Is gold worth anything in the 3I?

[Blue Ghost]

I think what's his name a few posts back had the right idea. This is a TL11 to TL15 society, and smelting and refining is bound to be "portable" to a degree. Meaning that you may not have to rely on some big facility to extract the metals you want, but it'll take fuel, and the more precious metal you extract, the heavier your ship. Meaning that if you're out in the boondocks, then you're probably going run across some rough customers, or people who just don't care who they steal from and what they take.

A technical note; you might be relying on gas giant refueling, in which case the more precious metal you extract, the more mass you're adding to your ship, meaning that at some point you run a real risk of not being able to pull out of a gas giant refuel run, especially with a cargo hold full of gold or platinum...or whatever you're hauling.

 

[coliver988]

I think what's his name a few posts back had the right idea. This is a TL11 to TL15 society, and smelting and refining is bound to be "portable" to a degree. Meaning that you may not have to rely on some big facility to extract the metals you want, but it'll take fuel, and the more precious metal you extract, the heavier your ship. Meaning that if you're out in the boondocks, then you're probably going run across some rough customers, or people who just don't care who they steal from and what they take.

A technical note; you might be relying on gas giant refueling, in which case the more precious metal you extract, the more mass you're adding to your ship, meaning that at some point you run a real risk of not being able to pull out of a gas giant refuel run, especially with a cargo hold full of gold or platinum...or whatever you're hauling.

Unless you are doing a gravity assist for the refueling, in which case I believe the mass is almost irrelevant: come in at the right angle and you'll shoot back out. Physics can be your friend.

Of course, that all depends on how gas giant refueling actually happens. Pretty sure you are not just sitting there sucking up hydrogen. This ain't no liquid lake to sit in with your hose fittings sucking up water (BTW, there was an article in one of the Challenge magazines on the actual liquid refueling process. Finally been getting around to reading all the stuff I keep getting and then ignoring...)

Edit: and in CT at least, mass has nothing to do with the way the drives work. Snap my suspenders, but that's how I play it

 

[whartung]

That would be an impressive feat of patrolling.

1200 light seconds from the inner edge to the outer edge, over 10,000 light seconds in circumference at the midpoint, on the order of a million large bodies spread a couple light-seconds apart to monitor, millions of smaller bodies. Short of a patrol fleet in the tens of thousands, and the costs associated with purchasing and maintaining all those patrol craft, I don't see them keeping out anyone who chose to pop in and prospect some rock away from the main focus of their activities. Of course that's our local example, but even a belt closer in would cover a whole lotta space.

Arguably patrolling this is not that big of a deal. Simply, while the entirety of the belt is large, it's fair (to me) to assume that the minerals et al are evenly distributed throughout the belt. So, you can easily see how a belt mining operation would be in one section of it, and, essentially, "lays claim" to anything within XXX radius of the main mining/smelting/processing plant.

This operation is the central point of contact, supply, local repairs, booze, hookers, etc. It's there for all sorts of the efficiencies that such a central point could bring. In the end, only that "small" region, encompassing the claim, needs be patrolled.

Could someone go out to random spot in the system to zap a random rock? Sure. But in the end, it's simply not efficient to do that vs working with an actual processor.

Outside of the claims, it's "Wild West" (which even more deters casual miners from going out there).

A 10MKm radius is hundreds of large rocks, and less than a day of travel from the edge to the center at 1g.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I suppose that's true, but I have a hard time with a seeker or regular type S trying to parabolic refuel around something like a Saturn or Jupiter with a hold full of pure gold. But, like you say, the rules work otherwise.

 

[Carlobrand]

...Of course, that all depends on how gas giant refueling actually happens. ...

I recall getting schooled by the others on gas giant refueling. Question came up about a 1G ship fuel-scooping. I figured the ship would have to be up where the hydrogen's about 1/200th atmosphere pressure. I was pretty sure you couldn't scoop enough fuel in a dive at high altitude to meet the canon description - 2 hours and 20 minutes, plus 20 minutes to transfer the load, and going lower would create drag that might leave you falling in if you didn't have enough G's in the drive. I was pretty wrong.

You're forgetting ram-air effect - the faster you go, the more effective pressure you encounter. ...

Maybe I am; let's see.

We're trying to scoop fuel. A dton of hydrogen is a metric ton of liquid hydrogen. Hydrogen at 0c and 1 atmosphere's 1/1284 the density of the liquid stuff, yes? Let's take that AHL fuel shuttle, needs to take in 350 dTons in - 140 minutes? That leaves it 20 minutes for the transfer, if I understand the canon elements right. So, 2.5 dTons per minute, 0.04167 dTons per second. Compensate for it being gas - 53.5 dTons of gas per second at 1 atm and 0C. 13.5 cubic meters per second, 722.25 cubic meters per second. Adjusting for thinner atmosphere, 144,450 cubic meters per second. So, a 1 meter square vent needs to be moving at 145 kps to do the job. A vent 2.4 meters square could do the job at 60 kps. I don't know the temperature up there, but colder temps would only make it easier. The scoop might not be 100% effective in collecting atmosphere, but there's plenty of room on a fuel shuttle for larger vents. Of course, you're not scooping hydrogen the whole 140 minutes, but then there's still plenty of room for the larger vents that would compensate for that. Since the fuel shuttle's pretty close to the highest proportion of fuel to volume of craft, it only gets easier for craft with a smaller proportion of fuel tank to craft volume.

All in all, assuming I haven't made a mistake or missed some detail, it looks like I was wrong: it's possible to skim fuel at an altitude high enough to maintain that key escape velocity. Just make sure your arc is shallow enough that it carries you back out to where you want to be. Takes about an hour and a half at 2G: in, then out. Twice that for 1G craft. 3G and up, likely to be a good deal faster since they can dive deeper and pull up without needing to worry as much about the local gravity.

All of which renders that half-atmosphere mention in Secret of the Ancients rather misleading, but it's not the first time some canon element misspoke. ...

I figure the gold-loaded ship, being denser, would have less of a problem finding that right altitude and speed where his drives could overcome drag enough to pull out after a high velocity fuel pass.

Arguably patrolling this is not that big of a deal. Simply, while the entirety of the belt is large, it's fair (to me) to assume that the minerals et al are evenly distributed throughout the belt. So, you can easily see how a belt mining operation would be in one section of it, and, essentially, "lays claim" to anything within XXX radius of the main mining/smelting/processing plant.

This operation is the central point of contact, supply, local repairs, booze, hookers, etc. It's there for all sorts of the efficiencies that such a central point could bring. In the end, only that "small" region, encompassing the claim, needs be patrolled.

Could someone go out to random spot in the system to zap a random rock? Sure. But in the end, it's simply not efficient to do that vs working with an actual processor.

Outside of the claims, it's "Wild West" (which even more deters casual miners from going out there).

A 10MKm radius is hundreds of large rocks, and less than a day of travel from the edge to the center at 1g.

Right, that's about how I see it. The corporation's going for efficiency and making a nice profit doing it. The guys in the dilapidated Seeker are operating on a tighter margin because they can't be as efficient but, barring some misfortune, they should be able to keep ahead of their debts. There've always been people willing to risk the "Wild West," or the freezing cold of Alaska, or similar places, and work their tails off with marginal return on the slight chance of making that elusive big strike.

Only hole in the system is I can't figure out where they're getting money for a down payment on a Seeker. Folk with Cr4.9 million in the bank don't generally decide to run out to buy a 40-year-old retired/remodeled scout ship to make a marginal living at hard work in vacuum on the hope of hitting a million-credit strike. It's a cool adventure hook, but the economics baffle me.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Well, it is venture capital here. I seem to recall that the Discovery Channel had a "Gold Hunting" so-called "Reality" show, where camera crews followed around a team of mixed age people who essentially strip mined sites that were abandoned. And they processed the ore right there, or at least were able to shake out enough to make the venture worth while.

 

[kilemall]

Only hole in the system is I can't figure out where they're getting money for a down payment on a Seeker. Folk with Cr4.9 million in the bank don't generally decide to run out to buy a 40-year-old retired/remodeled scout ship to make a marginal living at hard work in vacuum on the hope of hitting a million-credit strike. It's a cool adventure hook, but the economics baffle me.

Well, I would figure on the Seeker being worth a WHOLE lot less and be a whole lot older. I think the COTI flavor text pegs it as worth being MCr20, but that's probably excessive.



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?


IMTU Seekers are TL9 old scout craft, not even the classic Type S but rather one of those hemispherical versions somebody worked up around here. They are tailsitters as they don't even rate gravitic compensation, so uncomfortable just getting around and suboptimal cargo bays. They also are fission reactors with questionable safety and certifications.



I've even thought about ditching their jump fuel and drives, they have to be shipped to their destination systems.



As to justification, could be you need a full starship with jump capability to not get corralled into being under the thumb of the local megacorp infrastructure, and/or it's a requirement for at least one fully functional starship to even 'play the game' and get prospecting claims.

 

[Enoki]

That would be an impressive feat of patrolling.

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...

1200 light seconds from the inner edge to the outer edge, over 10,000 light seconds in circumference at the midpoint, on the order of a million large bodies spread a couple light-seconds apart to monitor, millions of smaller bodies. Short of a patrol fleet in the tens of thousands, and the costs associated with purchasing and maintaining all those patrol craft, I don't see them keeping out anyone who chose to pop in and prospect some rock away from the main focus of their activities. Of course that's our local example, but even a belt closer in would cover a whole lotta space.

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.

I can see the megacorp bribing the local government not to let their local industry accept business from anyone but the megacorp, but I can't see them keeping a prospector from doing a bit of mining and then jump-1-ing to some other spot to get the ore processed. The ore would need to be rich enough to cover their costs, better than about Cr150 per metric ton, I think, but it's doable.

The problem with that is you lose money on the deal. 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.

In fact, I figured out the best use for the "seeker" was a mining company would buy up the old scouts in mass, gut them, selling off the jump drive and other bits no longer useful, and it would carry instead 7 standard shipping container size automated mining robots that it placed on smaller asteroid it could maneuver near. It would rotate taking a load of empty ones out and bringing in a load of full ones. The crew was 2 or 3 persons (pilot, steward / general purpose crewman, and a payload specialist that placed and collected the containers. The rotation time was one week.

These made a small but acceptable profit running between the ore processor ship and the belt. The crew would rotate out periodically so they didn't get burnt out. The mining corporation would run the ships until they suffered a major breakdown and then sell them off for scrap value. So, the independent seeker becomes this worn out ship bought for scrap value and fixed enough to make it to an independent system a corporation isn't mining, or one that is "played out."

 

[Enoki]

I think what's his name a few posts back had the right idea. This is a TL11 to TL15 society, and smelting and refining is bound to be "portable" to a degree. Meaning that you may not have to rely on some big facility to extract the metals you want, but it'll take fuel, and the more precious metal you extract, the heavier your ship. Meaning that if you're out in the boondocks, then you're probably going run across some rough customers, or people who just don't care who they steal from and what they take.

A technical note; you might be relying on gas giant refueling, in which case the more precious metal you extract, the more mass you're adding to your ship, meaning that at some point you run a real risk of not being able to pull out of a gas giant refuel run, especially with a cargo hold full of gold or platinum...or whatever you're hauling.

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).
For example, in copper mining, they've gone so far as to frack it in some lower grade veins. That is, the "mining" company drills wells on the area of the low grade veins, pumps in a mixture of sulfuric acid and water to dissolve the copper out of the ground and then pumps it back to the surface where it is electro-chemically recovered. The energy use is much lower and the chemicals are reusable.

Using a vacuum furnace would lower most of the temperatures necessary to extract those metals and such that can't be chemically extracted. I'd assume that there would be more advanced methods available we don't know about as well.

So, I could easily see a 100,000 ton + ship being used as the ore processor to get a base metal that is pure enough for shipping even if not usable for finished products. The idea would be to refine the ore sufficiently to make it economical to ship, not pure enough to use for any purpose. That can be accomplished elsewhere.

 

[Straybow]

Not the point. The point is the farther it has to fly, the more vulnerable it is to grabbing. The slung-ore trope works in universes where you don't have something equivalent to jump. ...chasing down someone who's grabbed an ore chunk and jumped is not so simple as you'd like to make it, at least not in the frontier sectors.

No, I said that ore isn't valuable enough to take by jump. A ship can't make ends meet at Cr1000 per dT, so even allowing 10 T per dT the whole idea is a non-starter. Even at double that estimate it's not a great haul for the risk.

I'm sorry, I didn't notice an IMTU disclaimer with respect to that issue. ...But, yeah, if the miners are mining claims so lean that they're generating less than Cr100 per dTon, or even less than Cr1000/dTon, there's not much incentive to nab the ore shipments.

It's not IMTU, it is any reasonable universe. 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.


The long term belter population has to live off the leftovers. Their hard work is digging out the clumps of ore from the bulk of asteroid that isn't even good enough to be called ore. They can collect some valuable minerals from the fines by electrostatics. If there's ilmenite, that can be processed by heating in a vacuum to collect oxygen, aluminum, and titanium. Of that, the oxygen is almost as valuable as the metals. For some other mineral they need a facility that can do what terrestrial miners can do with gravity and water. Other processes are more complicated, with heating and chemicals.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I should be writing, but got obsessed with finding that show I saw some years back. As per forum policy the following link is to the official Discovery Channel's website, and specifically their series called "Gold Rush". Note that you can do a search for "gold" and it will display other iterations of the same show with different participants.

Discovery Channel's Gold Rush

I'm not a big "gold" dude, I started this thread because D&D and other fantasy RPGs have gold as a monetary reward. Years back Research Station Gamma was an adventure that my friend ran for us a couple of times, and I'd simply forgotten about the gold thing relating to the Imperium and in relation to the NPC Chirpir's "coyn".

Some really great and insightful replies.

Enoki; that's pretty interesting. I figured if fusion is portable, then someone could merely do the pulverizing thing, and then superheat ore to melt out the gold. I don't know, I'm not an expert, I just seem to recall from Bond / Goldfinger and University Engineering Chemistry that gold has a low melting point.

 

[kilemall]

Just did a run-through on CT Beltstrike in answer to another topic elsewhere, and that thing is very thorough in terms of sensor work, workload to prospect, fuel use, etc. It may not fit your conception of belting, but at least you would know what GDW's take was on what those Seekers are doing, it's the gold standard of belting rules (pun intended).


I don't have and don't plan to get the MgT Beltstrike, is it largely a conversion job of the original?

 

[Enoki]

I found that article. It was in Nat Geo August 2012 issue. The table / graphic in the article showed that 100 tons of Earth "rock" was worth on average about $74 a ton for just Platinum, Iridium, Palladium, and Gold.

The average value of 100 tons of asteroid rock was $11,578.

I took the standard scout and modified the design removing the jump drive and some of the interior resulting in room to hold 7 standard size shipping containers. These would instead be mining robots that could each carry about 3.5 tons of ore or about 24 to 25 tons per load.

These little ships would then operate with an ore processing plant (think giant space station that also has amenities for the miners aboard) so the ships don't have to go very far to rotate out their container loads.

If you assume a one week turnaround on a load using just scout ships-- that is two days out to place a load and pick up a load at the belt, and two day in to unload at the station and load new containers with the other two or so days being down time, maintenance, etc.-- you make net per scout about 8,000 to 9,000 Icr per load in processed value just for the four previously mentioned minerals. It'd be more if you were extracting additional ones on top of those.

While I didn't figure out the cost of fuel, maintenance, and a crew of 2 or 3, I'd say that even little converted scout ships would be profitable operating on that schedule. Switch to something like a subsidized merchant design where you are unloading empties into the field out the front, and loading full containers in the rear, and carrying far more of them with a crew of say 4 or 5 at most in a bit more comfort and you are making bank.

Such and operation could quite literally vacuum up the asteroid belt as they go.

Compare that to the seeker design where the ship sits and has to be loaded with the raw ore, and the seeker becomes horribly unprofitable. Instead, the best thing would be to hire on as an independent "trucker" with the mining corporation. That's essentially what they'd be doing. The small ships are the equivalent of huge mining dump trucks hauling ore from the field to the processor using the shortest turnaround time possible. The time it takes to fill a mining robot container is largely irrelevant. If say, this took 6 days, the ships simply rotate between 4 sets of containers, two filling up, one full and one empty swapping out one set a week.

The only really high value item in all of this is the ore processor station. The ships could all be fifth hand ones for all it matters. The mining robots are so numerous they are a local production item. Cheaper to import a mobile factory to make those than haul them from system to system. Better, most of the raw materials to make one could be acquired from the mining operation itself. Even the ships could be made locally since it would likely take decades to mine out an asteroid belt.

 

[whartung]

Right, that's about how I see it. The corporation's going for efficiency and making a nice profit doing it. The guys in the dilapidated Seeker are operating on a tighter margin because they can't be as efficient but, barring some misfortune, they should be able to keep ahead of their debts. There've always been people willing to risk the "Wild West," or the freezing cold of Alaska, or similar places, and work their tails off with marginal return on the slight chance of making that elusive big strike.

Actually, I was visualizing the Corporation running mining station to support the independent contractors. Mining is a dangerous business, the Corporation gets its money and scale supplying services to the miners, plus probably a cut of the take for assaying, processing, and redemption.

It's not IMTU, it is any reasonable universe. 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.

This is only valid if "gold is worth something" and there's enough demand to justify the prospecting and mining of the entire belt. That's a lot of space, and a lot of labor to cover it all.

 

[Carlobrand]

...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 3x10¹⁸ 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.

 

[kilemall]

Sorry, I think there were CT-era articles on ship quirks, but I'm referring to the MgT mechanic, one quirk every 10 years old. Some are good, computer model upgrades or unusually well performing subsystem, some are bad or at least annoying.


Economics of belting are eking out a living while working for that big strike. They talk about reasons to have that Seeker, notably taking in ore from the claim as proof as well as fast cash. This is particularly important if the prospector is going to sell the claim instead of mining it directly. BUT only really valuable claims like heavy metals or radioactives are worth the claim bidding process.


The way the tables are built, the vast majority of your finds would be carbonaceous or ice. The valuable radioactives and dense metals however can be quite profitable- the average asteroid comes in at 100-1000 tons of ore deposit, which at full base price even at the low end is Mcr10 for metals and MCr50 for radioactives per 100 tons.


The prospecting process suggests that people who are hasty or stupid will miss deposits, so even a worked over part of the belt may still yield overlooked treasures.


But it takes a LOT of scanning and matching vee and getting out and assessing deposits.



So the time value for the prospector is such that he likely won't be actually mining, unless it is for just pay the bills cheap nickel-iron or plain stone for stations or ice for water starved settlements.


Out in the Oort Cloud, my major unusual IMTU environment, of course it's pretty much nothing BUT carbonaceous/ice.

 

[Enoki]

Now, in game terms, the scenario I laid out--

A large corporation running an asteroid mining operation has a huge ore processor in the belt. They're hiring independent ship operators to move their mining robots (ie., the container sized mining robot modules) to and from asteroids rather than pay for and operate the ships themselves.
Operators get paid on the number of containers they can haul per week or month or whatever.
The mining corporation operates on a mass scale. That is they want as much ore moved as possible and aren't too concerned about the particulars of that other than the ore is being delivered in bulk.
For operators who don't have a vessel, they offer terms on leasing / buying one for use. Of course, the terms are such you end up not making much more than nothing on the ship if you agree to take one...

But, for the enterprising prospector who knows a bit about the ore and minerals being extracted, a savvy operator of a seeker (with 7 mining robots aboard) is also carefully surveying and reviewing what potential ores are being extracted and is looking for the big score. It's the hiding in plain sight scenario.

 

[Selandia]

Now, in game terms, the scenario I laid out--

A large corporation running an asteroid mining operation has a huge ore processor in the belt.
...

For operators who don't have a vessel, they offer terms on leasing / buying one for use. Of course, the terms are such you end up not making much more than nothing on the ship if you agree to take one...

...
.

In such a setting, the MAMAG (Major Asteroid Mining Aktien Geselshaff) would use non jump spaceship. Major cost saving and use the whole of JF space for ore. Independant operator with seekers would not be cost effective, although if they use collapsible tanks for the whole of their JF tanks they may make it if they have no mortgage.

Actually it may works like 1950 Whaling: many catchers, one factory ship, a couple of tankers to shuttle the oil from the pelagic field to the shore with one addapted to also act as a stroreship/eefer for resupply, exchange crews and commercial meat.

Anyway, the ref is always free to create a local micro economic that justify the setting needed for the adventure.

Have fun

Selandia

 

[aramis]

No, I said that ore isn't valuable enough to take by jump. A ship can't make ends meet at Cr1000 per dT, so even allowing 10 T per dT the whole idea is a non-starter. Even at double that estimate it's not a great haul for the risk.

that's ruleset dependent.
CT using Bk2, yes, it's doable, at least on minimum crew pure cargo designs, as the cost for J1 is under Cr900 per ton-cargo per jump, including refined fuel, mortgage, salaries, and maintenance.

CT Bk5, it's only doable at TL15 J1.

Not a way to get rich... but if the mods are right... it can be reasonably reliable "Pay the bills"...

 

[Straybow]

that's ruleset dependent.
CT using Bk2, yes, it's doable, at least on minimum crew pure cargo designs, as the cost for J1 is under Cr900 per ton-cargo per jump, including refined fuel, mortgage, salaries, and maintenance.

CT Bk5, it's only doable at TL15 J1.

Not a way to get rich... but if the mods are right... it can be reasonably reliable "Pay the bills"...

Ok, Cr1000/dT barely make ends meet for J1 to a one parsec destination. Assume the pirate isn't paying a mortgage on his ship (either skipped or hijacked). That can make some money only if there is a haven within a few jumps. So it takes multiple (likely 3 or more) jumps in, multiple jumps out. Now you're stretching the profit out over a couple of months instead of the standard two week trade cycle. Still a non-starter, IMO. Four standard trade cycles with a little bit of spec trade can probably do better with far less risk.



Ok, so the pirates have acquired a J3 merc, mortgage free. Now it's one dead head jump in, and one out. Assume a few days shut down for limited maint service in the engineering section after the jump, also used for finding for a good ore shipment. Then a few days maneuvering to it undetected. That's about a week. Profit is spread out over a four week cycle (including the week at haven for a proper maint service), so it's compared to two trade cycles.


Your haven is only three parsecs away from the hunting grounds, and once the losses get large enough to attract attention somebody comes looking. If the pirates are hitting multiple systems to spread out the losses, all two or three parsecs from the haven, that triangulation increases the chance of being traced. Once found, things get sticky for pirates and harboring facilities. If the haven is farther away, more jumps means thinner profit over time.