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Belting 101

G

Golan2072

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I'd like to recommend (again) a site to all of us Belters and interplanetary spacefarers. Its choke full of information useful to anyone running (or participating in!) a Belter campaign or trying to describe in details a TL7+ (or even TL6+ in some extreme cases) system with extensive local interplanetary industry. Most tech detailed in that site is approximately TL7-8.

The site is (drumroll!) PERMANENT.

Note that some of the links to oither sites don't work; PERMANENT (unfortunately) wasn't updated much in the recent years.

The most useful (IMHO) parts are:
- A speculation on astroid composition.
- Belting!
- What could be easily mined from Luna's crust and Lunar Crust: Volatiles.
- Mining Luna.
- TL7-T8 Propultion Techniques.
- TL7-TL8 Spaceside Industries.
- Solar PowerSats (SPS).
- TL7-TL8 Interplanetary and Orbital Habitats.
 
I'm trying to build my own Belting system for CT (useful for those who don't have JTAS #3 or BeltStrike); my basic idea is that just finding an astroid of each of the four types (Carbonaceous, Chrondrite, Iron-Nickel and Ice) in a star system is very easy; the trick is finding one with profitable materials (just Iron-Nickel isn't THAT profitable for a freelance belter). So if you want for some reason (for example, refueling) to find an Ice Chunk, it'll be very easy unless yyou're very close to the star, maybe rolling 3+ on 2D. But finding an Ice Chunk with complex organic compounds (Petrochemical-equivalent), which is profitable, is a far more difficult task (10+ on 2D, with a DM of +Prospecting Skill).

Different minerals are found with different chances on different astroid types.

I'm also trying to merge the system with the LBB2 Trade System, so that you sell a claim or mined minerals just as you sell any other cargo.
 
I'd be interested in this...post it when you got a working model for feedback
 
E2-4601,
Nice links, you might find this article interesting:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/401227.stm

I found it looking for an old Journal of Planetary and Space Sciences article from circa 1994-1996 on the economics of mining an asteroid. The BBC article is right in line with my recollection of the scientific artilce; that some typical stony asteroids could contain more gold and platimun than has been mined in the entire history of the earth.

I have an image of belters drapped in gold chains which they value less than a fresh juicy steak or water that doesn't taste like a tin can.


Of course, after the first generation a lot of the good rocks may be gone? Don't know.
 
Gents,

I'm going to seemingly rain on the parade here and discuss why 'mining' planetoids isn't as sure a bet as we've all assumed over the years. But don't worry, at the end I've got a rabbit to pull from my hat! Okay? Good, then away we go...

Veins of gold? Rich uranium deposits? Platinum to blow your nose with? All that in a planetoid and more? Well sure. All those elements and more are present in planetoids but they're present in planetoids the same way they're present in seawater.

You'll have to process megatons of planetoid to (maybe) get tons of what you're after. All the elements are jumbled together in an undifferentiated olio.

You see, planetoids were undifferentiated rubble piles that experienced none of the aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism required to separate metals into veins and ore bodies. What's more, planetoids were far too small to even retain the heat from their formation long enough to develop into a differentiated body; that being a body which stayed hot enough long enough for its component materials to separate according to density.

Remember, except in extremely rare cases (i.e. the Ancients), planetoids are not pieces of a shattered moon or planet. Instead, they're simply clumps of accreted materials that never formed into a planet or moon because of interference from a large gravity source (i.e. Jupiter).

When we got a good look at Mathilde a few years ago, scientists were shocked to learn the planetoid had an unexpectedly low mass. So low in fact that Mathilde's overall density was more akin to balsa wood or styrofoam than rock. It seems that Mathilde, like many other planetoids, was a highly porous pile of rubble with substantial gaps and voids in its structure.

Planetoids are undifferentiated rubble piles that experienced none of the aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism required to separate metals into veins and ore bodies. What's more, planetoids are far too small to even retain the heat from their formation long enough to develop into a differentiated body; that being a body which stayed hot enough long enough for its component materials to separate according to density.

