Trawling Chassis

Add a Tadpole chassis for food gathering.
Press a key to enable the collector. When enabled, if you pilot the tadpole near food, it gets sucked into the internal storage. Fish, plants, eggs, slugs, etc.
Currently, you must get out of the tadpole to catch fish with your bare hands. Are we so bereft of technology?

The whole “what can and can’t technology do” is a constant source of friction between the world design and game balancing. Technically, a civilization that has the ability to “rearrange matter on a molecular level” shouldn’t have any trouble fabricating food from any organic source, but we still need to “fry” fish - rearranging their molecules into a “fried” configuration and adapt our enzymes to their proteins. We have the ability to pressurize our biggest tanks in less than a second on the surface, but the biggest air tank we have is basically equivalent to a SpareAir(TM)

I just like the idea because it would never be necessary… but if you’re in a multiplayer situation, this could let one player help feed several others efficiently. It’s added value if you take the side path to build it. Maybe solo players would not find it as valuable.