[Space] What’s the minimum resources required for Asteroid or Comet habitats?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Trachmyr

BTW, as to why I need a shopping list... my PC's are considering going into the surveying/mining trade, and I need to know what's valuable and what's garbage in this kind of environment.

Ah!

I figure that chalcophile elements are going to be scarce in space. Siderophiles ought to be found in the nickel-iron material, lithophiles in the stony asteroids, and atmophiles in the ices. But I don't know of any material in space that is enriched with chalcophiles to anything like the richness of a commercial ore. The material simply isn't differentiated enough.

Sulphur itself probably isn't terribly scarce, but silver, arsenic, bismuth, cadmium, copper, gallium, germanium, mercury, indium, lead, polonium, antimony, selenium, tin, tellurium, tantalum, and zinc probably only exist in ores about as rich as concrete.

Also, don't be too blasé about, for instance, the platinums. Iron-type asteroids are platinum-rich compared with the Earth's crust average, but not as rich as a good commercial ore.