No veins and ore bodies, no mining as we know it. You can process megatons of this undifferentiated mess for the substances you want. You can also 'mine' gold from seawater. Whether the cost in time and energy for each of those 'mining' operations is worth the end result is another question.

Not all is lost however! (I promised!) Observations by probes and ground based sensors clearly indicate the presence of volcanic basalts and other hallmarks of past geological activity on the surfaces of some planetoids. Many meteorite samples pointed to an origin within a differentiated body too. It was evidently clear that many planetoids had once been quite hot, some meteorites exhibited features whose formation required temperature as high as 950 degrees Celsius. Where did this extra heat come from? How was it created and maintained long enough to create the features observed in and on bodies so small as to quickly radiate it away?

The decay of various radioisotopes has been suggested. However, the relative abundance the other suspected isotopes proved to be too low to produce the kinds of melting observed. Some other mechanism had to be at work.

The answer is collisional heating and it puts planetoid mining back on the agenda.

Here, the highly poruous nature of most planetoids comes into play. Scientists were amazed to discover that Mathilde's density; close to 1.2 grams per cubic centimeter, meant that the planetoid had a porosity of nearly 50 percent! Such porosity means that collisions and the craters they produce are very different from those involving more dense and compact bodies. When an object collides with a cohesive body such as Earth, it creates a bowl-shaped crater and ejects large amounts of debris. When an object hits a low-density planteoid however, it drill into the porous material like a bullet into styrofoam. The impact causes a deep, nearly cylindrical crater.

The shock energy in such a collision; which will also attenuate rapidly in the porous materials, goes more into heating and compressing the rocks bordering the crater and less into ejecting debris. With less debris ejected, more debris falls back into the deep and relatively more narrow crater, plugging it, and helping to further retard heat loss.

The differences between the apparent crater and true crater on a porous planetoid are far great than those on a terrestrial body. While fallback debris and slump deposits still fill the true crater's void to create the apparent crater's surface, the planetoid's true crater is far deeper for its size. More importantly, the region around the bottom of the true crater is region of compressed, heated, and melted rock. That compression, heating, and melting are exactly what is needed for differentiation to occur, the very differentiation that allows veins and ore bodies to form.

This then is the bread and butter work of most belters. They crawl around planetoid impact craters taking deep drill samples from the shocked and melted area of the true craters' bottoms. Sometimes these ore bearing regions are shallow enough for small crew to work and sometimes they've been uncovered by later impacts. Most times however, the belter is happy enough use his drill samples to sell the location of a prospective ore body to an outfit with enough muscle and equipment to exploit it.

Megatons of gold or anything else may be present in a given planetoid, but most of the stuff we want is simply mixed all together with stuff we don't want. Separating all of this wouold usually be more effort than the resulting materials are worth. Instead of that, we mine the ore bodies and veins the ancient impacts have thoughtfully have created for us.

So, that's it. The bad old gray-headed fat man first takes away and then giveths. ;)


Have fun,
Bill

P.S. Some of this material is from an unfinished Amber Zone I've been puttering around with for the last couple of months.
 
Bill,
I want to believe but where are you getting your data besides Mathilde?

I very much like the idea of a belter having to land and search asteroids instead of setting ones scanners to "dense body."

The data I'm familiar with, suggests that "dense" asteroids (densities greater than 2) exist. That is they are not all rubble piles...and in the internet spirit some links avoiding popular news reports/fan sites and trying to focus on .edu and .gov stuff.

For chondrites, (Mathilde is a C type I believe) what you say is true from what I know, but for other types does it still apply?

For the S-tpye Eros the density is much higher and data indicates it is not a rubble pile, e.g.,

http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/June02/PSRD-ErosPorosity.pdf

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/metsoc2000/pdf/5157.pdf

http://www.csulb.edu/~gordon/LectureNotes/Asteroids%20Close%20Up.html

WARNING: This one takes a while to load but it has a cool map of Eros
http://web.mit.edu/thb/www/56


Since I think we've only investigted half a dozen asteroids up close enough I'm not willing to wait for the data to come in. (pun intended.) Is the Itokawa mission still on track, we should get some more data in 2007.

From a game perspective, I like the "cylinders of ore" idea that comes from our current knowledge of C-types. There may be a few asteroids out there that got heated more (weathered as they say) and would be more the fabled gold-mine for belters. This is assuming of course that the planetoid belt was from material that never consolidated enough to heat up.

In other systems there may be a situation where heat and gravity separated things out, a body started to form but then was shattered/ripped apart by other forces, impact, tidal maybe, c-velocity rocks ;) . These belts would be highly valuable I would think.

Edit: I don't wan't to think about it but I did, what of aliens (since humans would never do such), that stick some big HePLARs on some rocks (these drives seem to give plenty of delta v) then aims them at a planet to break it up into nice pieces to get at that dense core. Something like DarkStar
 
Originally posted by Ptah:
I want to believe but where are you getting your data besides Mathilde?
Click to expand...
Ptah,

There are a relative few planetoids that are large enough to retain enpough heat from formation long enough for differentiation to occur. Eros isn't one, but Ceres, Vesta, and the like may be. Their numbers in Sol's Belt are tiny however, maybe dozens.

I first read the information on collisional heating at the Scientific American site. The May 2005 issue had an article entitled 'What heated the Asteroids' by Alan E. Rubin. I read the article and followed up with the bibliography SciAm always provides. (Having UNH library privileges is nice!) Try this link too:

www.psrd.hawaii.edu/April04/asteroidHeating.html

Remember, its not just density at work here. The vast majority of planetoids are simply too small to retain the proper levels of heat long enough for differentiation to occur no matter what their density. Without that differentiation, there will be no ore bodies and no veins of metal. You'll be 'mining gold from seawater'.

Because they can't retain the heat from their accretion long enough and because the heat from isotope decay isn't enough, another source of heating had to be at work to create both the surface features seen on some larger planetoids and the attributes seen in certain chrondites.

The chrondites I wrote about are those bits that have fallen to Earth. Those bits are obviously from collision impact zones, that's how they came to Earth in the first place! Rubin's article deals with the many types of chrondites as part of the research that proved that isotopic heating wasn't long/hot enough to produce the observed data. The chrondites Rubin discusses show veins of metal, veins that had to be created in some manner.


Have fun,
Bill
 
Originally posted by Ptah:
In other systems there may be a situation where heat and gravity separated things out, a body started to form but then was shattered/ripped apart by other forces, impact, tidal maybe, c-velocity rocks ;) . These belts would be highly valuable I would think.
Click to expand...
Ptah,

Missed this bit!

Yes, that's why I mentioned the Ancients in my first post. Belts made up of shattered planets/moons - however they were shattered - should be made up of differentiated bodies because the planet/moon they came from was large enough to retain enough heat to differentiate.

The Marches supposedly has more belts than average because of Yaskodray's war with his children.


Have fun,
Bill
 
What about the Iron/Nickel astroids, parts of which were found on Earth as meteorites? These are (IIRC) mostly a natural "alloy" on Iron and Nickel, and quite pure at that.

Besides, most of what we know about planetoids is from meteorites anyway; we had flybys on only a very few of them and landing (IIRC) on one.
 
Originally posted by Employee 2-4601:
What about the Iron/Nickel astroids, parts of which were found on Earth as meteorites? These are (IIRC) mostly a natural "alloy" on Iron and Nickel, and quite pure at that.
Click to expand...
2-4601,

Planetoids are mostly made up of silicates. When the popular press talks about Iron-Nickel planetoids, ice-teroids, carboneceous planetoids and all the rest they aren't exactly right and they aren't exactly wrong. They're talking about relative concentrations.

An 'iron-nickel' planetoid simply has more iron and nickel in it than ice and carboneceous materials.

The problem is the lack of aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism in the vast majority of planetoids. For ore veins and ore bodies to exist, a mechanism is required to separate them from their surrounding materials. Even then, vien and bodies are merely higher concetrations of the materials we're after.

Because of their small sizes and high surface areas, planetoids could not retain enough heat for enough time for aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism to occur. That means everything in a planetoid is still 'mixed' together. There's no differentiation, no crust, mantle, and core as it were.

Iron. nickel, gold, or whatever are present but they're present in the same way gold or magnesium are present in seawater; equally spread throughout the entire volume is miniscule concentrations. You can 'mine' gold from seawater. The cost of doing so is far more than the amount of gold you'll retrieve. Undifferentiated planetoids are much the same. The materials you want are present but they're spread throughout the entire body in a miniscule concentration per any given volume.

The chrondites found on Earth; the 'meteorites you mention, sometimes exhibit higher concentrations of materials because they were formed the impact zones I wrote about and thus were effected by collisional heating. That's the same mechanism that WILL create the ore veins and ore bodies our belters exploit.

Besides, most of what we know about planetoids is from meteorites anyway; we had flybys on only a very few of them and landing (IIRC) on one.
Click to expand...
Google 'spectroscopes'. We know a great deal about planetoid composition. How else do you think we could have classified them as S, P, D, O, and so forth? The planetoid mining site you linked to use planetoid composition classifications which were determined by spectography but now you want to say that we don't know enough about planetoid composition to discuss how mining may really occur?

Talk about eating your cake and having it too! ;)


Have fun,
Bill
 
Originally posted by Bill Cameron:
The answer is collisional heating and it puts planetoid mining back on the agenda.
Click to expand...
Bill, since you've done the research, what about the effect of heating during the intial star formation? (Or does the increased solar wind just blow dust grains away?)

And what about close-approaching asteroids like Icarus, does the conductive elements in those bodies interact with the solar magnetic field (like a motor) to generate enough heat for deposits to form?

Also how does this effect asteroid hulls for starships? Do they have to be melted and then used now to give them less porosity (porousness?) and enough structural strength for use?
 
Jeff,

There are parts of Rubin's article that can answer your questions in a round about way. Because he talks about examining undifferentiated, partially differentiated chrondites, and fully differentiated chrondite in meteorites it stands to reason that any heating from early star formation wasn't enough. Otherwise all chrondites would be differentiated.

Let me quote this bit to get the idea of differentiation across:

If a chrondritic asteroid melts completely, the metals and silicates will form immisicble liquids: they separate according to density, just like oil and water.

You need that melting to occur for separation to happen. You need that separation for veins and ore bodies to exist. The problem then becomes one of heat. Planetoids are just too small to retain the heat required long enough.

It had been suggested that the decay of several isotopes; Al-26 and Fe-60, could account for the trick. Calculations showed that, while heating did occur, the isotopes would only allow a 80km planetoid to reach about 670 degC which was too low to cause any melting at all. The chrondites Rubin and others had been examining showed indications of reaching 1100 degC so another mechanism had to be at work.

Rubin's article doesn't touch upon the subject of asteroid mining. He's presenting an explanation for the differentiated and partially differentiated chrondites found in meteorites. Planetary scientists know the planetoids are old and grew cold very early, yet some show signs of aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism that couldn't be explained. (Spectral and radar analysis of Vesta reveals basalt on its surface.)

Because aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism couldn't occur in planetoids; they're too small to retain enough heat for enough time, mining in the usual sense was right out. Paul Drye published this bad news in JTAS a couple of years back. (His 'solution' for OTU belting had belters chasing after odd deposits 'plated' on the planetoids by the solar wind from 'odd' stars.)

IMEHO, Rubin's solution to the problem of differentiated and partially differentiated chrondites coming from bodies that shouldn't have been hot enough to create them meant belt mining was back. The large, cylinderical impact craters have shocked and heated zones towards their bottoms. Zones in which enough heat was created and trapped long enough for aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism to take place. That's where the differentiated and partially differentiated chrondites come from and, because they show signs of metal veins, veins and ore bodies should also be present.

My suggestion could be completely wrong, but its been long known in the Hobby that, unless we somehow handwave in a mechanism for aqueous alterations and thermal metamorphism to occur, 'belt mining' was just another item of faith in Traveller like gravitics and jump drive. I'd like to think Rubin's paper on solving the problem of differentiated and partially differentiated chrondites through collisional heating makes 'belt mining' much more plausible.


