Re: Gas Skimmers

Yaah, missed the beginning of this thread, but for my ¢2:
How about increasing the hull strength to survive better in the
turbulence but dropping the engine size.  The idea would be to build a
skimmer tender that would tow a whole bunch of skimmers into a launch
position where they have the deltaV to skim through the atmosphere and
catapult them outwards using the gas giant's gravity as an assist (nice
lo-tech solution we're using today).  The drives would then need only
enough power and fuel to kill their velocity for the tender to rendevous
with them on the other side.  Then you pump out the product, refuel the
skimmers, and tow them back to a launch position for the next run.

Now you have scenarios with drive failures and ships in rapidly decaying
orbits (or shooting off into the Void with no braking power!).	Also
gives thoughts of retrofitting the skimmers with a few beams or missiles
(hull already strong) to make bulked up fighters (although slow) popping
up out of the sensor shadow of the gas giant's atmosphere (where no one
thought to look for an enemy) when the station has to fight off a rival
corp's raiders.

Sid

Robertson, Brendan wrote:
> 
> The high losses the previous week were unusual losses.  I estimated
> normal losses at about 1 every 3 months for this, which gives a
skimmer
> fleet of about 15-20 ships servicing the station.
> The reason for the VW hull, is that full streamlining eats so much
mass,
> plus powerful enough drives to escape a gas giant's gravity well
doesn't
> leave much.  Everything is built to the minimum required to maximise
> tankage.  As soon as I increase the hull, the mass doubles to maintain
> the same tankage.
[clipped]