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Old 03-21-2010, 04:34 PM   #30
Langy
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: CA
Default Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You

I don't know how the resource value modifier tables would help much, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean in 'mineral wealth tables'.

I did do some thinking on this, and came up with a pretty decent way to get the resources for a C-type asteroid, at least. By using this table, you can figure out how much of each element a C-type asteroid might have. I came up with approximately 50% of the mass of a C-type asteroid is in industry-useable elements, with the other 50% being in volatiles (oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon). Using that table's figures, I came up with a figure of ~$2,000 per ton of industrial elements (volatiles are worth ~$250 per ton). If you then use that to produce parts in a factory modules, and then use those parts to build your end-product, you get something like this:


Build two 100 ton craft for $2,500,000 - ship costs $12,500 per ton. Using SM+10 modules.

First, 400 tons of ore is processed by mining modules - produce 200 tons and $400,000 of industrially-useful elements, 200 tons of volatiles (16 tons hydrogen, 175 tons oxygen, 8 tons carbon, 1 ton nitrogen)
200 tons of processed ore given to two factory modules - this $400,000 of ore is turned into $1,000,000 of parts
$1,000,000 of parts given to five factory modules to process - together, produce $2,500,000 of starships

Require 400 tons of ore to produce 200 tons of ship and 200 tons of useful volatiles (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen)

Requires seven factory modules and eight mining modules to produce five factory modules worth of stuff per time period.

A robofac is twice as fast as a fabricator, but it still needs the same amount of parts per finished product - double the number of mining modules required. With nanofacs, you don't need those two extra factory modules at the beginning - you can turn those 200 tons of processed ore straight into your starships. However, they're also twenty times faster than a fabricator - and mining modules don't increase in speed, so if your ships haven't gotten any more expensive, you'll need twenty-times as many mining modules per nanofac compared to a fabricator.

So, it'd go something like this:

Code:
Factory Type         # Min. Mods  # Fac Mods  SM+10 Prod/Hr  SM+10 Cost
Fabricator           8            7           $2,500,000     $3,580,000,000
Robofac              16           7           $5,000,000     $7,160,000,000
Nanofac              160          5           $50,000,000    $15,600,000,000
My figures for asteroid composition are rough - I rounded them a bit so that they fit neatly. Other than that, they should be good.

EDIT: Note that if your vehicle costs more than $12,500 per ton, you'll either need to put it through a few more turns on the fabricator or use more expensive ores than the stock $2,000/ton ones. Another round will get you up to $31,250 per ton, then $78,125 per ton, $195,312.5 per ton. The most expensive module is a fully-automated replicator for $20.02 million per ton, which would require sixteen turns on the fabricator to produce, multiplying the raw ore's value over 2,000,000 times over. Alternatively, a replicator might require primarily precious metals in its production, which according to Spaceships 2 might have values as high as $10,000,000 per ton by themselves. If you need large numbers of precious metals to produce a replicator, then you only need to run it through a fabricator maybe two times (one from processed ore to parts, one from parts to replicator).

Also note that Spaceships 2 gives a different value for the price of Industrial Metals than I derived from the asteroid composition chart - $6,000 per ton. Probably either assumes a higher cost for iron or less iron in the mixture.

Last edited by Langy; 03-22-2010 at 07:35 AM.
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