Johannes replied to me: > I guess a lot depends on, what the costs of sending a ship to the belt and > around in the belt are, and how big the mining operation is.
Well, that depends on the size of the deep space industry :-) Vehicles has some rules for one-of-a-kind designs, but when you assemble an one-of-a-kind ship at Ceres, prices should skyrocket. Unless there is a major shipyard in the belt, with supporting industries and large populations. Then it becomes reasonable to apply list prices again ... > If the costs are high, having small, possibly slow robotic drones check > out the belt, before you even consider sending a mining ship there, seems > like a good idea. Possibly bad for the story, so I'd like to avoid that. > If costs are low, flying needlessly around might be less important, then > getting your returns earlier and preventing someone from snatching your > findings. Also, assume that robots are bad at mining an asteroid, and that prospecting requires some mining. Rock, dust, ice, all mixed up, can a robot really tell if it got a good sample or "obviously" just foreign matter lodged on the surface? > If the operation is large, you can have many vehicles and stations with > dedicated purposes. > > If the operation is small, you propably have not more then one ship with > subcrafts. > > In the Traveller example, costs are low and robotics discouraged. A > possible alternative for a slightly larger belting ship, would be a slow > miner with one or two small fast subcrafts as prospectors and possibly > also for landing, should the main ship not be steamlined and they still > need to get down on a backwater world for one reason or an other. Oops, the reference to Traveller was for comparison. I'm thinking about a moderately hard TL9, no reactionless, no landing starships. > It would be still for a one ship operation. > > You also could have larger mining operations there, which would lead to a > belt with population, and all operations done by non jump capable ships. Why mine the belt? To extract materials for the spaceborne industry. Why have a spaceborne industry? To support the population in the belt. Why have a population in the belt? To mine the belt. If the initial funding was a commercial venture on the homeworld, they must have had some plan to get the profits back to the homeworld. It could have been colonists, or military bases, or a non-profit scientific venture which provided the initial impetus, of course. I'm thinking of some sort of space-metals-to-Earth scheme. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
