Is gold worth anything in the 3I?

[Timerover51]

So I still become rich after a few weeks*. That's better than trying to fill the hold of an A1 with valuable enough crap to make a living. To the mines!

*For large values of few.

The Terran Solar System Asteroid Belt is about 93 million miles wide, with an average circumference of 788 million miles. You are talking about searching billions of cubic miles of space to find a gold-bearing asteroid. Currently, they are recovering gold at the rate of about an ounce per ton of ore, if they are lucky. Then there is the naturally occurring alloys of gold and silver with copper, which would need to be separated out. Then gold is typically found in veins of quartz, which means you are going to be searching stony asteroids, not iron-rich ones. You could fire your laser into a stony asteroid, come up blank, with a gold-rich vein of quartz twenty feet to the left or right of your shot. A lot of the silver being recovered currently is as a by-product of zinc and lead mining.

You might be the one in a thousand prospectors who hits the Mother Lode. More likely, you will be one of the 999 prospectors who do not. There might be thousands of asteroids in several billion cubic miles of space to survey. That is going to take more than a few weeks or a few months to look over. Then you have the asteroids located at the Trojan points of any gas giant in the system, and those that do not have a nice circular or near-circular orbit, buy have elliptical ones.

How long will it take to adequate check out an irregular chunk of rock about 12 miles long by 8 miles wide by 6 miles thick?

I will go with Marc's statement in Research Station Gamma that gold is still a valuable commodity in the Imperium.

 

[giant.robot]

The Terran Solar System Asteroid Belt is about 93 million miles wide, with an average circumference of 788 million miles. You are talking about searching billions of cubic miles of space to find a gold-bearing asteroid. Currently, they are recovering gold at the rate of about an ounce per ton of ore, if they are lucky. Then there is the naturally occurring alloys of gold and silver with copper, which would need to be separated out. Then gold is typically found in veins of quartz, which means you are going to be searching stony asteroids, not iron-rich ones. You could fire your laser into a stony asteroid, come up blank, with a gold-rich vein of quartz twenty feet to the left or right of your shot. A lot of the silver being recovered currently is as a by-product of zinc and lead mining.

You might be the one in a thousand prospectors who hits the Mother Lode. More likely, you will be one of the 999 prospectors who do not. There might be thousands of asteroids in several billion cubic miles of space to survey. That is going to take more than a few weeks or a few months to look over. Then you have the asteroids located at the Trojan points of any gas giant in the system, and those that do not have a nice circular or near-circular orbit, buy have elliptical ones.

How long will it take to adequate check out an irregular chunk of rock about 12 miles long by 8 miles wide by 6 miles thick?

I will go with Marc's statement in Research Station Gamma that gold is still a valuable commodity in the Imperium.

You jump into a system in your Type-J and start a survey of the system. The TL-8 WISE probe is a high resolution IR telescope with asteroid hunting as one of its main uses. It had a 47 arcminute field of view (0.48°^2 area) and could expose an image every 11 seconds. The total sky is 41,253 square degrees so out Seeker goes up above the orbital plane a few AU out. It only needs to scan half the sky so a little under 21,000 square degrees. That ends up being 131 hours or five and a half days. Let's do three scans from different locations above the ecliptic to get good parallax measures so we need a little over three weeks for the scans (including travel time). That's with TL-8 sensors. Our Seeker's TL-12 sensors could do the half-sky scans in a fraction of the time.

So a few weeks wasn't quite accurate to make my fortune but prospecting still seems like it beats trading to pay off my ship and getting rich. I can trade terms in chargen for that time spent prospecting and end up young and rich or at least totally debt free and owning a few ships outright and young enough to adventure around the galaxy.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I think old school with microjumps that would work, but the new microjump rules may throw a monkey wrench into your get rich by prospecting scheme.

 

[giant.robot]

I think old school with microjumps that would work, but the new microjump rules may throw a monkey wrench into your get rich by prospecting scheme.

Why would I need microjumps? If I jump into the system above the orbital plane I can start my survey arc. An arc 1AU long would take about a day and a half to traverse so two survey points takes not quite two weeks total. Once targets are identified it's a straight shot from above the orbital plane to the first target. No jumps necessary.

In our solar system traversing the circumference of the asteroid belt with a 2G M-drive (at its greatest extent) would take about two weeks. Most of the time prospecting would be spent in the vicinity of asteroids doing the actual mining. Travel distances are small enough to only need M-drives.

