An Alternate Take On Fabrication Rules

[Terry Mixon]

I've been using a homebrewed rule for how fabricators work in MTU for a while now, and after my latest tweaking of the process, I decided to share it in case someone else might find it useful. If you have suggestions on how I could make it better, I'd love to hear them.

The Central Supply Catalogue Update 2022 says this:

"Fabricators require materials equal to the mass of the object created. These may be everything from simple powders to rare earths or more unusual materials, depending on the final product. In general, these materials will cost 50% of the cost of a similar purchased product, although those composed of purely common materials may have as low as a 10% material cost and those requiring rare elements may cost more to fabricate in small batches than to purchase from a manufacturer able to acquire such materials in bulk. Optionally, the Referee can impose a 1D x 10% materials cost for most products and a 2D x 10% materials cost for computers, robots and complicated electronic machinery."

It claims that the mass must be equal, but then also indicates that it needs to equal the value of 50% of the cost of a purchased product. For robots or things that are expensive, like fabricators, that is unrealistic. Not even radioactives can match the price point.

The optional rule for pricing the materials has the value being 1Dx10% (35%) for most products and 2Dx10% (70%) for computers, robots, and complicated electronic machinery. That does nothing to explain what could be used to create a size 8 (1 dTon) Hive Queen worth MCr43/2 = MCr21.5 in a ton. That is 21.5 times the cost of radioactives, on average, so unachievable.

As players with fabrication chambers will likely desire to harvest their own raw materials, I took some advice from others on how they handle the situation and made my own method that uses resources in the books to make the magic happen. The only addition that is required is a means of putting more material into fabricators quickly.

I realize that this is a kludge, but without actual rules on how this is achieved other than using powdered Unobtainium, it allows for in-game fabrication using resources and raw materials that can be gathered under the rules.

A suggestion was made to use manufactured products as the input to the fabrication process, common, uncommon, and specialist, but for me, that added extra complications that I felt really didn't serve a purpose. Instead, I felt the easiest place to get raw materials in the game is asteroid mining, refining, and smelting. It's even broken down what you get from it and what it is worth, on average.

High Guard Update 2022 says this:

"Once asteroids are delivered to the station, they must be crushed, the ores and other by-products sorted, and waste released back into space. The produce is split between 50% Common Ore, 30% Uncommon Ore, 15% Crystals and Gems and 5% Precious Metals (as defined on page 244 of the Traveller Core Rulebook). For example, for every 100 tons of produce from the refinery, 50 tons is Basic Ore, 30 tons is Uncommon Ore, 15 tons Crystals & Gems and five tons Precious Metals."

When it comes to smelting, it says this:

"Ores are the normal end-product of a mineral refinery but many stations also conduct onboard processing to create more valuable materials. A smelter allows Common Ores to be processed into Common Raw Materials and Uncommon Ores into Uncommon Raw Materials. Each ton of smelter allows the processing of 0.2 tons of Ores into 0.1 tons of Raw Materials per day."

So, the output of the refining and smelting process for a ton of harvested asteroid material breaks down like this once it is fully processed:

Common Raw Materials: 25%
Uncommon Raw Materials: 15%
Crystals and Gems: 15%
Precious Metals: 5%
Waste Materials: 40%

From one ton of harvested material, you get 0.6 ton of finished materials.

Broken down by the average price in the Core Rulebook, you get this after multiplying the volume of material by its price.

Common Raw Materials: .25 ton x KCr5 = KCr1.25
Uncommon Raw Materials: .15 ton x KCr20 = KCr3
Crystals and Gems: .15 ton x KCr20 = KCr3
Precious Metals: .05 ton x KCr50 = KCr2.5

So, that 0.6 ton of material is valued at KCr9.75.

I have decided to call that mixture of raw materials a Fabrication Unit. For ease of math, it can be rounded to an even KCr10 if desired.

So, if I want to build a robot that would cost MCr43 like a Hive Queen (size 8 as stated earlier) I would need MCr30.1 (on average) in raw materials based on the higher cost of building a robot. That is 3,010 fabrication units, or 1,806 tons of raw material for a ton of robot on the other side.

To build a TL13 Hive Queen requires a TL15 Enhanced Fabrication Chamber, and the build time is 8 hours. To make it work, I would need a hopper capable of holding and using 1,806 tons of raw materials in those eight hours, which I would represent by adding an UNREP system capable of delivering at least 225.75 tons an hour. That means 11.3 tons of UNREP for the Hive Queen.

