Belters: Just What Do they Do To Earn A Living?

[PoorMerchant]

So, here is my question - belters are a common trope in Traveller, being seen in many asteroid belts. But how do they actually earn a crust?

It seems to me that the guys cruising around in a Seeker can't use it to mine ore because the cargo hold is too small, so I'm thinking that they work as prospectors, checking asteroids for their value, taking samples and planting a beacon to support their claim. They'd then need to register their claim at a Claims Office.

I guess at that point things might go two ways - if the belter worked for a company or a co-op that had the ability to mine then they could pay a fee to work the asteroid. But if the belter was an independent then the Claims Office could pay the belter a fee based upon the estimated value of the asteroid - and then offer the claim to mining companies at a higher price.

The Claims Office would be based on the main world in a system, and be responsible for making spot checks of "claimed" asteroids to ensure there had been no falsehood on the part of a belter.

Does this gybe with the "official" view of things?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by PoorMerchant

It seems to me that the guys cruising around in a Seeker can't use it to mine ore because the cargo hold is too small, so I'm thinking that they work as prospectors, checking asteroids for their value, taking samples and planting a beacon to support their claim. They'd then need to register their claim at a Claims Office.

This role is clearly modeled on prospectors of the 19th century American west. A Claims Office scheme would be one way that worked. The other models would be placer miners (guys who find and work tiny but extremely high value deposits - this may require unobtainium, a mule load of gold may make you modestly rich in the 19th century, but it won't pay for a *spaceship*) and oil wildcatters (who can either work quite like the Claims Office model, or they can be subcontractors hired by existing oil companies)

Mind you like a lot of Traveller economics you probably don't want to look at it too hard - barring that unobtainium it's likely there are no resources rare and valuable enough to support any significant number of these guys. And anyway once the first couple extraction companies are set up on the first few good sites, well, your new discovery it's not going to be enough better to compete with extraction infrastructure already in operation on something with enough ore to supply the system for the next ten thousand years....

[jeff_wilson]

Perhaps they look for rocks with newly exposed veins of the stable super-heavy elements, then attach a small reactionless-drive tug to drag them off to the smelter.

[jeff37923]

No unobtanium is needed. Just to break even, you can have belters mining ice and carbonaceous material for volatiles to use in space station life support systems.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by jeff37923

No unobtanium is needed. Just to break even, you can have belters mining ice and carbonaceous material for volatiles to use in space station life support systems.

That's a good one, but my inner quibbler asks if getting that from comets and asteroids is really cheaper than shipping it up from a habitable planet, given the drive systems in Traveller.

If there isn't a suitable planet, of course, that won't apply.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by jeff37923

No unobtanium is needed. Just to break even, you can have belters mining ice and carbonaceous material for volatiles to use in space station life support systems.

Can you? How much do you think that will require? I suspect the rational economics on that are something like send one ship out to a big comet (which you don't need to search for, it's not like they are hiding, or get lost again once you plot their orbits the first time), touch down on it and run the drive for however many years it takes to push it into a transfer orbit, and once it arrives it supplies all your orbital habitats for a couple generations. That won't employ very many belters.

[woodchuck]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

That's a good one, but my inner quibbler asks if getting that from comets and asteroids is really cheaper than shipping it up from a habitable planet, given the drive systems in Traveller.

If there isn't a suitable planet, of course, that won't apply.

Designer water or ice cubes. There would be people who would be willing to pay big bucks for "primordial dihydrogen monoxide". There will be stupid people in the future.

[roguebfl]

There is also the rare earth needed for modern electronics

[ak_aramis]

canonically, it's the claims office model for most, and the placer miner model for many of the rest, and supporting service providers for the remainder.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

There are two different uses for the word 'belter'. One is the kind you get from Traveller character creation, which could more accurately be called a belt prospector; the other is someone who lives in a planetoid belt. Very few belters are belters. Most of them have much the same occupations as groundlings (with the obvious exception of occupations like wheat farmer, cattle rancher, ande deep sea diver).


Hans