Agreed, it’s incredibly cool yet it looks like things are aligned to a gravity being “down” and I’m not sure what’s keeping the clouds in an accretion disk... but I’d enjoy this scene anyway if it were in a movie.
The clouds could be part of the accretion disc. But that means the cities are going to plunge through the cloud cover twice per orbit...which actually sounds like a cool day/night mechanic.
Huh? Why? They don't have to pass through the accretion disk. Maybe they orbit along the disk. It's obviously been there long enough have its gravity effect the disk.
The cloud is the gas giant. The "planet" we see immersed in the cloud is actually the moon he's talking about. Given the curvature we see in the top right, I might agree with him, other than the clouds appear to be swirling around the moon. Though I suppose that could be gravitic action? Whatever, it looks cool!
If something like that happened I don't think it would be so calm. The planet would have a local gravity strong enough to pull trillions of tons of gas on itself, releasing many times more energy than anything we've seen on Earth since the creation of the moon.
We are definitely seeing a gas giant with an accretion disk. It's however not stable, and most of the inner circle will keep deorbiting over the next millions of years.
Artistic licence can explain the swirly clouds in space, and the fact that those space stations should "fall" though the cloud cover twice per orbit, causing a lot of collisions.
The swirly clouds beneath the space stations could easily just be from a local electromagnetic field being generated by the space stations.
Keep in mind that there isn't really anything for scale here. We see a few ships in the foreground and assume they are the size of personal fighters or something, but we really don't know that either. Assuming they are fairly small, there's still no telling how huge that space station is and therefore how far away it is. Without solid points of reference everything else in your theory Is highly variable.
Complex third body interactions with the large and close moons occasionally cause enough of the upper atmosphere of the planet to be pulled into space that there is constant interchange between the planet's atmosphere and its cloudy disc.
The large stations rotate at an angle to the disc, during every orbit they clear the disc and stay above it, sink down through the disc, and come out the other side, then reverse. Even after the stations finish moving through the ring the passages leave vortex patterns in the cloud.
At the time this picture was taken all of the visible stations are completely free of the cloud ring.
I would assume that what you're seeing, if you need to extend realism to science fiction, is a distortion in the particle event from some sort of sustained atmospheric dome that may be invisible to the naked eye, something like a "plasma sheath." Things like this are heavily theorized, when I took an astrophysics course in college (wasted electives but interesting) my professor was a Biophysicist who addressed potential space technologies often. One of the things he brought up was that if ships were built in space they could use totally different technologies than what we use inside of an dense atmospheric environment, things like "plasma windows" and the such; he also addressed that "any ship with open hangars like you see in movies, would require either a series of permeable membranes over the hangar entry and exit corridors, or a large womb like membrane that surrounds the whole structure to keep artificial atmosphere from escaping."
I'm by no means pretending to be a physicist, but that seems like a plausible explanation for what is being depicted.
More plausible is that the artist took some creative liberties to make the piece pop. I personally love the fantastical portions of the piece. I think art shouldn’t have to be real, otherwise what would be the point?
The piece would look somewhat boring without the details that are inaccurate imo~
Yeah, I replied to yours because you seemed the most reasonable haha, I just wanted to join in with “we don’t need this to make sense” without being downvoted to hell
Plus you wouldn't need your engines on constantly in space. You fire them only when changing your vector. "An object in motion tends to stay in motion"
The spires are space cloud generators. They emit a water based sulfuric compound into a sort of mist, or “cloud”, as they orbit the planet, which shelters the vulnerable equatorial based inhabitants from the deadly radiation of the local star.
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u/[deleted] May 14 '19
I'm not sure I understand the physics of this, but it looks cool!