Johannes replied to me: > If you have many small mining operations, you can have mass produced > ships, fitting for small operations. Maybe there are customers, who fear > a big mining operation is going to get leverage to control them, so they > rather each finance their own mining operation.
A single company could also operate many ships, small or large. My thought was that building just one or two ships means that the R&D costs are divided between those units, whose price will skyrocket. Can you run a big mining operation -- one rich asteroid, where the effort is concentrated -- with multiple small ships? Is that more or less expensive? A certain percentage of Lwt goes to fuel/reaction mass, another percentage goes to payload, the rest remains for the structure and the crew areas. What is the benefit of one 1,000-ton ship over ten 100-ton ships? - Scale efficiency. One captain, one surgeon, not ten. - The "startup weight/cost" of systems like TL9 fusion reactors. - Square-cube. The big ship will have a thicker skin than the ten smaller ones, which reduces radiation. - Big pieces of gear can be carried. No need to assemble them in deep space, where personnel costs will be much higher. > Astereoid wars by Ben Bova is close to what you look for i think. If i > remember correctly though, they also don't have a distinction between > miners and prospectors, altough i have not given it that much attention, > when i read it. Though given how much attention was given to drive out the > competition, it's quite beleivable, that not so much attention was given > to optimize mining. Assume that there are a couple of "likely" asteroids with very similar orbits. The first option would be to send a bunch of prospector ships out, followed by one miner to the best asteroid when they report back. The second option would be to send one prospector ship to check all of them in turn, then one miner. This requires a more capable, longer-endurance prospector, possibly one which can mine reaction mass from asteroids. The third option would be to send a combined prospector/miner. No need to wait for the results from a separate prospector, the ship simply goes to the asteroids, one after another, until it finds one that is good enough. The third option probably gets the fastest results, but not the most or best. I'm playing with numbers for a 100-ton TL9 ship with a 30-ton payload. That could be a reactor, a mass driver engine, and supporting systems to get the rock to a Lagrange point. Set it up, verify that the robots are shoveling mass into the intake, and go home again. Mission time would be several years. Should it have cryogenic capsules? Cryo capsules and cabins are probably too heavy, so if the crew sleeps through the trip they have spartan bunks on station. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
