I like your idea. I always wanted us knighys to have a spaceship mini game while exploring/traveling from the moon to cradle. It would be awesome and makes a bit of senae for us to try not to only explore cradle, but it's orbiting celestial bodiea as well. Because we are space warring/potential last survivors of race knights, it makes sense to jave smallini stations to use to repair our ship if we were ever to be damaged like we are now. So i definetly agree to this concept, but it would have to be fleshed out so we can have a full picture.

Now, sense the moon is not a clockwork, we would not be diving into the planet like cradle.we would be exploring the surface though to find guysers that would be coughing up these energy signatures from under the planet surface. So sk would send us on a mission to explore the surface of thw moon for these pocket of energy guysers and drill them out. So unlike cradle where we would be smacking minerals to pick them up, our spaceship will come with these drill tools which we can detach and equip in place of one of our weapon slots. This drill tool can be used to attack, like other weapons, but it's main fjnction is to drill and secure these energy crystals inside the guyser before the guyser cough it up to space where it qould make it too hard to retrieve. Once the guyser, cough's up all the crystals, it becomes like an inactive Volcano and hardens up on the surface. Unlike cradle where we can only carry one mineral per trip, the drill comes with a container behind the motor where a knight can carry 5 total and different mineral type. A player can swap different mineral sizes for bigger Or different types to get a maximum of one type of mineral or lots of different minerals. The moon will not drop crowns, so the amount of minerals you on your own or a party mines will determine how much the payout you will get. This wmphasizes more group play sense more peoplw in thw party means more payout. Another cool twist we can add is to have a storage compartment in the mini-pod space ship where knights can do multiple trips while on the moon to fill it with minerals. The catvh though is that on the way back to craddle in the minigame, the more minerals you have the slower the ship goes and the more the ship gets damaged, the more minerals gets lost for every hit from astroids, enemy oposition, traps,ect. So this is more of like a bonus round where you will already get payed what is in your drill compartment, but you can also get payed for what is in you space ship so you can get payed the same amount as a full party while playing solo (just much more challenging). The mini compartment in you spaceahip does not get shared throught the group. Also almost forgot to mention, for every trip from and back to the space ship, you would expose your spaceship hiding spot to the enemies where they can attack/ raid and steal your minerals. So it is very important you kill every enemy Or you will lose all your extra mined minerals.

Now our mission is to retrieve these energy sourceinerals, but what we dis not expect is oposition from very furry gremlins. These gremlins are much bigger then the average gremlin and they can attack with half the speed of a normal gremlin. They also love to scream eeuuaaaaghhh like the qookies fron star wars when evee they get A kill. These monsters also build a machine army of new types of robots that looks similar to donut rolls. These donught rolls roll around the moon's surface patrolling to keep out intruders. These donut rolls unfold similar to the star wars rolling robots where they charge their attacks and unleash a flurry of autogun sprinckles that take out nomal damage. These donuts also come with their peraonal minishield that is very similar to the big battlepod's hexagon shield that revolves around it and regenrates after it breaks
http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Battlepod. The players will have to face these monsters while mining for these energy deposits to complete the mission.

Now i was thinking that this suggestion should be unleashed as more of an expansion. But if we were to do that, then the spaceship mini game would have to become a general mini-game every player can do so it does not become exclusive to the expansion.

Anyway, this is how i would flesh out the idea. What do you think?