looming alien threat...

[mike wightman]

The rare elements needed to fabricate the internals of a smart phone require quite a considerable mining and smelting effort.
I agree with you that makers are limited by programming and raw material requirements and that there would be safeties and what not built into the 'gifts'.

The fabrication time is also a good point - making the 'chips' required by TL12+ electronics may take far too long and hence carrying a supply of them makes sense.

A similar case can be made for jump drive parts etc. so that trading with manufacturing centres - industrial worlds - is still required.

 

[Whipsnade]

The rare elements needed to fabricate the internals of a smart phone require quite a considerable mining and smelting effort.

True. Rare earth elements aren't physically rare. IIRC, one of them is something like the 15th or 20th most abundant element in Earth's crust.

A quirk in their outer electron shell means they don't form ore bodies easily. That is, they'd rather hang out with other elements and compounds than with themselves.

Much like gold in seawater, you've got to mine and refine a crap load of "precursor material" to get a little of what you're after.

I agree with you that makers are limited by programming and raw material requirements and that there would be safeties and what not built into the 'gifts'.

phew... Thanks for that. Having you understand my gibberish means I'm not off on one of my usual hair-brained tangents.

The fabrication time is also a good point - making the 'chips' required by TL12+ electronics may take far too long and hence carrying a supply of them makes sense.

Yup. Can't make enough fast enough and/or don't have enough of what you need to make enough fast enough.

A similar case can be made for jump drive parts etc. so that trading with manufacturing centres - industrial worlds - is still required.

Exactly. If Eneri J. Flintstone on Bedrock-II could make jump drive parts by pitchforking straw into a maker that Ind trade code wouldn't mean anything.

 

[Condottiere]

If the component is made out of Unobtainium, then you do have to find, secure and extract that mineral.

Infrastructure and factory costs might require investments in the billions, as well as qualified personnel to supervise the drones, and design new products.

If you want to include the marketing department, though if universal engineering standards are adhered to and enforced, it may be more of a way of branding your products, and purchasing consumer mindspace.

 

[mike wightman]

It could be the unobtainium can only be manufactured on industrial worlds of a certain TL.

Nuclear damper technology, cheap fusion power, and the ability to produce localised gravity fields that can focus laser light offer the possibility of manufacturing elements that nature can not - or can only do so in the heart of an exploding star.

 

[maksimsmelchak]

It could be the unobtainium can only be manufactured on industrial worlds of a certain TL.

I've always favored a solution like this.

The universe is full of resources, not unlimited, but so much, and the technology to extract some resources is sometimes prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. There is a cost-recovery curve.

Nuclear damper technology, cheap fusion power, and the ability to produce localised gravity fields that can focus laser light offer the possibility of manufacturing elements that nature can not - or can only do so in the heart of an exploding star.

Great points.

I love it when Traveller authors explore such ideas.

I always love your thoughtful feedback, Mike Wrightman. Thanks for sharing it.

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

 

[Ulsyus]

The universe is full of resources, not unlimited, but so much, and the technology to extract some resources is sometimes prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. There is a cost-recovery curve.

Do you see expense changing with TL though? Surely independent robots that can seek out and extract materials using a variety of means, assuming their effective life enables a positive balance sheet, would mean that at the levels of Very High Tech, if not at High, resource extraction could be a pretty straightforward activity?

I just imagine the old days of the meteor miner going out with the industrial laser onto the rock surface are more primitive, while the higher-tech miner sits in his vessel monitoring the activities and status of a number of mining bots out there doing the grunt-work for him.

 

[Carlobrand]

Seems to come down to where the bottleneck is in the supply/production/delivery chain. So, you build and deploy your mining bot only to have someone steal it while it's out mining in some remote location, 'cause bot brains are valuable while meat brains aren't worth stealing, 'cause the real rarity isn't some mineral but is instead some proprietary nanobot design capable of making advanced high tech processors, and the company that makes the tiny things has the bot industry by the throat.

 

[Ulsyus]

Seems to come down to where the bottleneck is in the supply/production/delivery chain. So, you build and deploy your mining bot only to have someone steal it while it's out mining in some remote location, 'cause bot brains are valuable while meat brains aren't worth stealing, 'cause the real rarity isn't some mineral but is instead some proprietary nanobot design capable of making advanced high tech processors, and the company that makes the tiny things has the bot industry by the throat.

Hence the reason the miner is sitting out there monitoring their charges as they beaver away on the rock. It's a lot more work to steal a couple of bots that are being oversighted by a miner in an armed vessel than it is to take them if they're operating rather more remotely.

Good point about the bottleneck though.

 

[Enoki]

Do you see expense changing with TL though? Surely independent robots that can seek out and extract materials using a variety of means, assuming their effective life enables a positive balance sheet, would mean that at the levels of Very High Tech, if not at High, resource extraction could be a pretty straightforward activity?

I just imagine the old days of the meteor miner going out with the industrial laser onto the rock surface are more primitive, while the higher-tech miner sits in his vessel monitoring the activities and status of a number of mining bots out there doing the grunt-work for him.

I'd think that at higher tech levels the operation is even more automated. A mining ship arrives, much like a fishing trawler, and releases automated mining modules that move to nearby asteroids, attach themselves, fill themselves with ore, and then return to the ship for pick up.
The modules take X days to fill up so the ship arrives with a fresh batch to release and picks up the now full ones. It then returns to a mother ship that collects a big number of the containers and takes them to the smelter or refining facility where they are unloaded and serviced. The mother ship is loaded with a fresh empty batch and returns to the asteroid field to distribute these to the mining ships.
The whole operation simply moves forward along the asteroid belt devouring it as they go. The refinery could be on a large asteroid turned into a mining ship that follows the operation.