Have fun,
Bill
 
Originally posted by Bill Cameron:
Google 'spectroscopes'. We know a great deal about planetoid composition. How else do you think we could have classified them as S, P, D, O, and so forth? The planetoid mining site you linked to use planetoid composition classifications which were determined by spectography but now you want to say that we don't know enough about planetoid composition to discuss how mining may really occur?

Talk about eating your cake and having it too! ;)
Click to expand...
Sorry for that response - that's what sleep deprevation does to me; I know about spectography; hell, I even used similar (in concept) methods in Chemistry in college.

Sorry again,
Omer Golan AKA Employee #2-4601
 
2-4601/Omer,

Please rest assured, my dear friend, absolutely no apologies were necessary or are necessary.

The trouble with these posts and all internet messages is that body language, tone, facial features, all those things that make talking face to face such so rich and fufilling are mising. If I had read or spoke that explanation to you, you would have chuckled good naturedly just as I chuckled good naturedly while writing it!

Years after 'demoting' belters and planetoid mining to 'handwave' status alongside jump drive and gravitics, I was very happy to read about collisional heating, shock zones, and the potential veins and ore bodies they could create.


Have fun,
Bill
 
My CT Belting System

The Referee decides whether or not the star system requires a license to mine its astroid belt; if random determination is required, throw Law Level or more on 2D to require a license. Obtaining a license is a Standard (Admin/SOC) task, DM -4 if the mainworld's Law Level is 8+; DM +4 if the mainworld's Law Level is 2-. Alternatively, bribing an official to get such a license is a Difficult (Bribery/SOC) task; obtaining it through underworld channels is a Standard (Streetwise/INT) task. A license costs 100x3d6 xL Credits(where L is the main world's law level) in fees and taxes and is valid for a year; underworld costs are 100x5d6xL Credits, and bribery should be done by offering Cr500 per Law Level to the official.

Just finding a "normal" rock (mostly made of silicates) or an ice chunk (frozen water and other volatiles) is easy (Routine (Prospecting/EDU or Survey/EDU)) - there are literally billions of these rocks in any belt; the problem is finding one which is profitable enough for a freelancer to claim and/or mine. Keep in mind that the corporations don't have any problem finding a silicate-heavy rock, for example, for their spaceside industry and won't usually pay for such a claim; they will, however, pay well for the location of an astroid containing rare elements, such as radioactives, gold, diamonds or complex organics.

Finding a possibly profitable astroid is a Challenging (Prospecting/EDU) task (Survey minus one level could be used instead of Prospecting); DM +half the ship's Computer rating, rounded up (i.e. Model/1, Model/1bis, Model/2 and Model/2bis give +1 DM; Model/3 and Model/4 give a +2 DM and so on, treat "fib" or "bis" as their base model). One roll is allowed per day. If a Spectacular Failure has occured, a minor collision (with a very small meteorite) has occured due to a sensor error - roll once on the LBB2 normal hit location table (or the HG Surface Explosion table with a DM of +6); a Spectacular Success leads to a chance for a special find, see below.

To determine the find, throw 1d6+Prospecting (max Prospecting DM +4) on the following tables.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Throw Find dtons Value Sell DMs
1 Organics* 1D6x10 10,000 NA-4, I+3, NI-5
2 Iron 6D6x100 500 I-2 R-1
3 Crystals 1D6x10 20,000 NA-3, I+3, R+3
4 Crystals 2D6x10 20,000 NA-3, I+3, R+3
5 Polymers 3D6X100 7,000 I-2, R+3
6 Copper 4D6x100 2,000 I-3, R-1
7 Tin 3D6x500 9,000 I-3, R-1
8 Silver 1D6x50 70,000 I+5, R-1
9 Rare Erths** 1D6x10 200,000 I-3, NI+4, R-1
10 Rare Erths** 3D6x10 200,000 I-3, NI+4, R-1</pre>[/QUOTE]* Treat Organics as "Petrochemicals".
** Treat Rare Earth Elements as "Special Alloys".