With TL-12 technology asteroid mining would be a boring but lucrative venture if precious metal prices are what the books say. If precious metal prices reflected the relative ease of mining TL-12 technology provides prospecting wouldn't be much more lucrative than commodity hauling.

Fusion power, mining lasers, and easy ore processing thanks to the same makes "rare" minerals relatively easy and cheap to extract in industrial quantities. If some magic X factor (like Marc fiat) says precious metals command high prices then asteroid mining is stupid lucrative. There's no reason not to automate the whole process of hunting precious metals and extracting them once found. In the Traveller-verse my Seeker might need a better than typical computer to do that work but it's still a small price to pay for the return. My human crew just maintain everything and let Extract-O-Bot do the heavy lifting.

Once I get a few extra credits I get a small fleet of modular cutters I drop in system and do a bunch of mining of different targets simultaneously and then do a milk run picking up all the gold and jumping to the nearest space bank to get my sweet sweet credits.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I guess I've never had a circumstance, nor seen a rule addressing, how you exit jump above a system's orbital plane. I'm not saying that what you're proposing is wrong, or somehow goes against or circumvents the rules, but I'm guessing you'd need to hand wave or Ref house rule the jump exit point. Using the travel formula on page 54 I get four days from exit point to your second navigational point of 2 AUs. That assumes you decelerate after you arrive at your second waypoint. But I guess you figured deccel, so that sounds about right. But you're burning fuel, and unlike the Empire Strikes Back, asteroids, unless your in a planetary ring, are, literally, worlds apart, so your still spending time and money (fuel) to get from one rock to the next.

But I guess you're right, if you exit jump, spend a few days scanning or surveying an untapped system, you can "pan for gold" Traveller style. Interesting.

I think I read somewhere, probably a NASA site or an earlier publication, that stated that most gold settles in planetary cores due to its weight. Here on Earth (TERRA), that means most gold is in our molten core.

Academics;
Using the formulae on page 54, T = 2 * root (Distance / Acceleration)
Time is in seconds
Distance is in meters
Acceleration is 1g ≈ 9.8 m/s

1AU ≈ 146900000 km = 146900000000 meters

T = 2 * root (2 AUs / 9.8ms^2)
T = 2 * root ((2*146900000000)/9.8)
T = 2 * root (29979591837)
T = 2 * 173,146 s
T = 346,292 seconds
T = 5,772 minutes
T = 96 hours
T ≈ 4 days

Assuming you don't turn around to decelerate at the midway point.

 

[Carlobrand]

You jump into a system in your Type-J and start a survey of the system. The TL-8 WISE probe is a high resolution IR telescope with asteroid hunting as one of its main uses. It had a 47 arcminute field of view (0.48°^2 area) and could expose an image every 11 seconds. The total sky is 41,253 square degrees so out Seeker goes up above the orbital plane a few AU out. It only needs to scan half the sky so a little under 21,000 square degrees. That ends up being 131 hours or five and a half days. Let's do three scans from different locations above the ecliptic to get good parallax measures so we need a little over three weeks for the scans (including travel time). That's with TL-8 sensors. Our Seeker's TL-12 sensors could do the half-sky scans in a fraction of the time.

So a few weeks wasn't quite accurate to make my fortune but prospecting still seems like it beats trading to pay off my ship and getting rich. I can trade terms in chargen for that time spent prospecting and end up young and rich or at least totally debt free and owning a few ships outright and young enough to adventure around the galaxy.

The WISE probe detects asteroids. Now we know where the asteroids are. And then ... what? Does an infrared scan in some way identify which asteroids have gold deposits? Even arguing that it helps identify the stony ones from the others, it sounds like all we've accomplished is to find out where the mountains are, not where the gold is. We've still got the problem of either finding the actual deposit or processing an entire asteroid to get at the gold in it, assuming there's any in that particular asteroid.

 

[Selandia]

...
If anything precious metals in the 3I would be little more expensive that non-precious metals. They're rarer than iron or aluminum in absolute quantities for sure but not so rare as to be more valuable than their industrial utility. If power is so cheap as to be effectively free industry changes significantly. Aluminum is cheap enough to be used in disposable cans today because of cheap power and induction smelters exist that did not a century ago.

Then, since the basis for trade is differential value/scarity, I load cheap gold on a HTLW world like Glisten and bring it to a low TL world (lets says TL Terra c. 1850 gold rush time) that value it and get a shipload of local currency or directly trade gold to buy whatever exotic (real Bourbon?, animal pelt? foods from pre-industrial chemistery farms?) I think will interest the neighbours of the next stop.