I figured this out one time where you'd use the Type S scout converted to a seeker carrying 7 mining modules the size of standard shipping modules. The seeker in this case has no jump capacity. It doesn't need it.
The mother ships would be subsidized merchants with the passenger space converted to a sort of rest area for the seeker crews who would rotate work shifts. Empty modules go out the front of the cargo bay, full ones go in the back being pushed forward until the ship is full.
It then takes the off duty crews back along with full containers to the refinery, picks up new crews and empty containers and goes back out to repeat the process.
That means the mining is going 24/7 365 non-stop. I had the economics even figured out based on an article in Nat Geo on asteroids and the estimated value of their metals etc. where this all made pretty good credits.

 

[epicenter00]

I figured this out one time where you'd use the Type S scout converted to a seeker carrying 7 mining modules the size of standard shipping modules. The seeker in this case has no jump capacity. It doesn't need it.

If you go by "realistic" asteroid belts (not the stuff you see in the average sci-fi), it's likely any close asteroid belt in an inhabited system is probably mined out.

It's more likely that mining activity occurs in the Scattered Disc or possibly even the Oort Cloud. Material in those regions are so scattered that it makes sense to have a Jump drive just to move between prospecting sites.

Seekers likely jump between bodies out there looking for stuff that is viable to exploit. If they find something, they file a claim and likely turn right around and sell that claim to a mining company, which has a setup like you describe except that the non-Jump Seekers are like "battle riders" on a converted merchant vessel that acts as a tender - the tender has the jump drives, jumps the mining vessels out to a promising body, they start mining and refining while a steady stream of merchant vessels jumps out from the local world to pick up the products.

That said, material out there is probably all pretty valuable. Water ice is likely a commodity. Any Rich, High Population likely has a voracious appetite for resources and local population has probably realized (with the Vilani long view) that selling their own local water to refuel every visiting merchant ship is going to impact their world's water reserves when you look at in the long view of many centuries of sustained starship visits. Even on a water world I'd imagine the population would start to get this feeling that something is being "taken" from them. Ever wonder why fuel at starports costs so much? 60% of it is convenience fee, the other 40% is because someone carts it in from the Oort cloud...

(Then again, IMTU, the Imperium has a law that you cannot mine on a shirtsleeves world, because of "Phoenix Laws" - as a hedge against the collapse of interstellar civilization leading to a collapse of civilization on the world-level, the Imperium has laws that say that a world's minable resources must be kept pristine on any world with a shirtsleeves atmosphere to allow that world to independently rebuild civilization again from square one if necessary. This law extends to worlds without human breathable atmospheres if it has native sophonts to protect them from outside exploitation. The law does not apply to the native sophonts and homeworlds of minor human races - they can do as they wish. This neatly explains why so many people live on these ATM0 worlds, why there's so much asteroid mining, etc.)

 

[nobby-w]

[ . . . ]
A return of one of Grandfather's progeny, or a secret plan enacted by one - or more - of them...

I always liked the idea of one of the grandchildren cloning and squirreling away a few great grandchildren somewhere. A council of 20 genius-level droyne - not quite up to Yaskoydray's level, but enough to cause trouble if they decided to set up shop.

 

[Timerover51]

I have a couple in my Piper Out Rim sector that I am working on. Note, this is to the Rimward of the Solomani Sphere by a sector of so, so a long way away from Grandfather. They are keeping a low profile, but a far amount of Terran life wandering around in the sector, along with the odd Krell ruin, and a few other ruins. They did leave behind an occasionally functioning transport disc in the Bahama-Bermuda area.

 

[mike wightman]

I always liked the idea of one of the grandchildren cloning and squirreling away a few great grandchildren somewhere. A council of 20 genius-level droyne - not quite up to Yaskoydray's level, but enough to cause trouble if they decided to set up shop.

Have you seen MgT Secret of the Ancients? It retcons the whole 'Grandfather got them all' statement...

 

[JFGarber]

(Then again, IMTU, the Imperium has a law that you cannot mine on a shirtsleeves world, because of "Phoenix Laws" - as a hedge against the collapse of interstellar civilization leading to a collapse of civilization on the world-level, the Imperium has laws that say that a world's minable resources must be kept pristine on any world with a shirtsleeves atmosphere to allow that world to independently rebuild civilization again from square one if necessary. This law extends to worlds without human breathable atmospheres if it has native sophonts to protect them from outside exploitation. The law does not apply to the native sophonts and homeworlds of minor human races - they can do as they wish. This neatly explains why so many people live on these ATM0 worlds, why there's so much asteroid mining, etc.)

Excellent!

 

[The Pakkrat]

Vargr Conservatism

Snipped.

(Then again, IMTU, the Imperium has a law that you cannot mine on a shirtsleeves world, because of "Phoenix Laws" - as a hedge against the collapse of interstellar civilization leading to a collapse of civilization on the world-level, the Imperium has laws that say that a world's minable resources must be kept pristine on any world with a shirtsleeves atmosphere to allow that world to independently rebuild civilization again from square one if necessary. This law extends to worlds without human breathable atmospheres if it has native sophonts to protect them from outside exploitation. The law does not apply to the native sophonts and homeworlds of minor human races - they can do as they wish. This neatly explains why so many people live on these ATM0 worlds, why there's so much asteroid mining, etc.)

This is good and consider it stolen for My Traveller Universe. Even as they consider Corsair piracy a Charismatic occupation, I believe there are Vargr conservationists out there that tolerate piracy than permanently despoil their 'shirtsleeves' mainworlds.

 

[nobby-w]

Have you seen MgT Secret of the Ancients? It retcons the whole 'Grandfather got them all' statement...

No. I have some 1e rulebooks but I haven't read any of the MgT adventures.