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

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by downer

[ . . . ]

Coming up with tables and rules seems somewhat unnecessary, unless you want to make the process itself, rather than the characters' hopes and fortunes the focus of your campaign.

And that's my pet peeve with the way asteroid mining is presented in most listed books.

It feels as if the results of prospecting in such campaigns depend on the whim of the GM, as opposed to the planning/skill of the players/characters.

[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.

[Celjabba]

If you really want numbers, you may possibly check an Eve Online (a space mmorpg) mining guide.
(for example, http://www.lsjv-eve.com/guide/ , specifically the tables
p 4,5,13,15,16,19,26,32,36,43,44 )
Of course, those datas are totally fictional and unrelated to realistic asteroid facts. If you want realistic geological information, it will not help you.

You have asteroid and ice mining,
various kind of asteroids, minerals, yields, volumes, refining ratio,market values, ....

Just rename the fictional eve asteroid and minerals to something that fit your universe, and replace the fictional mining lasers by appropriate drilling setups.
Use the game above yield in m3/h; modified by skill margin of success, quality of equipment and foreman skills (gurps low-tech would certainly help).

You will probably want to replace seconds and minutes by week/days/hours, if you want the players to spent a lot of time on the same roid, wich seem more logical in a realistic game.

The big work will be, for any location your players prospect, you will have to decide what kind of asteroids (and therefore minerals) are present, and their size/yield.

Hope this help

celjabba

[downer]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

And that's my pet peeve with the way asteroid mining is presented in most listed books.

It feels as if the results of prospecting in such campaigns depend on the whim of the GM, as opposed to the planning/skill of the players/characters.

Agreed, that's something of an issue. I'm used to seeing such things come up only as background, not really as part of the story. The asteroid and what it contains are treated as a McGuffin. If you want to center your play on the lives and doings of the miners, that won't do, I understand.

If you come from a simulationist angle, then why not do it this way:
Take a look at the actual distribution and composition of asteroids (I'd start out at Wikipedia, but I guess a good astronomy textbook might be even more helpful). Then express this as a table and draw up a chart of the asteroids in the region the characters are mining by rolling for asteroid density and content on your table. This way you would have set up the environment with a realistic set of rocks. Then let the characters use appropriate skills (Electronics Operation (Sensors) for locating an asteroid, Geology for analyzing its content, Crewman and/or Pilot to dock with the rock, Mechanic (Mining) to set up and operate the drill and Freight Handling to stow the ore in the hold) for the operation itself. Skills such as Area Knowledge (for knowing good hunting grounds) and Metallurgy (to check the quality of the ore) might also help. To spice things up you could have a random complications table that includes such things as pockets of unstable gas in the asteroid, claim jumpers showing up, and such. Once the ship is loaded, Current Events (Business) might reveal a good market, Merchant gets a useful price. Actual prices should probably be derived from the rarity of the material and the expected standard of living of a miner and the ships operating cost. You might have to play with the numbers a little.

[Langy]

Originally Posted by downer

Agreed, that's something of an issue. I'm used to seeing such things come up only as background, not really as part of the story. The asteroid and what it contains are treated as a McGuffin. If you want to center your play on the lives and doings of the miners, that won't do, I understand.

If you come from a simulationist angle, then why not do it this way:
Take a look at the actual distribution and composition of asteroids (I'd start out at Wikipedia, but I guess a good astronomy textbook might be even more helpful). Then express this as a table and draw up a chart of the asteroids in the region the characters are mining by rolling for asteroid density and content on your table. This way you would have set up the environment with a realistic set of rocks. Then let the characters use appropriate skills (Electronics Operation (Sensors) for locating an asteroid, Geology for analyzing its content, Crewman and/or Pilot to dock with the rock, Mechanic (Mining) to set up and operate the drill and Freight Handling to stow the ore in the hold) for the operation itself. Skills such as Area Knowledge (for knowing good hunting grounds) and Metallurgy (to check the quality of the ore) might also help. To spice things up you could have a random complications table that includes such things as pockets of unstable gas in the asteroid, claim jumpers showing up, and such. Once the ship is loaded, Current Events (Business) might reveal a good market, Merchant gets a useful price. Actual prices should probably be derived from the rarity of the material and the expected standard of living of a miner and the ships operating cost. You might have to play with the numbers a little.

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.

[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.

[KjetilKverndokken]

I looked through my M-Traveller pdf's and found that i have beltstrike, and it seems to give a very good job of describing what is needed in this thread. the only thing is to find out how to convert the M-Traveller credits to gurps Dollar, is it one for one or what?

Example was

1 tonne of radioactive materials was worth 1.000.000 creds
1 tonne ice was worth 75 creds
1 tonne Crystals 20,000 creds
1 tonne Dense metals 50,000 creds
1 tonne Carbonaceous material 75 creds
1 tonne Nickel Iron ore 1,000 creds
1 tonne Nickel Iron planetoids 400 creds
1 tonne Uncommon Ore 5,000 creds

The book also had a table for how many % of the total weight of the asteroid was valuable to be mined. Hard and fast descriptions of type of minerals, prospecting tables and the lot, everything could be converted to be used in Gurps, but the only thing is calculating Traveller creds to gurps dollar.

[KjetilKverndokken]

Any thoughts on the conversion ratio on the creds?

[giant.robot]

Some things to consider when speccing out asteroid mining for your game. The first is in space (unless you're in a post-scarcity TL) everything is valuable for something. While a miner would probably make their nut from ores they could also sell the carbonaceous or silicaceous leftover material to be cracked to their constituent elements. The second is that most mining will be functionally similar to strip mining. Few asteroids are large enough or cohesive enough for shaft mining and are often not differentiated so minerals you want to mine are evenly distributed through the entire mass of the asteroid.

Most asteroids are known as "rubble piles" and are just as the name describes. They have the consistency and cohesiveness of a pile of rubble. Only much more massive bodies will end up differentiated with denser materials sinking to a core and less dense material on the surface. To mine most asteroids you could mechanically reduce them to rubble and then sort the material in a centrifuge or magnetically in the case of sufficiently metallic minerals.

I think downer's skill suggestions are the most logical for actual mining operations. I see a mining operation as a single large capture/smelter ships with a small fleet of robotic tugs that latch onto asteroids and guide them into a bay where they can be broken down. Material from the asteroid in then processed on-site so the mining group can deliver somewhat refined material to wherever they're going to sell it. The day to day work would likely be boring but it's the sort of thing that any owners space habitat would see as an imperative. Asteroids would be the most accessible source of raw materials including basics like oxygen and hydrogen. While the materials would be commodities (one miner's ore is the same as another miner's ore) they would be necessary for people living in space to survive.