INHALATION

The interval

Anoikis guards its resources, the ore anomalies no less than the gas. The question a reservoir puts to a pilot is therefore not how much can be carried. It is how long you are permitted to remain, and the permission was issued before you arrived.

A reservoir sits undefended until something wakes it. What wakes it is a ship arriving in warp, and what follows is a Sleeper response on a delay the manufacturer has never published. Field guides place it at roughly fifteen to twenty minutes from that first arrival, which the Ministry records as the field's habit rather than as a specification.

Three consequences follow, and each matters more than the figure.

The clock starts on arrival. Not on the first scoop cycle. A pilot who lands, examines the clouds, checks the chain and then begins work has spent part of the interval on administration.

The clock belongs to the site. Leaving and returning does not reset it. Neither does relogging, nor arriving in a different ship, nor being a different pilot.

A site you did not activate yourself is of unknown age. Resolving a signature does not wake the reservoir; warping to it does. A site at a hundred per cent proves only that somebody could have gone, not that anybody did. Since you cannot tell those apart from outside, the working assumption on arriving at a reservoir you did not open is that the interval may be nearly spent.

What the clouds hold

Each named reservoir type carries a fixed pair of fullerites in fixed quantities, which is why a reservoir's worth is arithmetic rather than folklore. Contents per the field's record, verified against the Ministry's own filings, July 2026.

† The Ordinary is listed for completeness and is not a site to work: see the note at §1.

Which two gases a given reservoir carries, what each is worth today, and what any of it means for the hold in your ship are questions for the desk at §8 rather than for a table that goes stale between deployments. Core reservoirs are ordinarily found only in the deeper classes, though a shattered system will spawn whatever it likes.

Two figures are worth carrying in the head. A gas scoop has a base optimal range of 1,500 metres, which some hulls extend: the Pioneers add twenty per cent per level of Mining Destroyer, and mutated modules vary. The gases differ in bulk by a factor of ten, from one cubic metre a unit at the bottom of the register to ten at the top. Those two facts between them explain most of what follows.

The modules below are the ones that matter for this work rather than every module that exists; mutated variants of both families are also in circulation. Two families will pull gas, and the difference between them is ship class, not quality. It is worth stating plainly, because the naming invites exactly the wrong conclusion.

Scoops are the small-ship module: short cycles, modest batches, fitted to the expedition frigates and the mining destroyers, which is to say every hull in this circular. Harvesters are the barge module, the gas equivalent of a strip miner: long cycles, large batches, and restricted by the manufacturer's own filing to Exhumers and Mining Barges. A Venture cannot fit one. Neither can a Prospect, a Pioneer or an Odysseus.

A harvester is therefore not a better scoop. It is a barge's module, and six hulls may carry one. The Mining Barges are the Covetor, the Procurer and the Retriever; the Exhumers are the Hulk, the Mackinaw and the Skiff.

Those six ships are named here and then set aside. Every one of them is slower to align, larger on the scanner and more expensive to lose than anything in §7, which makes them instruments for a reservoir somebody has already made safe: the response cleared, the chain held, the holes watched by people who are not harvesting. That is a fleet operation and a different circular. This one concerns a pilot alone and the ships that can leave, so the register below is scoops.

Two figures in that table decide the choice, and rate is certainly one of them: the Syndicate scoop lifts twice what the Tech I does and a third more than the Tech II. The other is residue, which is gas destroyed rather than gas collected. It does not come out of your hold; it comes out of the cloud, so a scoop with residue empties the reservoir faster than it fills the ship.

The Tech II scoop is the standard and this circular's assumption, at a third more gas a minute than the Tech I and a thirty-four per cent chance, on each cycle, of destroying a further quantity equal to that cycle's yield. Nothing is taken from the hold; the cloud simply drains about a third faster than the ship fills. The Tech I asks less training, wastes nothing, and is cheap enough that the ship carrying it is genuinely disposable, which is the right posture for ninja work in a chain nobody controls. The Syndicate scoop is the indulgence and, on the figures, the best module in the register: the Tech II's yield on the Tech I's cycle, no residue at all, at a third of the processor load. It is also a considerably more expensive wreck.

