Gas Giant Mining

[NOLATrav]

Ummm… Helium3?

 

[Condottiere]

It's on the Moon, apparently.

Our helium seems to have a tendency to try and escape.

One spacecraft design benefit, would be, if they are more energy dense, we'd need less of them, possibly, also, as jump fuel.

 

[J. L. Brown]

As far as I know the "raining diamonds" thing is when the temperature and pressure is so high that carbon forms them.

By defintion, GETTING to the diamonds is difficult.

Since it's pretty trivial to just form lab diamonds, or find a convenient planet with accessable diamond deposits, I'd not think anyone would bother.

Diamonds aren't worth very much, objectively.

Anything that's not a gas is way, way down in the core of a gas giant. Unless there's some special unobtainium that is discovered to form there, any form of extraction is highly unlikely to be worth it.

GAS mining on the other hand, yeah, that makes sense. Don't think rocks, think methane, think helium, think ammonia. Ammonium sulfide.

You could have a station around the 1 bar pressure zone that sends gathering drones that are able to manage the high pressures down to where the heavier gasses are. It MIGHT be possible to do it with some kind of snorkel setup.

Why bother going down that deep? Apparently it is now (Mongoose 2e) canon that every ship with a maneuver drive has some built-in anti-gravity; equal to the rating of the drive. Since the ship is negating the effect of gravity on (at least) the entire bottom surface of the ship -- and all the way down to the center of mass of the planet -- a station could just stay in orbit and skim fuel without ever diving.

Of course that is less cinematic....