Mining the Asteroid Belts for fun and profit leads to serious questions

[Spike]

So I recently grabbed scoundrel and its giving me heartburn, maybe because I've got way to wicked an imagination.

So, here we have the rules for mining asteroids and a bigger and 'better' mining ship, but no additional mining equipment and no 'belter' lifepath. Meh.

The mining rules, however, seem rather... shoddy. Not sloppy, but actually shoddy.

In that metal ore is worth as much as 'uncommon' refined metal and radioactive ore is worth as much as refined radioactives. Obviously miners in traveller can refine ore as they dig it out of the rocks.

There is a lack of information on how long it really takes to speculate, and the tedium of mining is best translated (apparently) into tedium at the table. As written a failed speculation (empty rocks) takes 5 rolls minimum (six if you adjust your rolls so you know how long your characters spent scanning that empty rock), and is not at all uncommon to receive. We are vaguely introduced to the concept of a 'mining platform' that can process 200 tons of ore in a 6 hour shift, but unless it is in another book I don't have, that is ALL we know about it.

Here is the thing: A perfectly average roll for an asteroid will produce 150,000 tons of ore, which takes even professional miners decades to move back to port and is worth billions. Now, I'd be willing to reduce the value of ore to less than that of refined metals (say... by a factor of ten) but that only leads to a question: How to turn ore into refined metal, since travel times are the biggest 'slowdown' on exploiting an asteroid of that size, how do you maximize profit from the rock itself? How 'big' and 'expensive' is a portable ore refinery? If you are sitting on hundreds of thousands of tons of metal, why wouldn't you turn it 'industrial' on the spot and actually churn out finished goods for an even greater profit margin per trip?

How long is a trip, anyway? How many days or weeks of scanning rocks and travellign through space did it take to get that perfectly average rock of just dense metal that is worth a billion credits and twenty years of your life (or fifety if you never upgrade your cargo moving)?

There are no old, expert prospectors. Expert miners, yes, prospectors, no. They spend a few weeks and hit the motherlode or some pirate or claim jumper kills you for your really big money radioactive rock (our same average roll rock for radioactive ore is worth trillions, almost gazillions...)

So: where have I missed the information on becoming an industrial magnate with a portable factory ship? I can't be the first person in 30+ years of traveller to think of this, can I? How can I take a good sized asteroid in an unoccupied system and turn it into a war fleet... or even just that one rock to build a 100k ton battleship with my Engineer: Naval skill?

And where can I find a GM to terrorize into letting me pull this off?:devil:

 

[E.D.Quibell]

You need to run a ship.

Work out lifesupport, fuel, maintenance and mortguage payments, against the time it takes to find and mine the ore.

You may need a license to mine in a system, which would add to costs. And if you mine in a system that doesn't need a license then you may need to jump to the system to mine there.

And metals are only Cr5,000 a ton (basic raw materials from the Core rule book).

What the rules don't tell you is what the % of Cyrstals in a Crystalline astroid i.e. the difference in finding ice for fuel, or Crystals for Cr20,000 per ton.

Or the % of Precoius Metals in a Dense Materials Astroid. i.e. the difference between finding metal at Cr5,000 a ton or Precious Metals at Cr50,000 a ton.

However I take your point about the Radioactives though. 1 in 36 C asteroids on average hold 140,000 tons of them, making you a billionare overnight! And it's 1 in 13 with Metal Astroids!

Best regards,

Ewan

 

[Higgipedia]

Let's not forget that a million-credit find will spawn claim-jumpers and wildcats!

 

[Spike]

You need to run a ship.

Work out lifesupport, fuel, maintenance and mortguage payments, against the time it takes to find and mine the ore.

You may need a license to mine in a system, which would add to costs. And if you mine in a system that doesn't need a license then you may need to jump to the system to mine there.

Therin lies the beef about incompleteness. The only times we have in mining is the time it takes to scan a rock (1-10 watches (6 hours), and the time to actually pull the ore out (half a ton per hour by hand, average, 3 tons an hour average with a drone. Fill time for even large holds is thus around 1 day with mining drones). Obviously jumping the ore is less cost effective unless you are using very large cargo bays on a time=money view.

And metals are only Cr5,000 a ton (basic raw materials from the Core rule book).

Yet dense ore is 50,000 a ton, and dense ore is metals. I realized there was a problem in comparing the prices, but I hadn't realized the Scoundrel book was off by a factor of ten!

What the rules don't tell you is what the % of Cyrstals in a Crystalline astroid i.e. the difference in finding ice for fuel, or Crystals for Cr20,000 per ton.

Or the % of Precoius Metals in a Dense Materials Astroid. i.e. the difference between finding metal at Cr5,000 a ton or Precious Metals at Cr50,000 a ton.

Agreed. While this might work for very rough guides, its useless when what you are looking for is actually important. Imagine some stranded misjumped ship looking for fuel in the asteroid belt and getting frustrated that they are finding (to them) worthless diamonds! There is simply no good way, as is, to break down beyond the four given catagories, or even between them (in the case of multiple resource asteroids, as noted earlier).

However I take your point about the Radioactives though. 1 in 36 C asteroids on average hold 140,000 tons of them, making you a billionare overnight! And it's 1 in 13 with Metal Astroids!

Best regards,

Ewan

Thanks.

 

[Colin]

I would guess that the module "Beltstrike" would fill in many of the holes for you.

 

[ThunderChilde]

yes it will, I'm at work and don't have it to hand, but it covers what a ore processing facility is, extending life support for just dicking around mining insystem, and more detailed rules on everything including the fractional payout for selling a big find to a conglomerate for pennies on the dollar versus 20 years of your life at hard labour mining it yourself.

 

[Spike]

Having gotten Beltstrike I can only hope that the 'expansion' of the mining rules therein were not at all inspired by my beef in the OP. I refuse to have my name in anyway associated with that particular debacle.

The short form: Rotten formating... bullet points breaking up a table?!

The good: Yay, they added an 'exotics' roll chart! ANd I can now dice for scanning! Oh.. and now I know I can sell my find for 10%!

The Bad: Um... that 'The Good' consists of two additional tables and a toss off rule?

The Ugly: Some tables actually get LESS useful (now when you roll for the size of your asteroid anything above a 7 no longer gives you the dtonnage of the rock in question, making determining the final ore value impossible) Dense Materials are still worth 50k credits. Oh, and a wacky table that adds iron and (I think?) nickle iron at absolute crap prices (in comparison to even just finding water) but provides no way to actually acheive those (cheap) results when prospecting. In short, a GM is better off eyeballing the trade value charts and coming up with his own percentages of various valuable and comparatively worthless materials.

 

[HG_B]

Therin lies the beef about incompleteness. The only times we have in mining is the time it takes to scan a rock (1-10 watches (6 hours),

6 hours to have densomiter give you a 3D map of a rock? o:

 

[Spike]

six to sixty.

Edit: removed redundancy