction; planets sharing the same orbit...

Yeah, it's best not to set foot along that path.  Try to see the solar map as being an abstract interpretation of what's going on instead.

[lifehole]

To my understanding, the race does not actually live 'on' the gas giant, but the moons surrounding it.

[Histidine]

Well, Luna masses over 100 million times as much as Halley's Comet.

Still probably wouldn't be anywhere near lethal though, especially if the gas giant generates strong enough tidal forces to tear the moon apart before it hits.

[Teal_Blue]

does comet tails point in the direction of the largest gravity well?  ... the sun? But it would  be nice to have different orbits for the planets, and the planets spinning slowly, and perhaps even a random number of new planets added to the system that are uninhabited that can be used by the other races as resource sources.

Also, i thought in beta that the 'compatibility' of a planet to its race meant sometimes the 'overpowered' races were at a real disadvantage and the 'wimps' were running around the system thrashing everyone? At least that is the way i remember the intention in one of the posts. Is that the case?  Or was that changed or has not been addressed yet? Or replaced with something else?

Nice thoughts on the system behaviours though, it would be nice to see different bodies on the map interact.

-Teal

 

[runetrantor]

The whole 'living on gas giants' is debatable, as yes, logic says hey live in moons, yet when you check those worlds you get cloud cities on the atmosphere as a picture, and a surface area that's insanely big (Which I take as making new floating cities until you fill the planet), I once had the Skylaxians in a gas giant, and by late game they were expanding habitable area so fast their population just kept on increasing and stabilized at like... 5 trillion or something.