Have fun

Selancia

 

[whartung]

I guess I've never had a circumstance, nor seen a rule addressing, how you exit jump above a system's orbital plane.

I've never seen jump destinations limited to much of anything (outside of 100D), much less being tied to the ecliptic.

 

[giant.robot]

The WISE probe detects asteroids. Now we know where the asteroids are. And then ... what? Does an infrared scan in some way identify which asteroids have gold deposits? Even arguing that it helps identify the stony ones from the others, it sounds like all we've accomplished is to find out where the mountains are, not where the gold is. We've still got the problem of either finding the actual deposit or processing an entire asteroid to get at the gold in it, assuming there's any in that particular asteroid.

The reflected spectra of the asteroids can determine the type. S-type (stony) asteroids are the second most common type in our solar system. So running our spectral data through an analysis program (based on three millennia of asteroid study and prospecting) we'll get our short list of likely precious metal containing targets. Precious metals are coincident with other mineral deposits so our program is going to look for spectra that match precious metal sibling minerals. We may get lucky scanning thousands of targets and find spectra of precious metals on the surface.

Keep in mind our 1AU baseline for our survey means we have artificially high resolution for our targets once identified in wide field images. By the time the system survey is done we've got in a few days a spectral survey of a system's asteroids that would have taken years if not decades to complete with TL-8 sensors on/above Earth today.

As we make our way towards our targets we get higher and higher resolution images and more accurate spectral analysis. We can on our approach eliminate candidate asteroids from our initial survey list.

Once at an asteroid we blast a search pattern with our mining lasers, a pattern again informed by three millennia of asteroid prospecting, to search for precious metal veins. Asteroids don't have the same sort of stratification of material density as planets because their gravity isn't strong enough in most cases. This would mean the outer surfaces have similar composition (statistically) as their cores. So our surface search finding precious metals would make said asteroid worth mining. A negative surface search means we head to the next candidate. We don't need to mime all the gold in a system, just enough to get rich.

I'm honestly surprised at the pushback I'm seeing in this thread. In a far future setting with backpack sized fusion power plants, artificial gravity, reactionless thrusters, and faster than light travel...the idea of asteroid mining is somehow far fetched? According to the RAW asteroid prospecting should be really lucrative. I don't see any reason it should be terribly difficult with commonly available TL-12 technology.

The same logic that says an uninhabited system's habitable worlds remain unexploited says that system's asteroids remain unexploited. Either there's new unexploited system's to explore in the game universe or everything's already been explored and it's a game about space truckers plying the space Interstates.

 

[Timerover51]

Then, since the basis for trade is differential value/scarity, I load cheap gold on a HTLW world like Glisten and bring it to a low TL world (lets says TL Terra c. 1850 gold rush time) that value it and get a shipload of local currency or directly trade gold to buy whatever exotic (real Bourbon?, animal pelt? foods from pre-industrial chemistery farms?) I think will interest the neighbours of the next stop.

Have fun

Selancia

I am not sure why you think that this would be something unusual. You could do the same thing with aluminum, which was far rarer than gold circa 1850 on Terra and accomplish the same thing. For that matter, a cargo of synthetic dye might be more valuable. On Terra, circa 1850, gold was worth about $20 an ounce, and that is what you would get in local currency, not 200 Imperial Credits an ounce. The currency you would have to spend locally, because a high Tech Level planet is not going to accept it. All you would have done with the gold is give the Tech Level 3 planet more gold for their economy, while generating exports for them. Good whiskey did sell at about a dollar a gallon, but you would have to figure how many kegs of whiskey you could fit in a Traveller dTon. Bottles are going to cost a bit more and take up more room per gallon.

 

[mike wightman]

I'm honestly surprised at the pushback I'm seeing in this thread. In a far future setting with backpack sized fusion power plants, artificial gravity, reactionless thrusters, and faster than light travel...the idea of asteroid mining is somehow far fetched? According to the RAW asteroid prospecting should be really lucrative. I don't see any reason it should be terribly difficult with commonly available TL-12 technology.

You are not getting any push back from me - in fact I think system exploitation is trivially easy from TL9 on up.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I think world TLs is another can of worms ---> :CoW: , because TL doesn't designate "society level". I think in pre-Imperium Traveller TL was a signifier of what societal development was on a world, but in the OTU TL more signifies what the basic technological level is, because that world has a starport. Ergo mining gold in some asteroid field and bringing it to what you think is a mid 1800's environment may actually be a 35th century society, but relies more or less on TL15 Steam Technology to till fields, operate ferries, and power homes.

