Belt Mining Chapter questions

PsiTraveller

Cosmic Mongoose
Just a few questions and notes about the Belt mining chapter: And apologies in advance for a long post. Lots of questions.

Page 76 resource presence chart: Can the Radioactives line be removed from the Asteroid Composition/Resource chart? The chart is a copy from Beltstrike (pg 6), but the Scan Potential chart in Hg2e pg 75 does not have a radioactives entry on it anymore. The 'R' results were replaced with 'D's on line 2, 3 and 11. Radioactives were also removed from the descriptor at the bottom of the chart. Only an Exotics result can end up in radioactives, and the Composition chart has an Exotics line on it. Or do you roll for Exotics resulting in Radioactives on the Radioactives line and that is the reason the R was left on the chart?

Also: Could a paragraph or description be added to describe in some detail how an asteroid is mined and what is recovered in terms of ore worth money and slag worth nothing? here is my take on things and I want to know if I screwed up anywhere.

My confusion comes from this:
Step 1: Assume a Sensor check is made in the M Zone. The result is a 7 for Crystalline materials, including ice. (pg 74-75)
Step 2: Ref rolls in secret to see if the asteroid is Metal, Carbon Chondrite or Ice (pg 76)
Step 3: Lets assume a 7 is rolled again so it is a Carbonaceous Chondrite
Step 4: Cross referencing Carbon Chondrite with Crystalline an 8+ is needed for the resource to be there. Let's assume it is there (roll of 9 for example)
Step 5: The ref rolls twice on the size and then yield table on page 77. Assume a roll of 6 on 2D for size to make my math easy and you get an asteroid of 10 000 tons and has 4D% yield of Crystals. Assume another average roll and that is 14% yield in crystals

Result: 1400 Tons of Crystals inside a 10 000 Ton asteroid. So now we want to mine the asteroid to get the money from the material.

Question: Is all of the above correct?

Realising the Claim: Page 77
So the mining crew has a ship with 5 Mining Drones and a skilled operator. The Drones get 1D tons per day per drone, so 5D tons per day. Let's assume 20 tons a day to make my math easy.

Questions: What is extracted? At the end of the day there are 20 tons of what exactly in the hold?
Are there 20 tons of Crystals worth 20 000 Cr per ton as the chart on page 79 suggests?
20 tons of some sort of crystalline metal, 20 tons of common ore? uncommon ore?
20 tons of material 14 percent of which is valuable once it is smelted?

Looking at the chart on page 79 for commodity prices:
How do you find common ore using the Belt mining rules?
How do you find uncommon ore using the Belt Mining rules?
The Core book has a simple roll for finding Precious metals and other metals from the chart on page 147. How do find the same kind of results using Highguard. Is it all based off the Exotic result of a 12 on the Scan Potential?


The 8600 tons of material left in the asteroid. Is it all worth only 75 credits per ton, or could it be mined for metals, the kerogen and polymer and hydrocarbon/petrochemical material that is worth thousands of credits more per ton?
 
Mineral Processing at a Spaceport:

Assuming your mining operation works for days or weeks and then has a huge stockpile of material
Step 1: What kind of material is it?

Step 2: Assume there is a Mineral Processing facility in the system. How do the mining Drones used in the belt mining chapter work with the inputs into the Mineral facility? It does not appear that they do.

It appears that entire asteroids are shoved into the processing maw and you get 50 percent common ore, 30 percent Uncommon Ore, 15 percent Crystals and Gems and 5 percent Precious Metals.

This is a better return than the 14 percent we rolled in the Belt Mining chapter. There is no wasted material from processing? No slag left over to heat up and cast into big injection molding containers to Liberty ship a fleet of planetoids?

Question: How do you reconcile the two chapters operating in the same system?

And another question: You can use smelters to upgrade common ore to common raw materials and uncommon ore to uncommon raw materials. Can you use any of the tech listed to upgrade Carbon Chondrite material to something more valuable (like the polymers and petrochemicals mentioned above). Or can you convert it all to refined fuel?
 
