Deep space mining and other civil logistics.

[kato]

Btw: I was actually surprised how well the Pathfinder and first Alliance Grand Survey numbers meshed up with that prediction.
=> Within 40 light years by those sources there would have been 36 systems with habitable worlds plus 57 to 59 other systems settled.
=> By the above metric within this space there would be those 36 systems with habitable worlds plus 56 other systems settled (25% with colonies, 75% otherwise).

It also gives one a good idea of the number of systems the Star League might have used BECAUSE they were marginally viable and not suspected of habitation.

The lack of remains of such given by the system generation rules hints that this was not as widespread as one may imagine. Throughout the Inner Sphere there would be about 750 non-charted former or current uses of systems not on BT maps. Statistically about one-in-three habitable systems in the Inner Sphere was settled and nearly 10% of remotely viable systems show signs of former or current exploitation.

[Daryk]

750 is still a considerable haystack in which to hide a needle...  ^-^

[Emcha]

There were a couple of units pre-Jihad that specialised in helping other units repair or customize units

Sending salvage back to an HQ though is fine on a planet but over several light years would be expensive would you make money back on it? Questionable

Cost of salvaging weapon to start with
Checking it on base
Putting it on a DropShip
Paying DropShip Fuel
Paying JumpShip costs
Time to travel
Then refurbishment costs
Before resale

That's a lot.  Now if they were using said weapons on building new units at HQ they might make money off them but there would be no way to standardize production or make custom builds for customers unless you're unit had a sixth sense in hunting for guns

or, they could just have a dropship converted into a mobile workshop. take all the completely wrecked parts and use them as donors to repair not quite as destroyed components. you can't tell me this sort of thing doesn't happen in the setting; because it HAS to have been a thing for several generations back when it wasn't possible to produce new stuff. further, there HAS to be custom shops that produce parts for mechs that are long out of production, otherwise you'd never see a lot of the mechs in the setting.

it's not too terribly hard to refurbish circuitry if you have the tools. it's even easier to restore and repair machined parts, so long as you have the tools and knowledge. if you're a combat unit you're not going to be interested in stuff you can't immediately throw onto a mech, so it makes sense a lot of stuff is going to get passed over. but if your goal is to find parts and assemblies to rebuild then you don't have to bother much with how usable something is when you find it.

people may have lost the toolings and design blueprints for a lot of things, but swapping capacitors out, repairing moisture damage, rebuilding boards, all are possible so long as you know what components are supposed to go where.

patching armor, rebuilding structural members, that all is even easier. it wouldn't be too dissimilar from what heavy industry mechanics and machinists do now.

myomer refurbishing might be more tedious involved. I imagine torn/damaged bundles would get unwoven and the fibers divided up by approximate length, then rewoven into smaller bundles.

[kato]

I've already made a very small shipyard station as a template, and I'm wondering how I might go about creating a Homebrew factory module.

As a suggestion (that's what i do): Just look at real-life equipment of the desired scale - doesn't need to be in the same field of manufacturing in my opinion either - and abstract it into some blackbox factory equipment. Don't get lost in the details though, after all you basically just need something where you can say "this weighs 500 tons and converts 5 tons/day of raw material X into product Y". Every factory in Battletech is just a blackbox.

As an example, if (as i am doing) i design a mobile structure for strip-mining and first-step-refining ore on the surface of other planets, i look at:

• mobile land rigs for oil drilling in Alaska, mostly for getting a sense of size and scale, including crew numbers.
• strip mining gear used for coal in Siberia in detail, abstracting from gear available in BT and scaling up to see where i end up at.
• large-scale steamcracker equipment and similar for fluffing out the refinery a bit.

and then i mold that into something usable that looks like it'd somewhat fit into the environment i'm thinking of.

[Emcha]

As a suggestion (that's what i do): Just look at real-life equipment of the desired scale - doesn't need to be in the same field of manufacturing in my opinion either - and abstract it into some blackbox factory equipment. Don't get lost in the details though, after all you basically just need something where you can say "this weighs 500 tons and converts 5 tons/day of raw material X into product Y". Every factory in Battletech is just a blackbox.

that's a very good idea and was something i was thinking about doing before i found a site with actual stats for orbital factories, and subsequently lost the link.

As an example, if (as i am doing) i design a mobile structure for strip-mining and first-step-refining ore

so a walking excavator with added agglomerators?

[kato]

so a walking excavator with added agglomerators?

A bit more static. In Alaska there are dozens of large-scale mobile land rigs like this one which for movement are disassembled into a couple modules, drop their wheeled running gear and are hooked on to trucks pulling them to a new site. For some of these exploring new sites this occurs about every month within a winter. Largest of their type weighs around 5,000 tons in 12 modules. Sizewise nothing stopping you from putting the same gear on the tracked running gear of something like a TAKRAF excavator either. Excavating gear would be more likely bucket-chain rather than bucket-wheel for my purposes, with the benefit of being lighter.

