Gas harvesting

[TriacFox]

Sorry if this has already been suggested, but I think gas harvesting would be a great feature to add.

Currently there's not much of anything to do on gas giants, but adding a gas harvesting mechanic could make these worth exploring and spending time at. It would also make sense to make special rare and valuable compounds which you can only get from nebulae which would help encourage exploring and getting out of the main bubble.

I'm not entirely sure how it would work, ideally it would be more interactive than fuel scooping. Perhaps have floating clouds of gas which you can approach and use essentially a vacuum on or similar.

I'd think it should be a module which needs a large ship and power, so perhaps class 6 or higher as if we're keeping it semi-realistic you'd need to gather a significant amount of gas to make it worthwhile.

Balancing the rarity and type of gas would be a bit difficult initially as it shouldn't be too easy to make money off of, but also should be worth people's time. An added complication is that for most known gasses you'd need way more than a few dozen tons to be worthwhile.

Thanks for reading and hopefully we'll see something along these lines implemented eventually.

 

[Variform]

Gas harvesting sucks.

But no, really though. What gasses are you going for? I am not a astrophysicist - I can't even spell it without help - and no D. Braben, I refuse to a science fanboy, so I won't be one, evah, but how much and what type of any gas can be scooped at what sites? Aren't gas giants all Helium and there is Hydrogen and maybe there are places with Argon and such gasses, in that case they would likely be atmospheric gasses. And we cannot land on such worlds.
Fine idea anyway, the more you can do, the better.

 

[MBaldelli]

Sorry if this has already been suggested, but I think gas harvesting would be a great feature to add.

This has recently been covered when it comes to fuel scooping... Here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/389542-Scooping-overhaul

Currently there's not much of anything to do on gas giants, but adding a gas harvesting mechanic could make these worth exploring and spending time at. It would also make sense to make special rare and valuable compounds which you can only get from nebulae which would help encourage exploring and getting out of the main bubble.

Hmm! This might be somewhat useful when it comes to Class IV as well as Class V Gas Giants; as they are Alkali Metal/Silicate (respectively).

First there would need to be a specialized Scoop for this sort of thing as the Fuel Scoop feeds into the "gas tank". This Scoop would then have to feed into the asteroid miner's refinery in order to process the material(s).

Unfortunately there wouldn't be all that much work other than having to have the ship -- say a Python's Commander -- monitor that the heat levels from the friction don't go into overload. And it would probably be a bit slower than fuel scooping.. But it would have about the same(ish) interaction as asteroid mining.

I like the thought... Pity it's not going to get implemented. Here's a +1 for getting me to think about this...