HG said:
Mineral refineries rely on manned tugs to bring suitable asteroids to the space station, though at TL12 these are replaced by tug drones.
The Belters seek out suitable (containing a resource) asteroids. How you find suitable asteroids is described in the Belt Mining chapter, e.g. you found an asteroid with Crystals.

HG said:
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...
This says that if you feed 100 random asteroids containing resources into the crusher you get the following resources. There is no specification of how much waste that was discarded because it did not contain any resource, and hence how large the asteroids were. Just the yield is specified.

You then need a Smelter to turn the Ore into Raw Material, e.g. iron ore into iron, resulting in further slag waste.

There is probably not any shortage of waste material...
 
More questions:

- Size progression of the asteroid jumps from 10,000 to 1,000,000. It this correct, or there is one zero too much?
- How do you calculate the yield of the planetoids? There are no tons listed. Is it ... Infinite? (i.e. big enough for years to come of mining?)

Trading the claim:

- If a miner want's to trade his claim without mining it, he only gets 10% of the value of the commodity. I assume the corporation immediate cash offer is further % of the value. I.e. the first value reduction is if the belter decides to sell the ore without mining it; the second is if the belter prefers to sell it quickly to a corporation without having to look around and sell it portion by portion to local markets. It makes sense, both actions cost time and money, and are associated with further risks (pirates, accidents, mortgages; finding buyers, negotiation prices, transporting the cargo)

Bonus question:
- Which commodity equals the different resource?
 
SIlica asteroids are mentioned on page 73 as a class of asteroid, and then not used at all.

There seems to be no way to get to most of the commodities listed on the commodity pricing chart. I am not sure how you would get to the nickel iron ore, nickel iron planetoid or Uncommon ore on page 79.

If you have a spaceport smelter and refinery then buying an asteroid and processing a CC asteroid that way improves the value several fold.

CC asteroids are worth 75 credits a ton, but sending things through a refinery produces common ore, uncommon ore crystals and gems,
These can be further smelted into common raw materials and uncommon raw materials.
A single million ton asteroid could provide raw materials for years, as mentioned in the block about 16 Psyche
 
After a few nights of sleep, I think this section requires a careful approach. Right now, I think it's too easy to score significant income by claiming, and then selling the asteroid without mining it. This income can dramatically fluctuate based on the asteroid size, and composition. Also, some combinations are totally out-there of income. For example - hitting a 1 mil ton of, even 5% yield in radioactives, results in ... well, 50 billion cr, and if you manage to sell to a corp - it's 5 billion in cash. If it's even iron ore, it can be lower, but still a lot - 5 million without mining.
 
There is an interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson who says asteroid mining will result in the first person as a trillionaire. http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-space-ventures-will-spawn-first-trillionaire-n352271


And post scarcity is an excellent description. Resources are easy for a spacefaring cultures to get. There are no mountains to remove to get at the ore below. On Earth places like Sudbury Ontario are major mining sites because of the presence of meteoric metals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin

How easy is it to make a Billion Credits using the new rules?
Make a character: Send them to University and take Electronics: Sensor (2), Belter 1
Go into a career that gives Pilot as a skill (or you need a Pilot)

Get a prospecting ship with a Mineral Detection Suite. This gives +4to your Scan check and your Electronics gives +2. The +6 gives a good chance of finding a Dense asteroid in the N Ring. You may find something on your first shift. :)

The Composition chart will likely make that an Metal Asteroid with an average roll. The 9+ Resource presence roll is the riskiest section of the process. There is no way to boost the number. Once you make that number you are set. An average roll of 7 will make the Asteroid a Million Tons, and average yield will give 14% yield. That is 140 000 Tons of Dense metals worth 7 Billion Credits. You can sell the claim for 10 percent, but you need an Admin 1 check to find a buyer. If you had a second career that added a level of Broker to your character that would grant +1% to your payout, worth an extra 70 Million.
 