The two named scoops are listed dimmed because they are traps for this work: they match the Tech II's rate exactly and waste on every cycle, one at twice the yield and one at four times, which is a way of burning a reservoir you are trying to harvest. The 'Crop' is the cheaper on processor load, and that is the whole of its case.

For completeness: a faction harvester exists on the barge side, and it is worth knowing that it is not faster than its Tech II counterpart either. Eighty seconds and a hundred cubic metres, identical to it. What it returns is processor load and the Tech II's residue, which it does not have. The pattern holds across both families: the faction module buys quiet, not speed.

The methods

Five procedures are in circulation. They are distinguished less by how they gather gas than by how they fail.

Ninja is the one to learn first, and not because it yields most. Its failure mode is departure. The others fail into wreckage.

Sorted by what becomes of the response: Clear destroys it. Ninja leaves before it arrives. Perch never attracts it. Jedi and Spin leave it alive on the grid and manage it — the first by being shot at and missed, the second by never being in range to be shot at. That distinction is the whole of the difference, and it decides which sites each will survive.

The two were separate developments by different pilots seven years apart, and for a decade they were alternatives. They are no longer: in 2026 the author of the spin reported unifying them, and flying a single fit that will ninja, perch, Jedi and spin every reservoir in Anoikis except the Ordinary, which admits no method at all. The lineage is at §11; the procedures belong to their authors.

Before the first cycle

Preparation is the only part of this work performed at leisure.

Scan and bookmark every wormhole in the system before touching the site. Note the signature count, so that a new one announces itself rather than being discovered. Bookmark each cloud separately. Establish an observation position at least 150 kilometres off, from which the site can be watched without landing among the clouds. Reaching one by warping into the site has already started the clock; a position made from outside has not. Establish a departure position that does not sit on an obvious line between celestials. Recall the probes before settling to work.

An observation position and a working position are different things and should never be the same bookmark. The first is for looking at the site from outside it. The second is a place inside a cloud, chosen for its distance from everything else.

Distance is the method

A gas cloud is enormous and solid to nothing. A scoop reaches about 1,500 metres. Between those two facts lies the whole of the technique the field calls perching.

Those facts permit a working position hundreds of kilometres from the arrival beacon while still touching the gas. Two quite separate benefits fall out of that distance, and they are worth separating because they fail separately.

Against the Sleepers. Distance from the point where the response arrives may leave the harvesting ship outside the range at which it takes an interest. Practitioners report working the outer regions of large Vital and Instrumental clouds while the response sits unbothered at its arrival point. This is behaviour observed, not a rule with a published radius, and a distance that served in one reservoir has no standing in another.

Against other pilots. Distance from the beacon means an arriving hunter lands where you are not, and must then find you across a very large grid.

That second benefit is time, and time only. A combat probe, an old bookmark or simple prior knowledge of the site removes it without notice.

Which cloud, and in what order. The field's habit, where the response is being managed rather than fled, is to take the smaller cloud before the larger: it is the quicker of the two to exhaust and often holds the scarcer fullerite. It is a habit and not a rule. The smaller cloud is not reliably the more profitable, and it will not always fit — an Instrumental's smaller cloud is two thousand units of C540, twenty thousand cubic metres, more than a Prospect can carry.

A visit may take one cloud, or the other, or both in either order. The desk at §8 will plan any of those, and once it has prices it will say plainly when the habit and the market disagree.

Spinning

The field's other answer keeps the Sleepers in motion rather than at a distance: a deliberate orbit in which the response turns, trails, and never closes to a range at which its weapons matter.

It was published in 2023 by the pilot who published the perch, and it is not the Jedi huff of 2016 under a new name. The Jedi is shot at and missed; the spin is not shot at. That difference has a consequence worth stating before any of the rest: as published, the spin does not work in a Vital Core Reservoir, whose battleships reach out to orbit range and will kill a ship attempting it. The perch and a careful Jedi both do work there. The 2026 unification of the two methods rests on precisely that point — its author reports that an orbit can now be flown against those battleships as well.

