Imagine a medium sized ship whose job is to plunge into a gas giant and refine atmo into high quality Q-fuel. No visibility, a bucking wild ride, creaks and groans... Okay, got that picture in your mind? Okay...now go design it. :wink: Requirement Ideas Heavily armored / Shielded - gas giants are storm racked with strong winds, radiation, lightening. Pressure and heat are incredible. The best fuel comes from the lowest depths where the big ships can't survive. Aerodynamic - Must be a Hypersonic design to sustain high speed atmospheric flight. Inline engines, any weapons would have to be hull retractable. Refinery - No use hauling back tailings Hand Off Storage - Like the Prospector, the ship's job is mining. So if another ship (e.g., Freelancer or Hull A) could do the actual hauling so much the better. Powerful Avionics - You don't just want any gas, you need the right gas mixtures you can only find by hair-trigger pilot reflexes. At the speed you're traveling you'll also need to watch out for stuff (space whales?) Cryopods - Plunging through atmo is the roughest ride imaginable. Its not that crew might get hurt and need a medbay; its that when they get hurt it's bad enough a medbay wouldn't be enough. Attached Mechanicals - A normal engineer has an easy life, he pops off the lid of a component and sets it aside, pulls a damaged subcomponent and puts in a new one. Then puts the cover back on and they're ready for the next thing. In a dipper, with it's violent trajectory, anything loose for any length of time can become a missile. Engineering Station - A normal engineer goes to where the component is. In a dipper, with it's violent trajectory, unhooking the safety harness can be a death sentence. The ship must be designed such that commonly failing equipment (e.g., fuses) can be reset/replaced/bypassed without the engineer needing to leave their station. Doppler Radar - When your traveling hypersonic in atmo, the turbulence is caused by both wind shear and by different densities in the atmo composition. A doppler radar in addition to the normal scanner (or perhaps an overlay) could show both color coded; allowing a pilot to navigate the most deadly of effects. Crew Ideas Pilot - Keeps the ship going fast but from getting too hot, being driven too deep where the pressure crushes it, and gets as close to the waypoints from the navigator as possible. At those speeds if you push the turn to far the craft will spin out of control and be destroyed. If you go to slow the refinery can't process gas. Navigator - Runs the avionics (scanners/computers) to determine where the richest sources are. Passes info to pilot and Refiner. Refiner - Sets the controls to optimize refining based on input from the navigator and what the current readings actually are. Engineer - Has to constantly manage systems and their power levels, such as balancing between the speed of the ship and keeping the shields up in case of a stray lightning strike. Should things start to take damage, he might be the difference of the ship getting out in one piece or not at all. For a medium sized ship it would need to be under 50 meters. Little Dipper For a more serious challenge, the Little Dipper would be a crew of one and be under 25 meters.