AT,
CT says that planetoids are merely 'tunneled' out to create hulls. The smelting bit is something I assume may be used in certain cases.
Anyway, ton for ton, planetoid hulls are over two orders of magnitude cheaper than manufactured hulls. Consider the following:
Planetoid Hull of 10K dTons (8K dtons useful)
- Transport fee: 100Cr per dTon for 1MCr
- Tunneling fee: 1000Cr per useful dTon for 8MCr
- Armor fee: Factor 3 armor for 0MCr
- Total: 9MCr
Mnaufactured Hull of 8K dTons
- Construction fee: 100KCr per dTon for 800MCr
- Armor: 10% of hull is the average for Factor 3
- Armor fee: 0.6MCr per dTon for 480MCr
- Total: 1280MCr
Begin to see the problem? Now let's look at the planetoids themselves...
First, the vast majority of planetoids are going to be too big to use as ship hulls. Are pool of available cheap hulls just shrank drastically.
Second, we need planetoids that are not undifferentiated heaps of gravel with a density less than that of styrfoam. They're going to be used as a starship hull after all. Thermodynamics bites us really hard in this step. It works out that the larger a planetoid is, the less chance it will be a flying pile of gravel. Remember what I wrote about planetoid sizes? That most are going to be too big? Now we find out that the 'sturdy' ones are all big ones. That cuts our available pool of cheap hulls even further.
Third, just because a planetoid isn't a heap of flying gravel it doesn't necessarily follow that it also is a seamless body of NiFe close to the appropriate size we need. We'll need to carefully examine the planetoid looking for voids, bubbles, faults, and fissures. Think of flaws in a gemstone but on a huge level. Too many voids, bubbles, fissures, and faults means we need to find another candidate for our hull.
We can work around paragraphs two and three. We could carve the hull size we need out of a larger planetoid and we can 'repair' those voids, bubbles, faults, and fissures. However, look at the job we need to do before we even get the rock to the shipyard.
Look at the prospecting we have to do, grubbing through the all that emptiness in the belt looking for likely candidates. Look at all the prepatory work we have to do too. We got to identify a possible hull inside the planetoid, remove the 'overburden' to get at it, carefully survey it to determine it's structural soundness, if it fails that 'soundness' examination we need to determine if we can 'repair' enough it to do so, and only then do we know whether we can tow it to the shipyard or whether we need to start looking all over again.
Do you really think all of that work will only cost 1,100Cr per dTon?
Planetoids hulls are far too cheap in CT.
Have fun,
Bill
P.S. We can probably 'smelt' or 'sinter' planetoid chunks to make the hulls we want, but that will be more than 1,100Cr per dTon too.
