Asteroid Prospecting and Mining - rule book, supplement, whatever?

[terranstrider]

Does anyone know of a RPG rule book, supplement or adventure that includes rules for finding, mining and selling valuables from asteroids and or comets?
I'm after rules for the chance of finding something valuable; what it takes to mine it - time, cost, equipment; how to sell it and how much it is worth.
I have read the information in GURPS Space, GURPS Transhuman Space The Deep Beyond, GURPS Spaceships 6 - Mining and Industrial Spacecraft and the GURPS Basic rule books. There are plenty of guidelines but no specifics for gaming asteroid mining.
Space Campaign Parameters: TL 10^, Wormhole Jump Drives, Artificial Gravity, no nano-technology. Players can access a mining ship 3,000 tons, 2g/c manouver drives, with mining module, ore & volatile processing modules and the ability to tow external cargo modules (if leased).

Some rules with tables for % chances, random events, hazards, bonanzas, etc. would be a big help.

[hal]

Originally Posted by terranstrider

Does anyone know of a RPG rule book, supplement or adventure that includes rules for finding, mining and selling valuables from asteroids and or comets?
I'm after rules for the chance of finding something valuable; what it takes to mine it - time, cost, equipment; how to sell it and how much it is worth.
I have read the information in GURPS Space, GURPS Transhuman Space The Deep Beyond, GURPS Spaceships 6 - Mining and Industrial Spacecraft and the GURPS Basic rule books. There are plenty of guidelines but no specifics for gaming asteroid mining.
Space Campaign Parameters: TL 10^, Wormhole Jump Drives, Artificial Gravity, no nano-technology. Players can access a mining ship 3,000 tons, 2g/c manouver drives, with mining module, ore & volatile processing modules and the ability to tow external cargo modules (if leased).

Some rules with tables for % chances, random events, hazards, bonanzas, etc. would be a big help.

There was an "astroid strike" adventure for use with TRAVELLER back in the day. Do you want more information on that?

[terranstrider]

Thanks Hal,
Found a PDF copy of "Beltstrike" an old GDW Traveller book (late 70's or early 80s) on DrivethroughRPG for $12.
Bought a copy on spec hoping it would be a professionaly presented product as opposed to the rubbish presentation and abysmal editing Mongoose publishes. I was wrong; it's a low-res scan of a hard copy, all GDW copyright material removed, no illustrations, the few maps presented do not scale when zooming... ah well, at least it has useful prospecting and mining rules and maybe the adventures will be good.

Still if you know of anything set in a more realistic universe than Traveller with reasonable presentation I'd appreciate a note.

[fschiff]

The Mongoose Adventure Beltstrike ( named after the GDW effort ) has about 30 pages on asteroid belts and mining.

[hal]

Originally Posted by terranstrider

Thanks Hal,
Found a PDF copy of "Beltstrike" an old GDW Traveller book (late 70's or early 80s) on DrivethroughRPG for $12.
Bought a copy on spec hoping it would be a professionaly presented product as opposed to the rubbish presentation and abysmal editing Mongoose publishes. I was wrong; it's a low-res scan of a hard copy, all GDW copyright material removed, no illustrations, the few maps presented do not scale when zooming... ah well, at least it has useful prospecting and mining rules and maybe the adventures will be good.

Still if you know of anything set in a more realistic universe than Traveller with reasonable presentation I'd appreciate a note.

Therein lies a major connundrum if you will. Realistic rules for something set so far into the future - sort of boggles the mind ;)

That having been said, the real question to ask yourself is "what is it that I truly desire for use with my players?"

Is it a series of values associated with a given amount of any one "material" being mined, so you have a frame work of how to determine what it is your player characters are mining? Is it meant to be a high-tech version of the gold rush of the 1840's? Are you trying to tell a story akin to the gold miners who'd work placer deposits? Do you want a sort of wild west atmosphere where instead of gunpowder and pickaxes, you want robotic diggers and lasers? How much "detail" are you looking for in your upcoming campaign?

Have you for example, taken a look at the old GURPSNET archives? I seem to recall once, a discussion (thread) discussing the relative values (and weights) of various metals and minerals - so much so that you might be able to find it archived somewhere in the GURPSNET archives. At the moment, I'm trying to rack my brains for the various SCI-FI role playing games over the years, that might have something of what you desire.

What might be worth your while, is to go look on EBAY to see what sci-fi games are being sold second hand. While you may not want to purchase anything from Ebay per se, it might give you ideas of what to look for.

