Well,I've got an idea about making use of the gas giants.Hope this could be part of the mod's features.
I was actually inspired by the "Gigastructure Construction" mod in Stellaris.The mod has a gigastructure that can be built on gas giants,which is called "Yggdrasil Orchid Complex".It seeds specially modified jellyfish-like creatures on a gas giant and harvest food from it,give a gas giant the potential of becoming a farm that can provide an entire space empire's food.Considering the fact that we already have Eisen Division,I believe that it could be reasonable to make gas giants more useful in this way.
By the way,I wonder if it's possible to create a special kind of mining facility on siphon stations and gas giant colonies dedicated to collecting volatiles,harvesting more but only volatiles?
Making use of gas giants might be a great feature.
The gas giant jellyfish idea is interesting. The main problem is that it couldn't be implemented as a default setting due to the lack of lore precedent and balance issues, and I want to avoid spending large amounts of development time on non-default content because most players will never use it.
Regarding implementing a new version of the mining industry that only extracts volatiles, the problem is I can't disable or block construction of the vanilla mining industry without causing compatibility problems. Players will be confused why they can mine volatiles with two industries at once, whether it's a bug, how it works, etc.
So like the upcoming planet breaking, but only for gas giant volatiles? Personally, I think the biggest flaw of gas/ice giants is that they're really hazardous, so I'd prefer ways to make them safer, like the "Floating Continent" condition from the Unknown Skies mod, but for something relevant to your idea, the Mimir Siphon Platform in the Valhalla system uses something called the "Ouyang Process" to harvest volatiles from Niflheim more efficiently. Maybe that could be implemented?
I'll look into a terraforming upgrade that will improve volatiles resources on a gas giant. I think this could be a default setting and would not have any serious balance issues that I can see.
You don't have refer to a mod of another game. Gas giant life actually exists in Starsector canon, on Kumari Aru in the Kumari Kandam system.
It doesn't have any special modifiers that make it a source of food, but that might be because of low research funding and Luddic interference.
I've been thinking about ways to implement some feature that cares about the presence of xenolife. What planets in vanilla Starsector have native xenolife on them? I know about Kumari Aru, Chalcedon and Typhon (in the Samarra system). Are there any others?