I can see their point. If you suffer a casualty during an ice-mining operation, it's usually just *that* guy who gets hurt. But if you flub it on a gas giant skimming run, *everybody* dies.

My old college group used to routinely conduct wilderness refueling by skimming gas giants. But since I revamped MTU in the wake of Firefly with generally-grittier tech assumptions such as getting rid of magic anti-radiation shielding, few players have been interested in braving the radiation belts of even the smaller gas giants (let alone the Jupiter-sized ones).