Tom Kalbfus said:
F33D said:
Jeraa said:
Reynard said:
Reynard said:
I think harnessing the energy of a Supernova which by the way outshines all the stars in the Galaxy is no trivial feat! I don't think gold will ever be made cheaply, diamond however is a different story, since it is only another form of a common material carbon. I think the cost of manufacturing gold in a particle accelerator will always be much higher than simply mining it, so I believe it will remain a medium of exchange in areas where the Imperial Credit is scarce, like the Credit, gold is hard to counterfeit, though is it possibly to have a fake gold coin with a coating of gold, around lead and a core of tungsten to produce the same weight and texture of a gold coin, so long as too much gold isn't scrapped off the surface, but to actually manufacture gold is another story.F33D said:
The density of gold is 19,320 kg/m3, water is by the way 1,000 kg/m3, liquid hydrogen has a density of 70.85 kg per cubic meter, there are 14.114 cubic meters in a displacement ton of liquid hydrogen, therefore if you fill that volume with solid gold you get 3849 tons of gold! If that is worth cr75,000, then gold is worth cr19.48 a ton, which I believe is comparable to the price of steel. I'm not buying that gold is so cheap! if it takes a supernova to make gold, I don't think even fusion reactor can make it at a cost of cr19.48 worth of energy. If gold was that cheap, there would be no use for lead!Jeraa said:
I wouldn't reduce it by more than a factor of 10. Gold is easier to mine in space, because you don't have to factor in the difficulty of mining so deep when you are mining an asteroid in the absence of significant gravity. I think one should roll a 6 sided dice and multiply by cr58,500 to get the barbarian's spending money, about cr180,000 would be a fair amount I think.Jeraa said:
There have been a few errors in the Traveller material, I would suspect they meant to say cr75,000 for a metric ton of gold, not a displacement ton of gold! A metric ton is a measure of mass, while a displacement ton is a measure of volume. Still I find cr75,000 to be a bit on the low end. I think creating large quantities of gold rather than a few thousand atoms of it, would take stupendous amounts of energy, probably at least the amount of energy released by a 10 megaton thermonuclear bomb! I don't think the ability to release that amount of energy should ever be trivial nor should it be worth cr19!F33D said:
without the credit, gold should be a fairly universal medium of exchange, there are probably places in the universe where the credit is a worthless trinket, because the Imperium is far away, but gold will be worth something. And I agree with you, if you could manufacture gold for around cr19 a ton, there would be no use for belters, because we could transmute a lot of other elements too. helium should be rather cheap though as it is a by product of nuclear fusion, the main purpose of which is to produce energy. Fusing lead into gold requires energy however and a lot of it! Having cheaper energy because of fusion doesn't change the fact that manufacturing gold requires a lot of energy, and that energy could be applied to more productive uses such as mining gold out of asteroids! Stars go supernova whether you want them to or not, and they cost nothing, they produce the gold for free, and all you have to do is find it afterwards, it is a lot cheaper than making your own gold!Reynard said:
I think there is more important cannon and less important cannon. I suspect Mark meant to say a metric ton of gold, which actually takes up a small volume, is worth cr75,000, not a displacement ton, though for the purpose of hauling it around in spaceships, it might make sense to treat it as if it takes a displacement ton. I think displacement tonnage of ships is actually an approximation for the ship's overall mass, with the assumption that the ship's overall density is approximately the same as liquid hydrogen. Otherwise, you could place a portable black hole in your cargo hold, a small one would fit in nicely say about 1 centimeter in diameter, it only has the mass of the planet Earth, just place grav plating on all the walls and ceiling of the cargo hold to shield the ship and everything outside of it from the black hole's gravity. What a nasty surprise it would be if you could suddenly release an Earth mass black hole from the cargo hold of a scout courier!F33D said: