...Course, I'm coming at this from CT, where the Seeker, Yacht and Hunter ships seem to be paid in full or at least open-ended, not mortgaged. In the case of a Seeker, I'd make it an 80 year old junker 80% off with what is it, 8 quirk rolls? What could go wrong?
...
I like. So some company buys and remodels a 40-year-old scout for its own purposes, then fire-sales it at 80 years, when it becomes impractical for them to maintain. Let someone else deal with the used-car headaches.
Where are the quirks from? I don't recall them.
The prospector has to sell his load somewhere, and that "somewhere" isn't going to be anywhere. There'd be no money in it if he had to jump out of system each time with the load...
Situational. Depends on the neighborhood and the value of the find. There are places it won't be practical and other places where it would be. With an entire sector to play with, there's going to be quite a bit of variation.
...Given the sensors and rolls involved, any ship in-system is going to be known PDQ, even if that PDQ is hours or a day or two. Once the prospecting ship is pinpointed, somebody shows up and things get ugly. ...
Depends on the rules system. CT detection range was 1/2 light second for civilian ships, 2 for military (and probably the scout, given its function, which might be what makes it so popular in resale). MT was ... quite a bit less unless you had a very good computer. Again, Terra's belt is 1200 light seconds from the inner edge to the outer edge, over 10,000 light seconds in circumference at the midpoint.There'll be smaller, there'll be larger, but even something in where Mercury is would likely cover a lot of area. We'd need to introduce something new to provide some pretext for any ship in-system being known "PDQ". I haven't seen anything like that in the game, nor anything that hints at it, but maybe I missed something.
... Somewhere, I figured out the average worth of a ton of ore from an asteroid based on figures in an article on asteroid mining in, I believe, National Geographic. It broke down the various minerals and elements you could expect to get and their value. I then converted it to Traveller credits. You need mass volume and a seeker is not going to make a profit like 99.8% of the time. ...
Yeah, reality tends to spoil the popular sci fi tropes. FTL, lasers, mesons, fusion tech, asteroid hulls, the list goes on. Given that 99.8% number, I'd have guessed even the really organized outfits might not extract a profit at it ...
Today, traditional smelting is the exception rather than the rule. For most ore, the extraction method is now to pulverize it into powder and then chemically extract the valuable ore(s). ...
...except of course for that.
However, the Imperium setting of Traveller is one where marginal concerns go about in dilapidated Seekers eeking out enough to live on (usually), so I'll keep that along with the FTL, lasers, and so forth for my Spinward Marches setting. Getting an urge to crunch numbers though. That's interesting information.
... It's not IMTU, it is any reasonable universe. ...
I would dispute that given our present level of knowledge about the universe, but I think we're venturing into opinion.
...On earth, large-scale gold mining is profitable at around 2 ppm (depending on how much overburden has to be stripped away). The prime asteroids will be far better than that. But a century or so after the system is settled all the rich claims are mined out by big corporations and a few lucky early birds. ...
On Earth, early finds were coming in at ten times that. And again, big, and frontier. A million or more bodies at 1 mile diameter, millions more at smaller sizes, rough estimate of 3x10
18 metric tons to evaluate, 82 trillion tons a day to go through all of that in a century, that's going to take quite a lot of people and machines, and then a couple or three hundred other systems to work through. Even assuming those National Geographic numbers, I don't see any hint in the game of that level of wealth being drawn out of systems. Maybe Glisten.
...The average value of 100 tons of asteroid rock was $11,578. ...
I presume that's metric tons. That's 800 metric tons for the Seeker, assuming 3 metric tons to the cubic meter. ~$92,000, or whatever that translates to in credits. That actually sounds quite profitable, depending on how long it takes to fill up, get it somewhere, and come back to start filling up again.
This is an interesting discussion.