And if it were a 19th century environment, then gold, though valuable, may not command the price it would on say Regina or Efate.

 

[atpollard]

I'm honestly surprised at the pushback I'm seeing in this thread. In a far future setting with backpack sized fusion power plants, artificial gravity, reactionless thrusters, and faster than light travel...the idea of asteroid mining is somehow far fetched? According to the RAW asteroid prospecting should be really lucrative. I don't see any reason it should be terribly difficult with commonly available TL-12 technology.

Your baseline assumptions run contrary to everything published so far in Traveller on Prospecting and your argument negates the commodity prices from all of the trade tables for everything from Iron Ore to Radioactives. Your "magic tech" makes them all abundant and worth little more than a glass of fresh water.

Welcome to Star Trek.

 

[Spenser TR]

I'm definitely a fan of the talk about the nuances of supply/demand, logistics, and so on, but to address the idea of "what if the characters had a literal ton of gold?" for a moment...

My informal and unscientific understanding of one of the predominant themes of Traveller is the idea that a great way to motivate players is to keep them in all kinds of denial - they owe on their ship, their ship has all these expensive issues, and so on - and that this need for cash is a convenient way the Referee can "convince" the players to take the next job.

I submit that as Referee one has the entire universe to draw challenges from, and in my own game if the players figured out a way to get that ton of gold or "exploit" the system I'd probably let them revel in that, spend some, enjoy the feeling and the game. But then give them challenges commensurate with that kind of windfall - if they were obnoxious and public about the spending, they'd get attention for that. If they were careful and subtle, less so, and subsequent challenges would have less to do with being short of funds.

Just putting it out there, as I am strangely attuned to the "we have to keep the players starving" thing. :rofl:

 

[Carlobrand]

... I'm honestly surprised at the pushback I'm seeing in this thread. ...

Not pushback against asteroid mining. Pushback against the idea that you can spot a gold vein in an asteroid from several AUs off. At least I think that was what you were saying. Mapping the asteroid field is the easy part. Heck, the scouts have likely already done that just in the course of making sure nothing's on a path to wreck the local mainworld. Buy their data.

If you mine MegaTraveller, gold prospecting is actually not that difficult. There's a densitometer in that game. Per the MT Referee Manual, "A densitometer with any penetration beyond surface can give a density map of an object's interior to the penetration depth shown." Densitometers capable of a density map show up at TL 11 with 1 meter penetration. By TL 15 they're mapping to a depth of 1 kilometer. Pricey - the TL 15 high penetrator is Cr1,500,000 - but well worth the money. If you're on a budget, a low penetration model at TL15 costs Cr205,000 and gets you 250 meters depth.

However, you've got to be there at the asteroid to do it. It's not something you can do from great distances. Our local example of an asteroid belt is on the order of a couple to 4 1/2 AUs out, the decent sized bodies average about 600,000 km apart, and it has between 700,000 and 1.7 million bodies of 1 Km or larger. So, you go to an asteroid, you do your densitometer scan, you spot the ore bodies - I don't know about the other metals, but gold has this nice thing about liking to show up in elemental form, so it should stand out pretty nicely on the densitometer. Probably easier to find than those metals that get tied up in rocky chemicals.

Now you do the mining. Same as any ground-side mining with the advantage or disadvantage of being in vacuum and zero G, and you've got tech like lasers to help with it. If you've got a Seeker, which is the classic mining ship, you've got a MCr25 ship (which likely already has a densitometer since it's a remodeled scout/courier) that you're paying Cr104,000 monthly for, plus your fuel and life support costs. Figuring from that Cr7054/Kg quote, I figure you need to recover a bit more than a half kilogram per day to break even. They measure gold mining in grams recovered per ton, if I read the Wiki right, and the good stuff back in the day was in the 20-30 grams per ton range; we're closer to 10 nowadays. So, you're mining something on the order of 25 tons of rock per day to bring up enough gold to break even. Maybe less, 'cause you've got a better picture of where the veins run than we do nowadays, but you've still got to get at it.