I can hardly imagine needing more, so rounding up to 12 tons and 240 tons an hour should be good for almost anything at a cost MCr6. I suppose that could be waived as part of the fabricator's feed system, and I could live with that as well.

A bit of a twist comes in when you get to Advanced or Superior fabricators. According to a side conversation with @Geir, they use nanobots to do their building, and the fabrication chambers at those levels include the capabilities of a Deconstruction Chamber to take things apart to make patterns.

So, my thoughts move to loading the asteroid material in, deconstructing it, shunting the usable raw materials to the hoppers and the waste to another, and then going right into fabricating what is desired once enough raw material has been gathered. You'd be taking out the middleman, so no refining or smelting required.

Again, this ignores the fact that the book clearly states that the mass of the raw materials is the same as the finished product. I know this. Even so, I believe that this process is faithful to the intent of the rules while ignoring the one aspect that I cannot overcome with powdered Unobtainium.

 

[rinku]

One caution I would make at ALL tech levels, is that while true fabrication methods may overtake other means of making stuff, they may not fully replace them, usually for cost or efficiency reasons. 3D printing isn't displacing injection moulding or casting for mass production where those can do the same job, and is unlikely to do so in most cases. Nanobots are flexible, but probably aren't the process that a high tech factory churning out millions of food packaging containers is going to use.

I'm dubious about the "requires materials equal to the mass of the finished product" rule for ANY manufacturing process. There is always wastage. But maybe that figure includes recovery and reuse? Nonethless, there should be overhead; fabricators are notoriously lossier than conventional processes, though I guess you could argue that magic tech fixes that.

Costwise, it's comparing raw material cost with retail price, which doesn't tell us that much. The key text here is this part:

"...those requiring rare elements may cost more to fabricate in small batches than to purchase from a manufacturer able to acquire such materials in bulk."

What were the material costs for a conventially manufactured item? What were the other costs, such as labour or equipment? Shipping? Storage? Taxes? Some of those might well be higher than for items fabricated on the spot, but if others are significantly lower, the overall cheapest process wins. Scale of manufacture also plays a part, since any big manufacturer has access to the same tools as a small one, but also economies of scale. If it's actually cheaper to fabricate than to make by conventional means, that's how Ling Standard Products are making them, for less than anyone else is able to afford to do.

I would expect that the higher the technology, the more complicated the object, the more rare materials are needed, and the higher the material costs will be for a small scale operation, as the text suggests.

And the big one... margin? Retail price is going to be marked up from wholesale price, which itself is usually marked up from simple cost of production.

 

[Limpin Legin]

The base material for fabricators (3D Printers) is plastic, which is sourced by mining oil. CSC talks about other materials used in fabricators at higher tech levels. What beats me is that I am sure I read somewhere in the Traveller literature (WBH? CSC? Or Traveller Wiki?) that advanced plastics that can simulate metals is discovered at certain TLs. If that is the case, then that would likely divert from the need to mine for ore.

 

[Terry Mixon]

The base material for fabricators (3D Printers) is plastic, which is sourced by mining oil. CSC talks about other materials used in fabricators at higher tech levels. What beats me is that I am sure I read somewhere in the Traveller literature (WBH? CSC? Or Traveller Wiki?) that advanced plastics that can simulate metals is discovered at certain TLs. If that is the case, then that would likely divert from the need to mine for ore.

Potentially.

 

[Sigtrygg]

The base material for fabricators (3D Printers) is plastic, which is sourced by mining oil. CSC talks about other materials used in fabricators at higher tech levels. What beats me is that I am sure I read somewhere in the Traveller literature (WBH? CSC? Or Traveller Wiki?) that advanced plastics that can simulate metals is discovered at certain TLs. If that is the case, then that would likely divert from the need to mine for ore.

We already have 3D printers that use metal powders here in the real world, not to mention a few other materials. It is likely incorrect to assume a high TL maker would be based on polymers.

Also hydrocarbon molecule substrates do not need to be sourced from fossil fuels.

 

[Sigtrygg]

The asteroid processing rules in High Guard are in need of someone to open a text book and find out what asteroids actually contain.

