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

[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.