So I’m working on a steampunk-ish game that occurs in a gas giant - usual “colonization effort gone bad, descendants with primitive tech” sort of situation, except these folk actually have to stay afloat lest they be crushed to death by the pressure.

  • Humans can live at up to 60bar for at least a week; presumably, if you didn’t need to decompress them, they could live much longer.
  • Pressurizing quickly without changing the percentage oxygen is a recipe for dizziness, convulsion, and death.
  • Long term exposure to high pressure can cause bone death. Not clear whether this is on account of the lower % oxygen necessary or on account of the subjects being de/repressurized.
  • The clouds in a gas giant are quite possibly much akin to the atmosphere above 18th century london; full of soot, tarry particles, and metallized hydrocarbons. This is apparently on account of convection, precipitation, and evaporation, and ofc works better the hotter the gas giant.
  • Deeper layers (and potentially different bands) would see the precipitation of some pretty spiffy molecules, including diamond, apparently; good reason to risk your life “diving”.
  • While I have yet to find a really good excuse for a layer or band of CO2 enriched atmosphere, were there to be one, it could be much akin to venus’ atmosphere, including the sulfuric acid clouds. Soot filled sulfuric acid clouds sounds lovely, doesn’t it?
  • Looking into diving bells, I realized that if the colony ship was a big (think km in diameter) concave bell-shape (used to catch the light from solar-system based lasers until the Bussard ramjet can take over) then when the ship has to “land” in the the gas giant, it can serve as a giant diving bell containing enough O2 enriched atmosphere for a small city. Since the rocket nozzle would have to withstand hydrogen plasma accelerated to nearly the speed of light, it would be robust against at least a few bar of pressure.
  • Since victorian tech is not too good with the whole membrane thing, the kind of Scuba-style apparatus you’d need to hang out outside is kind of off-limits. If I posit some sort of mutualist parasite that provides O2 in exchange for nutrients, then I have an easy way of differentiating the “working class” from the elites who get to live in a controlled atmosphere their whole lives - it makes the infected literally “outsiders”.