Concept i'm aiming for in my model case is something similar to the old Gold Dredges. Strip-mines its way through fluvial sediment in a Martian-environment crater, filtering the surface layer for certain components on a ppm scale while carrying a small mill and sintering plant onboard to be able to pass around ten containers worth of finished products (Ge-Ti alloy and NbTi filament...) to trucks bringing them to a spaceport for once-per-year jumpship transfer back to where it's needed for further processing.

Gravity, an atmosphere with even just trace amounts of oxygen and a surface to just pile the tailings on help tremendously in this.

[dgorsman]

If you're looking for examples heavy mining gear, have a look at Suncor's operations in Northern Alberta.

[Emcha]

ok so i just became aware of the snowden mining station. a taurian mobile space station that has 6,000t of ore proccessing equipment.

although i can't find any info on output capacity or construction rules.

[idea weenie]

ok so i just became aware of the snowden mining station. a taurian mobile space station that has 6,000t of ore proccessing equipment.

although i can't find any info on output capacity or construction rules.

You probably won't find either.  If actual numbers for that are provided, the whole economic system for Battletech will get over-analyzed (often by people like me).  There will be arguments if the output is too much or too little, the costs are too much or too little, set up time if needed, effect of critical hits, if they are single stage or multi-stage processing (i.e. some might consider single stage to be just rubbling an asteroid to remove the dross, others might interpret it as going from raw asteroid to smelted bars), and other arguments.

Catalyst took one look at the likely problems that would cause that and went no

[kato]

For over-analyzing:

If you normalize the Snowden's stats and tweak the numbers a slight bit, you get for somewhat usable numbers:

• a single mining drill requires a 200-ton blackbox ore processing facility backing it up.
• the combination produces 50 tons of usable "product" per hour at maximum efficiency.
• this production cycle may require going through up to 3,500 tons of "raw asteroid" that is fetched only from within the adjacent space hexes by small craft.

This is based around the cargo capacity as a temporary product holding floor, the number of bay doors and the time required to offload onto dropships.

[Emcha]

For over-analyzing:

If you normalize the Snowden's stats and tweak the numbers a slight bit, you get for somewhat usable numbers:

• a single mining drill requires a 200-ton blackbox ore processing facility backing it up.
• the combination produces 50 tons of usable "product" per hour at maximum efficiency.
• this production cycle may require going through up to 3,500 tons of "raw asteroid" that is fetched only from within the adjacent space hexes by small craft.

This is based around the cargo capacity as a temporary product holding floor, the number of bay doors and the time required to offload onto dropships.

and for the sake of gameplay you can maybe determine output based on how common the raw material is.

for example, if you're mining only titanium, 12.1% of all asteroid mass you take in will be processed into titanium sponge.

maybe one unit of black box ore processing facility has to be dedicated to a specific type of ore, or process. like for various precious metals you have to use a lot of acid and particulate separation, you naturally can't just switch that over to processing iron ore.
other processes might have secondary biproducts like silica sand from ore, or different naturally occurring alloys like monel from a copper or nickel operation.

[Elmoth]

Actually, since we do not know the numbers.tjst are needed to construct say a mech, it is still irrelevant. Maybe a 30 ton Valkyrie needs 6000 tons of steel that are refined to the 30 tons of its hardened military level armour. Or not, or just the opposite. And green. We have no hard data, so hard data in other parts is just not that important.

[Emcha]

Actually, since we do not know the numbers.tjst are needed to construct say a mech, it is still irrelevant. Maybe a 30 ton Valkyrie needs 6000 tons of steel that are refined to the 30 tons of its hardened military level armour. Or not, or just the opposite. And green. We have no hard data, so hard data in other parts is just not that important.

we can get a real good guess, though. because steel doesn't work like that, in order to get different properties you alloy it with other elements, so you're not reducing 6000 tons to 30, you'd be taking the steel you need and adding other things to it, which means you're using less steel by a small percent.

it also wouldn't be 30 tons of steel in a mech. as there's more than just steel or even metal that goes into a mech like the armor glass in the cockpit and the high strength myomers of the actuators, and much of its internal volume is empty space.

assuming all standard IS equipment, a 30 ton mech is built on a 2-ton structural steel chassis. that's the internal structure. then you have six tons of armor, assuming it's standard armor that just six tons of armor steel. so that's 8 tons of steel right there. the standard cockpid is like 3 tons, with let's just say 10% of that is the electronics, armored glass, and the gyroscopically-stabilized refrigerated cup holder.

so that's 10.7 tons of steel right there. since we almost never use "pure" steel maybe about 20% of that mass will be various additives like chromium, molybdenum, titanium, nickel, etc.

iron and carbon being some of the most common elements in the universe it's not hard to assume steel remains the main structural building material in 3100AD.


6000 tons of steel can contribute to 560 valkyries.

i feel like the bottleneck in making battlemechs isn't raw materials, but that they are so very complicated machines and require a complex network of systems to function. so it's less the lack of material and more the lack of expertise that drives the cost and difficulty of production up.

but this isn't JUST about making battlemechs, but supplying raw materials to all of society. everything from steel to glass to plastics to copper and gold for electronics and everything else.

[kato]

iron and carbon being some of the most common elements in the universe

Common? Iron constitutes 11 ppm, Carbon 64 ppm of the universe...

it's not hard to assume steel remains the main structural building material in 3100AD

Now that depends on where, what and how you mine for which purposes. A single proper large strip mine on the moon already produces 100 times the current annual Titanium sponge production.

[Daryk]

Just to add to what Kato said... Hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe, followed (not that closely, really) by Helium.  Everything else is literally "trace"...

[dgorsman]

Ah, irony.  It's like goldy or silvery, just heavier and more common.

[Daryk]

THAT made me LOL... good point!  ;D

[Emcha]

That's the problem with overinclusiveness; if you include all of infinity in your sample size all the numbers become meaningless.

Not all elements are equally as common, but they're also not evenly distributed.

Moon rocks taken from the apolllo missions were found to contain12% titanium. There are many iron and nickel rich asteroids, and there is a planet out there that is just one giant spherical diamond.

[kato]

there is a planet out there that is just one giant spherical diamond.

Largely disproven based on a second, more indepth spectral analysis of 55 Cancri a couple years later.


The main thing to consider though isn't abundance. It's logistics.

That Snowden? Let's say it simply outputs iron ore Based on the earlier calculation, if you had one in the Terran asteroid belt, you'll need to operate 14 Behemoths on continuous round cycles to move the product just back to Earth orbit to offload it in some zero-g factory up there. Operational costs for the Snowden? A rather cheap 3 million per year. Freight cost, with the operational cost of the Behemoth as a minimum? 45 million C-Bills. Worth of that iron ore you're mining on the market? Based on current prices somewhere around 92 million.

Sounds good, until you consider that you invested almost 4.4 billion C-Bills into that Snowden. Amortization after 100 years. As a business case about anyone would round-bin that proposal.

[Daryk]

Yeah... refine the ore in the belt, and only ship the finished product...

[Emcha]

This is why it's more economical to produce finished stock for consumption in other space production. Because remember it's much more cost effective to move freight between points in space than between space and ground.

[kato]

Because remember it's much more cost effective to move freight between points in space than between space and ground.

That already is between points in space.

Shipping it to the ground would be a lot more cost effective btw, since it basically lowers the cycle a Behemoth goes through in such a transport from 28 days to 18.4 days, lowering number of Behemoths required for offloading the Snowden to nine instead of thirteen, thus increasing annual profit from 44 million to 60 million. Of course not possible since Behemoths can't land. But: Battletech space transloading times suck.

Yeah... refine the ore in the belt, and only ship the finished product...

Sure. Second station the size of a Snowden to process the iron ore - and carbon - into steel, directly docked to it to minimize transfer times, let's also assume it costs the same in investment? With somewhere around 270 million annual profit from the combination amortization still takes 32 years.

Not all elements are equally as common, but they're also not evenly distributed.

And some are less common in asteroids. To get the Niobium for the superconductors in a single 10-ton fusion reactor you need to scour through about 4 million tons of asteroid regolith. Within Earth crustal matter it's about 30 times more common.

[Daryk]

32 years is a reasonable payback period for a company that can afford the hardware in the first place.

[Emcha]

That already is between points in space.

Shipping it to the ground would be a lot more cost effective btw, since it basically lowers the cycle a Behemoth goes through in such a transport from 28 days to 18.4 days, lowering number of Behemoths required for offloading the Snowden to nine instead of thirteen, thus increasing annual profit from 44 million to 60 million. Of course not possible since Behemoths can't land. But: Battletech space transloading times suck.

behemoths can't land or take off from most planets

and while it may not be modeled in game, it costs an order of magnitude more energy/fuel/delta V to land and lift off from a planet than it does to do an orbital transfer.

that's what I'm getting at here. fuel costs are always a factor and always will be, no matter how cheap fuel gets you still have to buy it by the kiloton.

Sure. Second station the size of a Snowden to process the iron ore - and carbon - into steel, directly docked to it to minimize transfer times, let's also assume it costs the same in investment? With somewhere around 270 million annual profit from the combination amortization still takes 32 years.
And some are less common in asteroids. To get the Niobium for the superconductors in a single 10-ton fusion reactor you need to scour through about 4 million tons of asteroid regolith. Within Earth crustal matter it's about 30 times more common.

that's earth. we don't know how common most elements are on other stellar objects. didn't the Marian Hegemony gain its start from the founder striking the motherload of germanium? now there's a huge station in orbit to process it. the precedent is there, now we have to figure out what makes it cost effective. because it has to be otherwise they wouldn't do it.