Value of Gold and other precious metals in BattleTech

[Daryk]

I figure he drove the Kuritan APC...  8)

[Knightmare]

What mech does Oddball pilot?

You could always reverse the scenario and set the scene during the last days of Alaric's seizure of Terra and have Oddball pilot a super-heavy so there's a small crew aboard. I'd put Kelly and his people in the APC.   

[Colt Ward]

Yeah, I would keep Oddball in SOME sort of armor main combatants . . . the infantry, Kelly & his crew, were to clear the urban areas so BA/PAL if cutting edge and some TacOps infantry w/ engineer support if not.

For Oddball . . . it has to be some sort of mech or armor that is a semi-credible threat but one that could be said to be a deathtrap . . . so no CASE!  Originally I was thinking a Quickdraw.  Sure it is a mech, sure it is a heavy, yeah it's mobile . . . but it has no kill shot weapon (PPC, AC/10, or later GR) and most the line combat medium mechs & up would not be intimidated to go up against it.  Enforcers, Centurions, Vindicators . . . heck even a Panther in the right terrain would not feel out of their depth squaring off.  Thing is you would need to fill his lance with something similar.

For armor?  Bulldog or Vedette . . . again, the main gun is not going to be a single tank threat against most other combatants.  Tanks would be easier to set up a homogenous unit.

[truetanker]

Manticore Ballista?

IIRC, his machine used an extra pipe to give the impression that It was a 100mm vers his 75? Also the engine was modified to be faster forward and reverse.

TT

[Daryk]

I was offline all weekend... in what terrain can a Panther not be mugged by a Quickdraw? ???

[Colt Ward]

I never said it would be a easy victory . . . but that 10 point hit at a range most of the QKD's weapons cannot reach gives it a starting point.

[Daryk]

True, but the Quickdraw has the maneuverability advantage.

[five_corparty]

I KNOW they already wrote a short fiction on a great train robbery stealing Capellan & Fed Suns currency.

Pretty sure that story got me on a government watch list, typing in "how much money is in the Philadelphia mint? How much does money weigh?" while at work on a government laptop.  ^-^ ;D ;D ;D

[Colt Ward]

Pretty sure that story got me on a government watch list, typing in "how much money is in the Philadelphia mint? How much does money weigh?" while at work on a government laptop.  ^-^ ;D ;D ;D

That is why you move over to your co-worker's station when they are on lunch/smoke break.  Anything questionable should always be researched on someone else's computer.

[Vonshroom]

I think a lot of the posters in this thread have not really touched on something that is really important, and a lot of you are really missing the point. First, What makes something valuable is its rarity, usefulness, desirability etc. A lot of the comments have touched on this but they look at it from more of a birds eye view. Keep in mind the average citizen of the inner sphere (even on a good planet) has a boring "earth like" life. They aren't MechWarrior's or interstellar adventurers or anyone you would want to read about. They are just normal people living their lives and making 10,000 CBills per year (on average). So ~$50k USD. Do they still want jewelry to wear? Yes. Do they still want the latest and greatest personal entertainment? Yes. Do they still want nice watches and things to impress their peers with? Yes. People are people and by and large in the BTU the majority of people live boring normal lives. Gold, silver etc. still has good value to these people just as it does to people today. A local lord or planetary noble is certainly going to place value on it, to impress others for no other reason. The spread out interstellar reaches of the BTU means due to simple supply / demand principles these highly differing worlds are going to have highly different values for the items that are scarce on their planet. Also the "interstellar economy" is significantly more limited than the "world economy" of today. Sure technology has progressed immensely but travel is limited to a level similar to the colonial era (with similar travel times to far flung realms of the crown). So unless you are on an inner world, as a typical person (participant in a world economy), you would never experience off world travel or in most cases off world goods. It simply is not cost effective to import things if they can be produced on the planet itself. This is going to make a huge value discrepancy between worlds as on one planet,  water or equipment may be very limited and thusly expensive. On a high water percentage planet with a large population base, precious metals might indeed be very valuable, and water almost free.

Now we get into the concept of the "haves" and the "have nots". On a lot of planets that are not earth like and may not even be habitable they may have huge germanium deposits but no water. That means water would have to be literally created by smashing oxygen and hydrogen together in a reactor, extracted from something or shipped in from a nearby source. This all adds huge costs to just getting enough water to drink, bathe in, etc. So suddenly water becomes valuable, not so valuable you are going to necessarily use it as a reserve for your currency, but valuable nonetheless. So its not far fetched to think that some germanium miners in an asteroid belt might start to use water rations as a medium of exchange, and large quantities of water would be worth a significant amount as the nearest most cost effective water source might actually be in another star system. Just like someone else pointed out about the Gold Rush. The value of shovels, ammunition, fuel, rifles, etc was immense, and compared to the gold nuggets that people were literally just picking up in creek beds very expensive. However back East, a shovel was cheap and the gold nugget was ridiculously more valuable. These same factors would be at play when you are talking about the cost limitations of interstellar travel.

[Colt Ward]

They may still desire it, but you are missing the point that once you can get into space at a really cheap rate, resource scarcity sort of goes away.

