rmhenn

Good point, but what I was thinking is that there could be a privilege system to make sure nobody steals your motor while you are planetside (fairly sure the devs are already working on something like that).

This is amazing, I bet when the game comes out you can put ads in that people have paid for with in game currency. Also no offense but maybe you should change the style to something a bit less bland (still this is a great idea I fully support if that means anything :/).

This cryopod style logoff mechanism is quite interesting, but what if they also functioned as escape pods? So if they (the player) logs off and the ship is destroyed, the escape pod ejects and has the possibility to get away. Something else I thought of that adds on to the escape pod idea is that when the player logs back in, he gets a menu or something that says who destroyed the ship (possibly even show a replay like CS:GO). A way for smaller ships to have an eject feature could be the cockpit detaching. This might be a bit too OP though considering that an auto eject feature might keep you from ever dying and taking away a sense of mortalilty (and some people might take advantage and create escape pod capturing ships that actively capture people while they are offline). Just my thoughts though.

you could also make a floating city like bespin from star wars

what about siphoning someone's space gas from their space truck?

I do also feel posting this topic three times in all caps does not increase the chances of getting replies. Just saying.

Very interesting, gas harvesting in general would be very useful more quite a few different reasons. 1. considering most gas giants contain significant amounts of hydrogen harvesting could be used as a source of energy (fusion). 2. gases could be used to create multitudes of things (as OP said) like water (back to the hydrogen idea). 3. could POTENTIALLY gather up unfathomable amounts in order to create a star (because why the hell not). 4. any other crackpot idea I haven't thought of yet not quite sure of the validity or probability of my ideas (especially #3) but those are my thoughts.

I agree with the previous posts, but what about also using it as a form of transport like the streetcars in San-francisco? you could have two base stations where passengers get on and off, the base stations then fire them into space and to another planet, the base station there uses another laser to slow them down and eventually stop, passengers get off, rinse, and repeat.

I am not saying that we cant use stealth technologies, I had meant for this to benefit ships that were not designed completely for stealth. An example of this would be a trader being chased by pirates, he gains a lead and hides behind the nearest moon and cuts his engines and nonessential systems. The pirates meanwhile, have lost him and are on the other side of the moon, even though they are scanning they cannot see where the trader went because the moon has absorbed too much of the different forms of radiation from the trader's ship and eventually give up and leave. while technological stealth is something that I agree with, I do not feel that that should be the only way to hide

Space is not absolute zero, absolute zero is the temperature that all atomic movement stops (Third law of thermodynamics since you seem to like them so much) and is impossible due to quantum mechanics (Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Also, since space is the closest natural approximation of a vacuum (due to no vacuum being perfect) heat would have an incredibly difficult time travelling through convection, conduction, or advection, and would travel mostly through radiation which would make it incredibly difficult to travel entirely through a moon and get to wherever the ship searching for the ship hiding is and then have them figure out it is a ship and not radiation from the moon itself. Also, if the ship hiding turned off unimportant heat generating machines, he would be even more concealed! All he would have to do after that is turn off active sensors and communication! In conclusion, Heat stealth is completely possible. (Also on the whole super-glass thing you could probably use some form of light sensor considering it would be quite useful)

Just adding another thought to this, what if you did not have to necessarily equip your ship entirely for stealth and instead were able to hide it behind something like a moon? Theoretically you could hide some signals (like radar and visual) from the enemy by just hiding behind a large enough object and turning off your engines and radio equipment or having active or passive shielding on them. I was thinking of something like season 8 episode 2 of doctor who where the ship the episode takes place on is hidden in the asteroid belt (they say shielded but it seems to be blocking visual since you can see them). That is just my thoughts though.