What follows are the constraints the procedure runs against, not the procedure itself. The Ministry has not flown it and will not print a set of settings dressed as a method; for that, see the author's account at §11.

The propulsion question answers itself once the object is stated correctly. The object is not to be shot at inaccurately. The object is to be somewhere the response cannot bring a weapon to bear at all, and that is a matter of distance opened per second. The field flies the microwarpdrive for this, and the Ministry has no observations of the alternative in the spin.

The microwarpdrive's cost is well known and is accepted here rather than argued away: the manufacturer's filing records a five hundred per cent increase in signature radius while it runs. A larger signature is easier to hit, which matters a great deal to a ship that intends to be hit and not at all to a ship that intends to be out of reach. The pilots doing this have chosen the second position.

The procedure depends on orbit radius, on achieved velocity rather than fitted velocity, on capacitor endurance, on signature, on the ranges at which the response's weapons and webifiers become effective, and on where both waves are standing. An instruction to orbit at five hundred metres is a setting, not a procedure.

Two failures deserve stating plainly. A webifier applied to a ship whose defence is speed ends the procedure and begins a different one. And a ship holding a stable orbit is moving without being aligned: it must still turn before it can enter warp, and that turn is the part pilots forget at the moment they need it.

The hull registry

Seven hulls are considered here; they are not the only hulls that can carry a scoop. Figures from the manufacturer's dogma, consulted 29.07.2026. Holds are the ship's mining or expedition hold, which is where gas goes; not the cargo bay, which on a Venture is fifty cubic metres and irrelevant here. Hulls listed alphabetically, as the register requires.

Two entries in that table are the ones that surprise people.

The Outrider is built from the Pioneer and looks like a larger one. It is not: the dogma records no gas yield bonus and no gas cycle bonus on it at all. It will carry scoops and operate them at the module's own rate. Its bonuses concern ordinary mining, drones, shields and command effects, which are useful things that are not this.

The Odysseus carries a fifty-thousand-cubic-metre expedition hold, a covert cloak and five hardpoints. Its gas bonuses are a fifty per cent reduction in scoop processor load by role and a five per cent reduction in scoop duration for each level of Expedition Command Ships, so its case rests on throughput and endurance together rather than on either alone. It is justified when its expedition functions are used together, and rarely justified because a Prospect filled twice.

The Venture's warp core strength of +2 defeats a single disruptor and a single scrambler by arithmetic, since a scrambler applies two points. It does not defeat a faction scrambler's three, nor two tacklers, nor a bubble, nor anybody who came prepared.

The inhalation desk

Choose a reservoir, a ship and a scoop; receive the arithmetic. Cycle times, yields and volumes from the manufacturer's dogma; cloud contents from the field's record; prices from the market when you ask for them.

The desk answers the one question prose cannot, because the answer moves with the ship and with the market: does the clock, the hold, or the gas run out first? Whichever it is, that is the constraint worth planning against, and the other two are decoration.

A reservoir holds two clouds of two different gases, and a visit is under no obligation to work both. It may take one, the other, or both in either order, and which it should take is not a question with a standing answer: it depends on the hold, on the clock, and on what the two gases are worth on the day. The desk will plan any of the five arrangements and reports the cloud you left alone as left standing rather than omitting it.

Smaller cloud first is the field's habit and the desk's default. Asking instead for whichever pays more per cubic metre will, once the market has been consulted, sometimes disagree with the habit — and the disagreement is the useful part.

The register's dearest gas is not its most profitable. A hold of five thousand cubic metres carries five thousand units of the lightest fullerene and five hundred of the heaviest. Whether that trade favours you on a given afternoon is a matter for the market, and the desk will ask it.

Compression

Every fullerene compresses to a tenth of its volume, and nothing is lost in the compressing. Neither compressing nor declining to is the correct answer; they answer different questions.

The ratio is flat across the register and needs no table: one cubic metre becomes a tenth of one, ten become one. The heaviest gas in Anoikis, compressed, is the bulk of the lightest gas raw.

The arithmetic is worth seeing. A full Odysseus, fifty thousand cubic metres, becomes five thousand: a Venture's hold. A Vital Core's larger cloud is two hundred and forty thousand cubic metres raw and twenty-four thousand compressed, which is the difference between a shipping campaign and an evening.

Who can do it

No ship in this circular can. Not the Venture, the Prospect, the Pioneer or its Consortium issue, the Outrider or the Odysseus. Compression is performed by a compressor module, and the gas compressors come in three sizes fitted to three hulls: medium on a Porpoise, large on an Orca, capital on a Rorqual, each on a sixty-second cycle. Every one of them requires the ship's industrial core to be running.

That last clause is the whole cost. A ship with its industrial core active is stationary, conspicuous and committed, which are three words that do not belong in the same paragraph as a wormhole nobody has been watching. Compression in the field is done in a chain you hold, behind a hole somebody is minding, by people who meant to be there.

A structure will not stand in for the ship. The manufacturer's own filing on the reprocessing facility says so in as many words: it does not enable the compression of harvestable gas clouds, which is possible only with a compressor fitted to an industrial command ship. A structure with that facility online performs the opposite operation, and that is the subject of the next part.

Whether to

Compression destroys nothing. The toll is collected at the other end. Compressed gas cannot be fed into industry as it stands; it must first be decompressed, and decompression is lossy where compression is not. The manufacturer's announcement of the mechanic puts it at eighty per cent at base, rising to ninety-five in a Tatara for a pilot who has trained the decompression skill to five, and it can be done only at an Upwell structure with a reprocessing facility online. Stations cannot do it.

The pilot selling compressed gas may never pay that toll personally. The market will nonetheless have paid it, because somebody must, and the price of compressed gas is quoted by people who know that. This is a commercial question rather than a technical one, and it moves with circumstance rather than settling once.

Compress when the journey is the expensive part: a long haul to market, a hostile exit, a hold whose value would otherwise justify several trips nobody wants to make. Ten times the cargo through one dangerous jump is worth whatever the buyer deducts for the trouble of undoing it.

Do not compress when the journey is short, when the infrastructure is somebody else's, or when the discount the market applies to compressed gas exceeds what the extra trips would have cost. A Prospect that fills its hold and takes it straight out through a quiet static has paid nothing and lost nothing.

Leaving

Departure is the skill. Everything above is arrangements.

Leave on the response, without waiting to identify what arrived or to finish the cycle in progress. A part-completed scoop cycle yields nothing and has no standing before the Ministry.

Leave on new information: a signature that was not there before, probes on the scanner, an unfamiliar hull, a wormhole whose mass or lifetime has changed, wrecks or drones that nobody has explained, or a response behaving unlike the response of twenty minutes ago.

Leave when the hold holds enough. Capacity is permission, not instruction.

Leave when you notice you have stopped checking. That condition is ordinarily identified afterwards, during the examination of the wreck.

The lineage

None of this was worked out by the Ministry. Each method has an author and a date, and the office has done nothing here but tabulate them.

A principal field source for this circular, and the clearest account of how these procedures arrived, is chloroken's timeline of wormhole gas, published 3 March 2026, from which the following dates are taken.

Two things in that table correct the received account, including this circular's own earlier drafts. The Jedi huff and the spin are not one family with two names: they are separate developments six and seven years apart, and only in 2026 were they brought together. And the clouds you are working today are four times the clouds of 2019, which is why older guides read as though gas were scarce.

The drone trick is the newest of these and the reason the timeline is worth reading rather than merely citing. Its author reports that it neutralises the response in a Vital Core Reservoir outright while keeping the protection against other pilots that the spin provides, which if it holds makes the richest reservoirs in Anoikis workable by one pilot. The Ministry has not flown it and does not print a procedure it cannot check, so the method itself is in the author's own account, where it belongs.

chloroken keeps the record: the channel, the stream, and the Ministry's own file on the pilot, PANTOSCOPE dossier: chloroken. Their past is public record. Credit for the perch, the spin, their unification and the drone trick belongs there; the Ministry's contribution is arithmetic, tabulation, and a desk.

Figures of record