Jupiter

Ecosystem

While the main source of both oxygen and water to the orbital inhabitants of Jupiter primarily came in the form of ice mined from asteroids and the planet's many moons (largely Ganymede) for many years, the Vruxari Empire eventually began wide scale implementation of water harvesting from the planet itself. This reduced the necisisty to rely on resources shipped in via spacecraft, which had in the past led to tragic situations in the past when a freighter crashed or was destroyed by a rouge meteor. These machines came largely in two forms with the same basic purpose: Rakes and Floaters. Rakes are typically suspended from either a low orbital station itself or a sort of rocket thruster powered parachute that drags a hanging water trap apparatus spanning a minimum of hundreds of feet through the deep clouds of Jupiter's gaseous surface. The many water-absorbent tubes strung together in a pattern reminiscent of a net or web catch and filter errant water moisture particles searingly amidst the primarily hydrogen and helium clouds, the liquid being channeled back into a central resevior for collection. The harvest is collected either by tubes pumping the water back up to the station or a transitional craft directly, where it can then by purified further for drinking or converted into breathable air.

Floaters act more independantly than their simpler counterparts, suspending their much greater size above the surface of the stormy planet in a similar fashion to the hot air balloons of old Earth. Water harvesting tubes typically form a dome around the sphere of gas, but the vast majority of harvest moisture comes from the nets that these stations drag behind them, the mile long nets of tubes trailing down into the clouds below to extract the life-giving resources. The collected water from Floater stations is most often stored either in an internal reservoir located in the center of the buoyancy sphere or in external liquid bladders for easy pickup and transfer. Sometimes these stations even function as research bases or refueling hubs do to their semi-permanent and slow moving nature in addition to their usual proximity to Jupiters roiling storms.