Space Stations and making money

[PsiTraveller]

Am I reading the numbers wrong or is it very easy to make money with a TL 13 factory or mineral processing facility?

100 tons of ore production per day is worth 10 million credits. 5 tons of space and 5 power. 2 crew can handle the output (1 per 50 tons, I am assuming that is output and not 50 tons of machinery)

100 tons of ore processed is 50 tons common ore, worth 50 000
30 tons uncommmon or worth 150 000
15 tons crystals and gems worth 300 000
and 5 tons of precious metals worth 250 000 Credits
750 000 credits per day output.

The ten million investment pays for itself in a couple of weeks.

Factories produce the same kind of monetary outputs.

Are there any costs for these to factor in? or is everything from the robot tugs free?

Has anyone else looked at how much material can be generated from an orbital facility? I am going to stat out a few thousand ton asteroid processing facility and see what income it can generate.

 

[MongooseMatt]

My first reaction is to reduce the amount produced across all TLs by 90% - thoughts?

 

[PsiTraveller]

I think the whole asteroid mining and ore production could stand a look. There seems to be nothing in an asteroid that gets in the way, despite waste being mentioned in the mineral refinery description.

Mining drones allow for 1D X 10 tons of ore per day to be harvested, generally common ore. The chart on pg 147 shows the amount and type of ore available in an asteroid.

This common ore is worth 1000 Credits a ton.

To make iron you need 2 tons of iron ore, 5 tons of air, a ton of coke, half a ton of limestone and heat this to 3000 F. http://science.howstuffworks.com/iron3.htm

For gold you need between 6 tons and 2 tons per ounce of gold http://www.businessinsider.com/tons-of-rock-for-an-ounce-of-gold-2013-4.

But this is space opera game and not hard science. There are fusion plants to provide cheap power and zero g processing and atmospheric processors and simple cryonics to hand wave everything away.

Asteroids do not have the mountains sitting on top of them in the way of the ore. This will help in processing. But there are different types of asteroids, stony, metalic, Carbon-Chondrite.
Page 7 of beltstrike has a Yield column for an asteroid. a 100 ton asteroid has 3D percent yield.A million ton asteroid has up to 24%yield. So 80 percent of the asteroid is left over. This matches with what is in the planetoid ship section with 80 percent volume of an asteroid being available as interior volume.

But again we are heading into a lot of paperwork. And what common ore is and what Uncommon ore is badly defined anyway, as are their by-products from processing. It is not closely define, just a few random rolls in Merchant Prince. But the breakdown in price is a ton of Common Ore is 1000 Credits, and 1 ton of Common raw materials, the processed result of the ore is worth 5000 Credits. So whatever your processing breakdown is, make sure it is not going to make those numbers shift unless you want to re-write the trade section.

Asteroid mining was described by Neil Degrasse Tyson as the opportunity to create the first trillionaire. Maybe the ease of getting to raw materials makes sense. http://www.salon.com/2015/05/04/neil_degrasse_tyson_the_first_trillionaire_will_be_whoever_figures_out_how_to_mine_asteroids/

Processing metals into manufactured goods is tough to write a game mechanic for. A TL 14 med-scanner may weigh only a kilogram but is worth 10000 Credits.
So spaceports making high end goods use very little in the way of raw materials.

And something else to keep in mind, a robot drone tug enabled smelter and mineral refinery connected to a high end production module could supply a very large military very easily. So expect players to start trying to take over a low tech system and bring in high tech modules and expand outwards.