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[Trekkin]

This is the most intelligent forum I know, so I thought I'd see what you make of this. Either it's hilariously unfeasible or interestingly plausible, and I'm wondering which.

My nuclear engineer friend and I were talking about how annoying it is that He3 doesn't exist in usable quantities on Earth, given its usability as a fusion fuel, and having read my Peter F. Hamilton like any good nerd I wondered at the possibility of sucking it out of gas giants. We got to throwing around ideas for a collector (that wouldn't break itself by trying to orbit within an atmosphere) back and forth and came up with, in effect, a Bussard ramjet bent into a U with a gas centrifuge in the middle; the electromagnetic field would gather the particles from the gas giant atmosphere, the centrifuge would remove some part of the He3, and the rest would go along to be fused and the bulk of that energy used to electrostatically expel the fused products as reaction mass at higher velocities than the field gathered it to keep it aloft without needing to rely on orbiting within the atmosphere.

Then we had other things to do, but the idea's stayed in my head, and I'm wondering where we went wrong in our theorizing if anywhere.

[Virex]

Erm, are you sure there is enough charged He3 present in gas giants to make that feasible? Because I'd expect most, if not approximately all of it to be electroneutral, in which case a magnetic scoop would fail. Secondly, if you're orbiting at a higher speed then the average speed of the gas below you, you're going to experience drag, so you'll need to divert a part of the energy towards thrusters to compensate that.

[Footkerchief]

This is an old idea.  I don't know of any specific term for it, but there are lots of scattered references and it comes up fairly often in sci-fi novels.

[Dasleah]

Why go all the way to a Gas Giant? There's plenty enough on the Moon to get us started, and at least whatever hits it isn't plinked away by a pesky atmosphere or moved around constantly by a 50-year-long storm system.

[Armok]

Two words: Stellar husbandry.