Recruit #75 here:
I was doing the occasional feather field mission when I encountered something rather odd, it was a whole bunch of feathers clumped up together… I fired my standard weapon, the Positron Stream and it took some time to destroy them, but man the POOF was worth it! The cluster disintegrated into a bunch of feathers and a purseload of coins also fell. I pushed away the feathers and collected the coins and wondered, are there any more of these things?.. The rest of the mission had no such freak obstacles and tbh, it was boring, I don’t particularly like feather fields as much as Supernovae or Comet chases.
I then spent a while looking around for more Feather field missions, and I found another but, well it wasn’t there, the next feather field also was standard, and the next and the next and so on… Where are these feather clusters?! I’ve searched nearly half a constellation for those Feather clusters! They were fun to kill, the POOF alone was worth it! Sigh… I I guess Feather fields are still their old boring selves… Back to chicken hunting I guess…
Sorry for the long Flavor text, it is a relatively simple idea but I got kinda carried away with making the flavor text.
Feather Balls, or Clusters are a group of feathers clumped up together into a single unit, they have their own dedicated wave although I guess you could incorporate them into regular feather field waves as well (Please don’t add them in Henpire Ambush, it’s going to cause a LOT of paint to most players).
Featherballs aren’t an instant kill by most weapons and at 100% difficulty, they should be able to shrug off a strong Absolver Beam charge, which does 11475 damage at 
10, aka at 100% difficulty, they should have around 12000-14000 hp each. Now of course these numbers are a rough estimate of how tough they should be, so it might need further tweaking. To compensate for their relatively high durability, they move rather slow, about 50-80% of the feather speed in feather fields. And as for how many there are, well around 10-16 in each wave might suffice, but these stats might also need tweaking.
This is what they could look like in-game:
When they are destroyed, they drop some coins and 6-10 feathers. The feathers will be flung rather fast, about 1.5 times as fast as the Henterprise’s blue Ions (once again, tweakable numbers).
(I could’ve made the explosion more transparent and made the coins more color accurate)
I really want to emphasize how important it is for iA to make the explosion visual and sound effects as satisfying as possible, since I kinda wanted an ASMR wave of sorts.
As for the inspiration, I suddenly thought about the wave “Pillow Fight”, which is just another name for a regular feather field wave, and I though about adding pillows that could be destroyed by the player. But then I thought about it and realized that there was no real reason to pillows, since it doesn’t match the theme of any CI stuff and well, I’ve yet to receive any confirmation that the feather fields are actually a dumping site for giant space pillows. So I came up with a ball of feathers.
I also have to mention that @Kylo-Hen did mention a cluster of feathers, so the ownership of the idea medal for this idea might be put into question:
So whaddya think?
Idea