Game companies you might want to google or look for on EBAY might be:

SPI - UNIVERSE
TSR - Star Frontiers (has Knight Hawks, which I vaguely recall having SOME mining rules in it, but nothing major I don't think)
FGU - SPACE OPERA: (do a wayback machine search on the following: http://www.sden.org/jdr/spaceopera/GB/interviews/ed.htm)

SPACE OPERA is still available from FGU as a published book at $20 US. You can also get it from RPGNOW for a cheaper price. I don't know if it will have mining in it though.


Hmmm. That makes me want to dig up my old FTL books to see if perhaps there's something in there.

[jacobmuller]

Saw your question and immediately thought of GURPS Spaceships 6: Mining and Space Industry. Sadly, it only has 2 paragraphs on asteroid mining and a couple of lines that refer you to GURPS Space p130-132, and Transhuman Space: Deep Beyond.

[KjetilKverndokken]

I must say this also interest me quite alot, because I also have an urgo to host a mining themed campaing in my sci-fi setting.

[jacobmuller]

Originally Posted by jacobmuller

GURPS Space p130-132, and Transhuman Space: Deep Beyond.

Nice statistics if you want the probable returns possible from running a mining operation.
Not sure I'd call mining an adventure- more of an excuse for being out where the adventure happens or a character background or a job that pays for the free time to adventure.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by terranstrider

Space Campaign Parameters: TL 10^, Wormhole Jump Drives, Artificial Gravity, no nano-technology. Players can access a mining ship 3,000 tons, 2g/c manouver drives, with mining module, ore & volatile processing modules and the ability to tow external cargo modules (if leased).

Some rules with tables for % chances, random events, hazards, bonanzas, etc. would be a big help.

Given your campaign parameters, this is probably a case where truly realistic rules would bore you to death.

At one point I was working on an asteroid mining supplement (or even just a JTAS article) for GURPS Traveller. I had to give it up. I couldn't find any process that would realistically pay a party of PC's enough to keep them in business as either prospectors or small-scale miners. Asteroids, to the limit of current knowledge (which is remarkably sparse, granted), are essentially commodities: you identify the interesting ones by telescope, pick the easiest to exploit, grind them up, and sort out the good stuff at the other end. I never found a reason to require visiting each one, or a mineral that would show up as simultaneously valuable, concentrated, easily exploitable once found, and not obvious from long-range spectroscopy.

If you're willing to fudge the realism, there are several rules sets with flowcharts for asteroid mining in the classic vein. In addition to the ones already mentioned, there was an article on belt mining in an early print Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society (#4, I believe). It's available on CD from Far Future Enterprises. GDW also produced a boardgame called Belter: Mining the Asteroids, 2076.

Tales of the Solar Patrol for GURPS has an asteroid miner template, and some discussion of tropes.

GURPS Traveller: First In has extensive rules for planetary surveys that could be adapted for prospecting.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by jacobmuller

Saw your question and immediately thought of GURPS Spaceships 6: Mining and Space Industry. Sadly, it only has 2 paragraphs on asteroid mining and a couple of lines that refer you to GURPS Space p130-132, and Transhuman Space: Deep Beyond.

One of my few annoyances with the spaceships series is that it was apparently decided that we didn't need any hard and fast rules for asteroid mining. Grr.

Originally Posted by Haseri

Of course, if one wanted it really simplified, why not use the Cargo Table is Spaceships 2?

Roll randomly to find out how many tons of stuff is in the asteroid (modified for the belt type) and either gloss over the time it takes to mine it all out, or give them something interesting to do.

This is what I'd do. Unfortunately you have to come up with your own tables of what you can possibly find.

Originally Posted by Langy

I've looked into this previously, and there are very few resources on the 'net that give you much of anything in what kind of distribution you might find in asteroid mining. There are things that talk about how many asteroids are nickel-iron or carbonaceous, and there are things that talk about what percent of asteroids in general is a particular element, but I've seen nothing that talks about what percent of each asteroid type is a particular ore, what the distribution of the ores is in an asteroid (whether you'd get all of one kind of element at once or if each asteroid is more homogeneous, where each element is distributed evenly through the 'roid, so if you mine one thing you mine them all), or how easy/difficult it would be to process an asteroid compared to normal mining and thus the dollar price of asteroid metals.

If I were to do this myself, I'd probably say 'asteroids are heterogeneous, so you need to roll to see what kind of ore you pull out', 'you need to roll to see how much stuff you mine is a high-enough quality of ore to be worth it', and 'use the table in Spaceships 2 for what each ore is worth'. I'd just need to come up with decent tables for determining what each asteroid type contains and how much you can get out of it.

Meteor composition gives us the particulars of what certain types of asteroids contain. You need to use the percent distribution of types of asteroids because some types are unlikely to survive atmospheric reentry, but otherwise meteors are just asteroids that made it through the atmosphere.

Still doesn't give you any figures for comet cores, and I think most organics get baked by reentry and impact.