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J. B. Stanhope replied to the topic Lightsabers, Warp drives and Phasers in the forum Sci-fi Writers 4 years, 11 months ago
A planet the size of Jupiter, with the mass of earth.
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- So it’d basically be a swiss cheese planet? Vaguely similar to Ego from Guardians of the Galaxy 2. I was thinking that it’d have different climates in it’s various layers, varying from a very moist and still environment at the core, to a very dry and windy environment on the surface with the atmosphere very close to the planet so the air’s thinner on the surface and the sky looks black in the daytime.
- but about the gravity: would the gravity’s power alter the closer one got to the core? Would the gravity change directions at the core?
In a symmetrical sphere, the gravity gets weaker the closer you get to the center. At the center the gravity is zero. Gravity will always pull toward the center, so if you were passing through the center, gravity would change directions. (If you want more details look up Newton’s shell theorem). Your planet is not spherically symmetrical because of the holes but I think if the holes were approximately evenly distributed it should be approximately correct.
If you fell through the a hole that went all the way through the center of the planet, you would reach you maximum speed at the center of the planet, then slow back down to zero speed at the other side of the planet and start falling again. This is actually an orbit that passes through the planet’s center. (Orbits are ellipses; this ellipse is so thin that it’s a straight line).
An interesting application of this, which would actually might be feasible on your planet because of all the holes, is the idea of a gravity train. Basically if you connect any two points on the surface of the planet by a low-friction train line that goes through the planet, the train can get to one point to the other solely by gravity power and the time it would take is constant for a particular planet, regardless of which two points on the surface are chosen. Because you have multiple habitable layers, I’ll point out that this also works for any two points that are the same distance from the planet’s center, although the time the train would take would vary with the distance of the stations from the center.
- So it’d basically be a swiss cheese planet? Vaguely similar to Ego from Guardians of the Galaxy 2. I was thinking that it’d have different climates in it’s various layers, varying from a very moist and still environment at the core, to a very dry and windy environment on the surface with the atmosphere very close to the planet so the air’s thinner on the surface and the sky looks black in the daytime.
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