My daughter rolled up a belter character and managed to roll '6' four straight times on her benefits. (at which I checked for loaded dice-one never knows with that kid!) She is currently in an inner system belt that is mostly iron nickel, but she managed a spectacular find roll. (using the Mongoose version of Beltstrike rules. They're the only thing we've got at present) Since she doesn't have much money, the 'Old Codger' the group hired on to help out convinced her to sell it for the 5% finders fee just to get some better working capital. Now she wants to go to the Bowman system and start a full mining company the finds, mines, and processes it. (She also seems to have this 'stick it in their face' thing with Ling Standard Products) Any, I wanted some more info before I started giving her options on things to buy and the processes she'll need to buy them for before she goes. So far some good things on ships, but what about the processing end of the deal? (Beltstrike has a lot of the mining equipment listed but as far as processing goes only has a giant 1000 ton barge that doesn't have a jump system on it):CoW:
Thanks for the help folks.
I do not know of any straight gaming material that covers processing and mining equipment. You might want to take a look at the following book, which covers Moon mining and processing for a space colony making solar power satellites.
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html
Also, you might want to see if any of the NASA studies on space colonies and space settlement are available online for download. I know that a lot of Earth ore processing involves crushing the ore, concentrating it by eliminating the excess rock, and then shipping the ore to another place for processing into metal. You might want to look up something like taconite production for iron ore to get some ideas.
Figure you are going to need some form of boring equipment to drill blast holes, with said equipment needing to be solidly anchored to the mass you are drilling, power for that equipment, and explosives to break off manageable chunks of ore from a larger mass. Then Kevlar, or some similar material, capture blankets for the chunks blasted loose, a small craft to tow them to a larger ore transporter, to take them to a crushing and separating plant. With grav plates, you could probably use a water wash to separate the heavier metallic ore from rock, or maybe use an acid-leach process on it to extract the desired material. A lot will depend on what you are going after.
There is also a book on Project Gutenberg called
The Business of Mining, by Arthur J. Hoskin, from 1912. It claims to be:
A BRIEF, NON-TECHNICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PRINCIPLES INVOLVED IN THE PROFITABLE OPERATION OF MINES
I have read the Heppenheimer book and you should find that useful, but I just found the other book. You might want to do some searching on Project Gutenberg for more books. There are some on gold mining as well.
My guess on asteroid mining is that the best an independent operator is going to be able to do is concentrate the ore for easier processing and then selling to a larger smelter operation. The final processing of ore to metal or whatever is going to be very capital intensive.
Edit Note: The Project Gutenberg EBook of
Getting Gold, by J. C. F. Johnson might also be useful, as it gives you some of the various ways gold ore is treated.