However, Seeker's got two 10 dTon ore bays; unless you've got money for the kind of machinery that will separate the gold from the rock, and haul the machinery out with you in your Seeker, you're filling up your ore bays with 270 cubic meters of rock - call it 800 tons of rock - and then hauling it to a processor to recover 20 kilograms of gold, which pays for your ship that month and gives you a very nice Cr35,000 to divide among you and your crew (up to 4 persons in the Seeker), assuming of course your find was reasonably rich and you could dig up 25 tons of rock a day. More lucrative if we assume you're getting a higher percentage of gold or can dig up rock faster, less lucrative if we think you're digging up less than 25 tons of rock a day or your find is leaner. You could get a bigger ship, but it still basically comes down to how much you and your crew can dig per day and what percentage of that is gold. Of course, there's be other ores as well, but I don't know how to figure those, how likely they are to be in a particular patch of rock, or what value you're likely to get from them.

Short form is: the guy in his Seeker can probably make a very nice living at it if we set the starting assumptions reasonably generously, but he's not likely to get rich. The folk who get rich are the big boys who can hire more crew and haul the fancy machinery out to the site to do their processing on-site rather than flying back to wherever the processing station is, since distances in the belt are likely to be large.

 

[giant.robot]

Not pushback against asteroid mining. Pushback against the idea that you can spot a gold vein in an asteroid from several AUs off. At least I think that was what you were saying.

Not what I was saying. I was saying asteroids likely to contain precious metals can be identified en masse from long range with TL-12 sensors. Three millennia of asteroid mining will provide great models for analyzing that data to further narrow down potential precious metal bearing asteroids.

 

[Straybow]

Then gold is typically found in veins of quartz, which means you are going to be searching stony asteroids, not iron-rich ones.

In the crust of a terrestrial world with active volcanism, yes. The gold is believed to come from the late heavy bombardment period, since almost all the primordial gold would have settled deep into the mantle and core. Subduction concentrates metals by confining the melted minerals between layers of unmelted rock. Volcanism spits the molten stuff back up toward the surface. The percolating fluids flush out those unbound minerals. They then concentrate wherever there are voids. The quartz precipitates out of solution in those voids as well.


There would be no analogous process on an asteroid to concentrate gold into veins. That's similar to PGMs on Earth. We get most of them as byproducts of nickel mining. Nickel ores also come from late heavy bombardment, and a few very late asteroid impacts, such as Sudbury.

You might be the one in a thousand prospectors who hits the Mother Lode. More likely, you will be one of the 999 prospectors who do not. There might be thousands of asteroids in several billion cubic miles of space to survey.

I'd say they should have better prospecting and mining tech than what we can extrapolate from current tech. A belter doesn't get rich off the gold, but off the total mineral value extracted. Platinum has historically been around double the price of gold, although gold eclipsed platinum in the last decade. Iridium, palladium and rhodium are at higher prices than gold at present. Many metals would probably still be in the thousands of Cr per ton mass price range.


Minerals generally aren't hauled around in starships. It's far more economical to do some basic concentrating and simple forms of refining in situ and push the metals and partly concentrated ores around the system to factories set up to make useful bulk products. They'd be packed into giant cable-reinforced bags. Each registered claim would also have safe transfer orbit paths assigned, perhaps making use of way stations to catch small loads and bundle them for delivery.

 

[Carlobrand]

Minerals generally aren't hauled around in starships. It's far more economical to do some basic concentrating and simple forms of refining in situ and push the metals and partly concentrated ores around the system to factories set up to make useful bulk products. They'd be packed into giant cable-reinforced bags. Each registered claim would also have safe transfer orbit paths assigned, perhaps making use of way stations to catch small loads and bundle them for delivery.

I like that, but I can't see a way to secure it in the Traveller setting short of an armed boat going along. Nothing stops a criminal consortium from taking a Supplement 9 jump ship, matching course with the stuff, and then jumping off with the load in their jump net.

 

[Timerover51]

I like that, but I can't see a way to secure it in the Traveller setting short of an armed boat going along. Nothing stops a criminal consortium from taking a Supplement 9 jump ship, matching course with the stuff, and then jumping off with the load in their jump net.

It would not need to be a criminal consortium, just another prospector looking for some easy money. Match velocity with bag, and change the markers, or simply grab the bag and take elsewhere. If know lanes are designated for the shipments, people will be picking them off.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I like that, but I can't see a way to secure it in the Traveller setting short of an armed boat going along. Nothing stops a criminal consortium from taking a Supplement 9 jump ship, matching course with the stuff, and then jumping off with the load in their jump net.

If you're the victim of a claim jumper, or just plain theft of your haul, you can, if you survive, report the transponder at the next starport, or even pass it onto the next X-Boat, and hope that the local navy or patrol will crack down on whoever wronged you.