Aether Atmospherics and Recycling

Aether's Designs and Purpose
Aether Atmospherics and Recycling is a company who provides power generation, supply and storage; and atmospherics capabilities to stations and ships.

Aether's main goals are efficiency, waste reduction and so much good customer service the only advertising they need is in shipyards. They resupply ships, pay them for waste byproducts of all sorts, outfit atmospheric and power distribution, and emergency generation, and recyclers to allow ships to operate for longer.

Aether build the highest quality parts they can, as interchangeable as possible due to the fact that dead customers are really, really bad publicity. To encourage the use of their parts, all the basic schematics are open sourced for fabrication, they offer a wide range of freebies, discounts and support to pure-Aether part ships. Pure Aether Atmospherics gets you free refills in exchange for all your waste for the trip, free oxygen candles for emergencies, and free part replacement, no questions asked.

Pure Aether Power has a few exceptions. Aether will support, as if you were pure, third-party power generation, and as Aether doesn't supply FTL or STL engines, they will support power-based engines too.

Pure Aether Power gets you free service, a complementary backup generator, and free recovery from a repair tug if you run out of power.

If you are not on these schemes, or do not have the material for exchange, you will have to pay, and though payment for fuel and air and recharge for a pure is cheap indeed, non-pure (using lower quality, cheaper providers) means that reflling becomes very expensive. Aether will still pay you for the waste products. They never refuse a paying customer.

Finally, Aether provides refinement, recycling and efficiency increasing products as a way of lowering their costs and the costs of ships equipped with this tehcnology. For example, a part-Aether owned mining station has an extraction and filtration plant, sucking all the gases given off from the refining process of the mining company. Then Aether take the slurry, and run that through equipment that sucks every last useful trace from it, gives the solid resources to the mining company as station rent payment, and ships off the gases itself.

History
Originally just a resupply company, Aether Supply, they had strong stationside holds in refuelling yards. They rolled out docking ports later, in order to ease resupply efforts, by standardising the connector.

Docking and Transfer ports, for Fuel, Gases and Power meant that any ship or station with Aether designs in it could benefit from a mass-transfer, and when they won the original bid to fit up Resupply Tugs, and Tankers with this system, the requests for upgrades and refits from pretty much every station and ship that wanted to resupply easily or mid-flight rolled in all over the galaxy.

From this, they started to roll out a standardised Atmospherics module to match the high-quality setups they had stationside, and in many other fashions ensure every ship that contained Aether gear was easy for engineers to work on, and tried to use as many interchangeable parts as possible so that broken systems could be jury-rigged back to usability. A lifetime supply of emergency oxygen candles free for any ship using pure Aether parts basically sealed this deal, and pushed most other competitors at this level to the sidelines. Alongside this came power transmission and storage within a ship, a strong infrastructure that could take usually 30% more than a ship needed, for emergencies.

Lately they have also been building in combined recycler/generator plants running off the standard solid wastes for ships. These produce dense, greyish cubes which Aether will pay 100 credits a cube for, far more than the 2000 for a ton of standard waste.