Which elements are in the 40% "waste", where are the radioactives etc.

There would be no waste materials, every element is useful for something.

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

There would be no waste materials, every element is useful for something.

While that is true there would still be waste as some elements are so abundant that most would not be needed or too cheap to be worth the storage facilities and the resources of shipping it anywhere unless compelled to (02 or N2 to Mars for example as part of terraforming) which would reduce profitability.

 

[Condottiere]

You try and leverage the byproducts.

Essentially, it would be sunk cost, since you can allocate production cost on the primary product.

 

[shammond42]

It claims that the mass must be equal, but then also indicates that it needs to equal the value of 50% of the cost of a purchased product. For robots or things that are expensive, like fabricators, that is unrealistic. Not even radioactives can match the price point.

I'm not following this point. Are you saying that for something complicated or expensive, 100% of the mass would have to exceed 50% of the value?

 

[Terry Mixon]

I'm not following this point. Are you saying that for something complicated or expensive, 100% of the mass would have to exceed 50% of the value?

Sort of. I was saying that nothing in the rules on harvesting raw materials has something of 1 ton being worth half the cost of a certain expensive thing like a robot.

Perhaps what is happening is that the very valuable parts of the ore are being pulled out and the majority of the material isn’t used. That would be one way of not having to cram so much mass onto each expensive project.

 

[shammond42]

Got it. Thanks for the clarification. I like a lot of what you've done here.

Setting aside the cost/weight of materials, this post has me thinking about requiring 100% the cost in materials from a balance perspective. The fabricator doesn't let you get things cheaper than you can buy them (per the above arguments), it lets you make anything you need right now. Given how many weeks it might take to get to a store to buy the thing, that's a huge advantage all on its own.

I'm thinking about this, as I usually do, in terms of Deepnight Revelation. The campaign makes a big deal out of "you only have the equipment you take with you...". Well no, you have fabricators, you can make what you need given time and raw materials. So, I want "realistic" limitations on time and raw materials to force some difficult decisions and compromises, and keep existing equipment valuable.

 

[swordtart]

I think fixed costs for a standard distribution of inputs to fabricators adds a lot of complication without adding much value. We know how much the things should cost as we know the price from CSC and we can take a stab at the factoring or use the roll 1D or 2 D and multiply by 10%.

The idea is that a dagger that costs $10 might only cost $3.50 in raw materials for the fabricator. Forcing this to include diamonds because that is your standard mix doesn't make any sense.

Assuming close to 100% efficiency (and we have no reason to believe otherwise) it will require 0.5 kg of input. It makes no sense that it requires 0.05Kg of input just to fit in with an arbitrary choice of what your mix of materials is.

What is that input? We don't actually care. We know what it costs, we know what it weighs but we don't need to know what trade good it equates to. It will vary depending on what we are making. You might guess common raw materials (and I wouldn't disagree) but what about a pistol or a laser pistol. Those probably have a higher proportion of more exotic materials but how much higher? That 1D to 2D jump is not the 4 factor hike from Common to Uncommon Raw Materials (or are they a different flavour of common raw material?).

Now do common raw materials cost Cr3.5 per 0.5 kg? We don't know as those raw materials could be anything or more probably a mix of things that costs Cr5000 per DTon. DTon is a volume not a mass. Materials probably come packaged in some way. Polymer filament for 3D printers comes on a spool that takes up more volume than the filament itself on it. Fine wire for transformer windings generally were on huge spools with volume many times that of the wire itself. Anyone who has ordered a pencil from Amazon knows that the volume of the packaging bears little relation to the volume of the contents. On the other hand a tub of metal powder might only be 10% larger than the volume of the contents. Pegging things to commodity prices is unwise as each consignment could be entirely different materials or products.

Then what about the Blade. It weighs twice as much as a Dagger but costs 10 times as much. Do we believe that the raw materials are significantly different from those required for a dagger? It should probably cost somewhere around twice as much in materials. In reality of course the main cost driver will probably be that the blade of the Blade has to be made better than for the short blade of the dagger as the leverage is greater. The Blade is not simply a Dagger that is twice as large, it is a different thing and the normal non-fabricator price probably includes more careful forging, heat treating and honing than is required for a cheap dagger. We can also see that the refined Long Blade is 50% more expensive than the TL1 version but they probably contain exactly the same raw material but the crystal structure of the metal will be more optimised in the TL3 version. Can a fabricator do that, nano's probably can. So what price do you use a percentage of the TL1 or T3 version?