PsiTraveller said:
There is an interview with Neil Degrasse Tyson who says asteroid mining will result in the first person as a trillionaire. http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/neil-degrasse-tyson-says-space-ventures-will-spawn-first-trillionaire-n352271


And post scarcity is an excellent description. Resources are easy for a spacefaring cultures to get. There are no mountains to remove to get at the ore below. On Earth places like Sudbury Ontario are major mining sites because of the presence of meteoric metals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin

How easy is it to make a Billion Credits using the new rules?
Make a character: Send them to University and take Electronics: Sensor (2), Belter 1
Go into a career that gives Pilot as a skill (or you need a Pilot)

Get a prospecting ship with a Mineral Detection Suite. This gives +4to your Scan check and your Electronics gives +2. The +6 gives a good chance of finding a Dense asteroid in the N Ring. You may find something on your first shift. :)

The Composition chart will likely make that an Metal Asteroid with an average roll. The 9+ Resource presence roll is the riskiest section of the process. There is no way to boost the number. Once you make that number you are set. An average roll of 7 will make the Asteroid a Million Tons, and average yield will give 14% yield. That is 140 000 Tons of Dense metals worth 7 Billion Credits. You can sell the claim for 10 percent, but you need an Admin 1 check to find a buyer. If you had a second career that added a level of Broker to your character that would grant +1% to your payout, worth an extra 70 Million.

Nice summation. :)

There probably should be additional modifiers on how much you can get. There was an adventure I got from Spica Publishing that had ships mining the belt, and one of the issues it talked about was that while the miners were independent, there was only one place in the system you could go to sell your claim. So that minimizes your potential right there. Plus, if it's that rich of a system, then you better believe there's gonna be a lot of competition, thus driving prices down.

Of course all this requires a macro-economic model, which is just a big pain to try and create in a gaming system. It's possible to create a microeconomic one that affects players, with some reasonableness. But those types of models don't scale up well to the macro level because you start talking about all kinds of external influences, as well as economies of scale, planetary and system-wide GDP and production capabilities, ties to other systems, etc, etc.
 
There is also the question of what happens when you put a million ton asteroid through a metal refinery on a space station.

Instead of 14% yield of Dense metal you only get 5% precious metals, but the other 86% of the asteroid counts towards becoming ore.
Oddly, there is no waste at all, no slag, no garbage. This is easy enough to justify in that with fusion power providing cheap energy you can convert even silicate rock into silicon and oxygen with enough energy.

If it were possible to remove the 14 percent heavy metals, and THEN put the rest of the asteroid you might even be able to get an extra 5 percent yield of Precious Metals while at the same time getting hundreds of thousands of tons of Common Ore (Or basic raw materials if you put it all through a smelter after), and Uncommon Ore (or Uncommon Raw Materials post processing) as well as Crystals and Gems.

So Fusor had it spot on when you look at the post scarcity economy. You just need a TL high enough to really extract the most value.
 
PsiTraveller said:
So Fusor had it spot on when you look at the post scarcity economy. You just need a TL high enough to really extract the most value.

Also, metal asteroids have everything all mixed up. You'd basically have to melt the entire asteroid to separate out all the precious stuff, it's not conveniently separated out into veins and ore bodies. It may just be more practical to take smaller asteroids (ship-sized or smaller) for more manageable processing.
 
Yes, I made a processing operation that did 200 tons per day of asteroid material. It gives 100 tons of Common Ore, 60 Tons of Uncommon Ore, 30 Tons of Crystals and Gems and 10 Tons of Precious Metals. The million ton asteroid would be consumed in under 20 years.

Put the Common Ore into a Common Ore Smelter and you get 50 Tons of Basic Raw Materials worth 5000 Credits per ton. An Uncommon Smelter would produce Uncommon Raw Materials worth 20 000 per ton.

There is some good money in sorting everything out.

I remember an old sci fi story in an Omni magazine. There was a processing ship that took in asteroids and heated them up and spun them to create a cylinder of material sorted out by weight. The metals and radioactives were sliced off and launched towards Earth. I forget the title and author. Told from the perspective of the server robot on the ship. (If anyone can remember the story please let me know.)

Such a ship could be made in Traveller. There could be a ship that produces goods on the move and sells them "door to door", or custom makes things.
 
Found the short story "Marchianna" buy Kevin O'Donnel jr.
http://www.williamflew.com/omni21b.html

http://www.williamflew.com/authors.html

Every science fiction story published in Omni Magazine. Hours and hours are about to be happily spent.
 
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