starship-design: Refueling

["Peter \(Sci\)" <scifox@asylum30.freeserve.co.uk>]

After shooting through the deep black for a number of years, accelerating,
breaking, plus any little accidents the ship may have, there probably
wouldn't be much fuel left, so I came to wonder about refueling and came up
with a couple of ideas.
These ideas assume a fusion-based power plant using hydrogen or other light
elements.

First off, gas clouds.  Assuming no legistation has been passed banning the
use/destruction of these immense features, my first thought was to extract
fuel from these.  Much like a bussard ram-scoop, suck in gas and store/use
it (btw, is there any reason a bussard scoop couldn't use an electrostatic
feild rather than magnetic?).  However, there's not much gas in this area of
space, unless you count gas-giants.
Now, gas-giants are something that are already being picked up orbiting
other stars, so perhaps some form of fuel-harvesting craft would be a
usefull adition to the ships complement?
Of course the atsmosphere of a giant is unlikely to be pure H, so a form of
distilery would be needed, which is also needed for my second thought.

Planetary rings. Now, although the rings are unlikely to be pure ice (as in
Asimov's "The Martian Way"), they would likely contain some, as well as
other solidified chemicals.  I perceived the idea of some sort of harpoon,
armoured and equipped with heating elements in the center, vapouring ice and
slush and forcing it up a hose to the ship for processing and distiling.  If
I recall correctly, tests have shown there are also a lot of simple
alchohols in space-born clouds, so perhaps there may be in other forms too.
Anyway, having equipment that can extract the H from any molecule containing
it would be useful.

Leaving a permenant fuelign station in place on a large iceberg seemed also
like a good idea at first, but changing the mass of one like that would also
change it's behavior and send it out of a previously stable configuration
(again, as happened in "The Martian Way").


A few thoughts for people to read,

Peter