This will not be fixed unless the whole pricing structure of equipment is completely revised and an explanation of the cost drivers for the prices included so we can extrapolate for the gazillion items provided in other supplements. Since this isn't "Manufacturer the RPG" the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

ZOZER Colony does explore this side of things if you are interested but it is pegged to a different version of 2d6 SF game and the cost of commodities is not the same.

 

[Terry Mixon]

I think fixed costs for a standard distribution of inputs to fabricators adds a lot of complication without adding much value. We know how much the things should cost as we know the price from CSC and we can take a stab at the factoring or use the roll 1D or 2 D and multiply by 10%.

The idea is that a dagger that costs $10 might only cost $3.50 in raw materials for the fabricator. Forcing this to include diamonds because that is your standard mix doesn't make any sense.

Assuming close to 100% efficiency (and we have no reason to believe otherwise) it will require 0.5 kg of input. It makes no sense that it requires 0.05Kg of input just to fit in with an arbitrary choice of what your mix of materials is.

What is that input? We don't actually care. We know what it costs, we know what it weighs but we don't need to know what trade good it equates to. It will vary depending on what we are making. You might guess common raw materials (and I wouldn't disagree) but what about a pistol or a laser pistol. Those probably have a higher proportion of more exotic materials but how much higher? That 1D to 2D jump is not the 4 factor hike from Common to Uncommon Raw Materials (or are they a different flavour of common raw material?).

Now do common raw materials cost Cr3.5 per 0.5 kg? We don't know as those raw materials could be anything or more probably a mix of things that costs Cr5000 per DTon. DTon is a volume not a mass. Materials probably come packaged in some way. Polymer filament for 3D printers comes on a spool that takes up more volume than the filament itself on it. Fine wire for transformer windings generally were on huge spools with volume many times that of the wire itself. Anyone who has ordered a pencil from Amazon knows that the volume of the packaging bears little relation to the volume of the contents. On the other hand a tub of metal powder might only be 10% larger than the volume of the contents. Pegging things to commodity prices is unwise as each consignment could be entirely different materials or products.

Then what about the Blade. It weighs twice as much as a Dagger but costs 10 times as much. Do we believe that the raw materials are significantly different from those required for a dagger? It should probably cost somewhere around twice as much in materials. In reality of course the main cost driver will probably be that the blade of the Blade has to be made better than for the short blade of the dagger as the leverage is greater. The Blade is not simply a Dagger that is twice as large, it is a different thing and the normal non-fabricator price probably includes more careful forging, heat treating and honing than is required for a cheap dagger. We can also see that the refined Long Blade is 50% more expensive than the TL1 version but they probably contain exactly the same raw material but the crystal structure of the metal will be more optimised in the TL3 version. Can a fabricator do that, nano's probably can. So what price do you use a percentage of the TL1 or T3 version?

This will not be fixed unless the whole pricing structure of equipment is completely revised and an explanation of the cost drivers for the prices included so we can extrapolate for the gazillion items provided in other supplements. Since this isn't "Manufacturer the RPG" the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

ZOZER Colony does explore this side of things if you are interested but it is pegged to a different version of 2d6 SF game and the cost of commodities is not the same.

You have valid points. Even so, for those that want to run this with some GM controlled details, some process that at least nods at the rules is needed.

For diamond being part of a dagger, perhaps it isn’t. The required materials pulled out of the raw materials would be different for each thing being fabricated.

Bottom line, one could fineness it in several ways. This is my suggestion, but there might be better ways to do it.

 

[Sigtrygg]

I just spent some time with AI speculating on what would happen if we could dismantle and asteroid such as 16 psyche

rare earths 350x more abundant in the asteroid, platinum group metals 1.4million times earths reserves, gold 53,000 times more...

and there are a lot more asteroids out there.

Now with grav drives and fusion power mining such an asteroid becomes trivial, the trouble is it destroys the value we place on commodities.

 

[Sigtrygg]

A couple of other things that came out of the AI conversation:

the synthetic elements we make in nuclear reactor have no natural source.

there is a slight chance that there may be elements beyond the periodic table in asteroids - this is speculative, let's call it science fiction