Space · World
Jupiter and Europa
Jupiter fills the black sky, its night side flickering with lightning; on its moon Europa, a crust of ice over a dark ocean 200 m deep.
In the game
How to get it
Phase 3 of the Solar System: you never land on Jupiter, a gas giant; its gravity throws your ship on to its moons. Land on Europa's ice.
What it is for
Jovite (the leviathan's shed scales, or a lightning probe dropped into Jupiter); the ocean under the ice, explored by submarine.
Why it exists
Cold, darkness and the pressure of the ocean -- and the first world whose real treasure is under its surface.
The same text the game shows in its progress tree and on the item's sheet (I).
Europa is Jupiter's icy moon, and Jupiter itself is in its sky: a giant world you can only fly by, a slingshot for the voyage outward.
Europa's surface
- Ice plains: a white frost over blue ice, 12 to 40 m thick.
- Lineae: double ridges 6 to 14 m tall running for kilometres, their ice stained red-brown by salts pushed up from the ocean.
- Chaos terrain: where the crust broke up, rafts of ice tilted in a jumble, and in its heart cracks of open water.
- Melt holes: round wells of open water 10 to 35 m wide, about one every 2.5 km: the doors of the ocean.
Under the ice
- The ocean runs under the whole crust, from its rough underside (icicles hang from it) down to a dark rock floor 30 to 160 m up: up to 300 m of black water.
- Black smokers stand on the floor: chimneys 10 to 24 m tall whose glowing seams are the only light of the abyss.
- The water of a hole stands at one level, a few metres under its rim: put a Submarine down on it.
The sky
Jupiter, banded cream and rust with its Great Red Spot, fills a good part of the black sky; on its night side, storm cells flash with lightning.
Dangers
| Danger | What to do |
|---|---|
| No air | a sealed suit, or the submarine's cabin |
| Cold: -220 to -160 °C on the ice | the Thermal suit (a space suit freezes); under the ice the sea is at -1 °C |
| The ocean's weight: 0.15 atm a metre under the water's level | a space suit holds about 20 m, the thermal suit about 27 m; the leviathans' depths and the floor need the Submarine (the brass pressure suit holds the weight but freezes on the ice above) |
| The dark under the ice | the submarine's lamp, a lantern |
| Electric eels | they hunt in packs in the ocean |