[Daryk]

Certain resource scarcity goes away... others increase...  ^-^

[Prospernia]

They may still desire it, but you are missing the point that once you can get into space at a really cheap rate, resource scarcity sort of goes away.

It's really, really, really cheap: one ton of fuel and an aerospace fighter, you can go to another planet.

If you use the original Aerotech rules and map, you can literally fly to the Moon in like, a turn, like, a minute; the Apollo astronauts took days to get there.

[Daryk]

The modern rules fixed that part, at least...  8)

[Prospernia]

The modern rules fixed that part, at least...  8)

Wait, at any point Battletech isn't modern?

As I recall, Interceptor, you never had planets blocking your LoS and Planets were a transitional-hexes designated on the map. Same goes with Battlespace. 

[Daryk]

You said the original rules, I was merely trying to point out they have evolved.

[Phantom000]

The value of currency aside, the value of gold as a commodity is going to be based more on planetary economics than the economics of the realm. What is the local supply/demand of gold like? Are there gold mines on that planet? It probably still does have industrial uses, but I'd say no more than what you see in the real world today.

I think you nailed it.

Gold and silver have long been seen as luxury items and are so widely accepted that they have, and still are to some degree, used as a basis for currency. It is only in the last hundred years or so that they have started to take on industrial application due to their high electrical conductivity. I imagine such applications would likely continue and even expand in the future.

The catch though, is that gold still follows the laws of supply and demand so how valuable it is will differ depending on how much gold a planet has and how much it actually uses. One planet might place a high value on gold because it has little to no gold and so have to import it from off world. On Another planet, gold might be less valuable because it contains lots of gold near the surface so it is easy to mine. Then again gold might be expensive because that same planet has a lot of factories and so its like bulk cargo; its easy to find but they use so much of it that they can't keep up.

So while I do see people trading in gold I don't really see it as anything unusual, just one more commodity you buy and sell along with a hundred other commodities.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

I think a lot of the posters in this thread have not really touched on something that is really important, and a lot of you are really missing the point. First, What makes something valuable is its rarity, usefulness, desirability etc. A lot of the comments have touched on this but they look at it from more of a birds eye view. Keep in mind the average citizen of the inner sphere (even on a good planet) has a boring "earth like" life. They aren't MechWarrior's or interstellar adventurers or anyone you would want to read about. They are just normal people living their lives and making 10,000 CBills per year (on average). So ~$50k USD. Do they still want jewelry to wear? Yes. Do they still want the latest and greatest personal entertainment? Yes. Do they still want nice watches and things to impress their peers with? Yes. People are people and by and large in the BTU the majority of people live boring normal lives. Gold, silver etc. still has good value to these people just as it does to people today. A local lord or planetary noble is certainly going to place value on it, to impress others for no other reason. The spread out interstellar reaches of the BTU means due to simple supply / demand principles these highly differing worlds are going to have highly different values for the items that are scarce on their planet. Also the "interstellar economy" is significantly more limited than the "world economy" of today. Sure technology has progressed immensely but travel is limited to a level similar to the colonial era (with similar travel times to far flung realms of the crown). So unless you are on an inner world, as a typical person (participant in a world economy), you would never experience off world travel or in most cases off world goods. It simply is not cost effective to import things if they can be produced on the planet itself. This is going to make a huge value discrepancy between worlds as on one planet,  water or equipment may be very limited and thusly expensive. On a high water percentage planet with a large population base, precious metals might indeed be very valuable, and water almost free.

Now we get into the concept of the "haves" and the "have nots". On a lot of planets that are not earth like and may not even be habitable they may have huge germanium deposits but no water. That means water would have to be literally created by smashing oxygen and hydrogen together in a reactor, extracted from something or shipped in from a nearby source. This all adds huge costs to just getting enough water to drink, bathe in, etc. So suddenly water becomes valuable, not so valuable you are going to necessarily use it as a reserve for your currency, but valuable nonetheless. So its not far fetched to think that some germanium miners in an asteroid belt might start to use water rations as a medium of exchange, and large quantities of water would be worth a significant amount as the nearest most cost effective water source might actually be in another star system. Just like someone else pointed out about the Gold Rush. The value of shovels, ammunition, fuel, rifles, etc was immense, and compared to the gold nuggets that people were literally just picking up in creek beds very expensive. However back East, a shovel was cheap and the gold nugget was ridiculously more valuable. These same factors would be at play when you are talking about the cost limitations of interstellar travel.

Water is created by burning hydrogen with oxygen. It's a combustion reaction, not a fusion reaction.  If you've got access to both elements, all you need to do is mix them together in a 2 to 1 ration of hydrogen to oxygen, then set off a spark and let chemistry take care of the rest.  It's really not that expensive.

And even if that weren't the case, dropships can apparently keep functioning as closed systems for months so there has to be some pretty good water recycling technology in the setting.

[AlphaMirage]

Water is also really, really heavy and pretty common throughout the universe. It should actually be something easy to get with even a fairly primitive dropship based ice mining operation in usable quantities (not even Ryan Cartel levels, after all you only need to mine it once). Its not something I'd run interstellar with beside using it as feedstock for fusion fuel and life support.