On a Spectacular Success, roll 1D6 on the following table instead, no DMs:

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Throw Find dtons Value Sell DMs
1 Rare Erths* 1D6x100 200,000 I-3, NI+4, R-1
2 Gems 1D6x10 1,000,000 I+4, NI-2, R+8
3 Radioactives 1D6x10 1,000,000 I+6, Ni-3, R-4
4 Silver 6D6x100 70,000 I+5, R-1
5 Salvage Varies Varies Varies
6 Artifacts Varies Varies Varies</pre>[/QUOTE]* Treat Rare Earth Elements as "Special Alloys".

Selling the claim to a corporation is handeled according to LBB2's trade system, using the mainworld's Resale DM's; however, the belter receives only 5% of the full price for the claim. Selling mined raw ore (see below) gives 25% of the full price; refined materials are sold at the full price.


Mining requires a ship or small craft with a pulse laser and several miners (humans or robots). The limiting factor is the miners, not the ship's lasers. Each miner much have a Portable Mining Laser and a Vacc Suit (robots don't need the vacc suit, ofcourse). After the ship's Pulse Laser cuts the rock into large chunks, the miners cut it into smaller chunks and load it unto the ship. A miner (human or human-equivalent robot) can mine and load 1 dton (14 m^3) of material in 4 hours; a miner could work up to 8 hours a day at full capacity; he could work 8 more hours, but will only extract half a dton per 4-hour period (i.e. an exsausting 16-hour workday could produce 3 dtons). A robot never gets tired (and refueling takes only a few minutes per day) and thus produces (in the case of a small robot) 6 dtons in 24 hours. Ship crews put to use as miners recieve their typical salaries (as in LBB2, p.11); hired miners are paid according to the local minimum wage laws, which (IMTU) ranges from Cr2 per hour (in the Lydia Consortium) through Cr3 per hour (in the Solar Triumvirate) to Cr5 per hour (for unskilled labor in the Alliance) - the OTU's Imperium will probably use Cr3 per hour. Overseeing one day of human work (done by a skilled miner/supervisor) is a Routine (Prospecting/INT) task; supervising a day of robot work requires an additional a Routine (Robot Ops/INT) task.

For every 10 points of Apparent (sp?) Strength a robot has, rounded down, (see LBB8 pp.38-39), it can perform the work of one Human worker. That is, a robot with an Apparent Strength of 50 can mine 30 dtons in 24 hours! A single K'Kree could mine twice the amount of ore a Human could.

Refining the ore requires, for the very least, one Ore Processing Bay. Such a Bay requires 39 unskilled workers (or robots) and one supervisor with atleast Mechanical-1 (as well as Robot Ops if the workers are robots); it is a Routine (Mechanical/INT) task for the supervisor to operate the Bay (roll once per day). A single Bay could proccess up to 200 dtons of ore per day.

Successfully launching a package of ore with a Mass Driver requires a Routine (Navigation/INT) task.
 
It's interesting you brought that up, Bill.

I've considered the implications on belt mining for a while and found the idea of such low mass asteroids to actually help my concept of belt mining as opposed to harming it.

I've always had this image that belting is similar to gold mining in California during the Gold Rush - there's money to be made, but mostly by those exploiting the miners as opposed to by the miners themselves.

For the moment, I assume that asteroid belts in Traveller are the unrealistic (but cool) versions of ultra-dense rock fields so beloved by sci-fi movies and artists, though it works plenty well even in more realistic diffuse belts. Belters probably use desiometers and spectrographs to find the richest concentrations of such diffuse ores. Then they blow a huge chunk off of the asteroid and stick the rubble in the cargo hold or tow the big pieces behind them to the inner system as this kind of rock is bulky but not particularly 'heavy', it's probably not uncommon to see a Seeker towing a rock ten or twenty times its size at like 0.3 G, taking weeks to get in system.

Why go in-system?

In the inner system awaits "processors" - essentially guys who own huge arrays of mirrors usually in the Life Zone of a system (where solar energy can be usefully concentrated). There, for a significant fee, they'll take your rubble or your rock, and heat it until it's in a molten state long enough for diffrentiation/sedimentation to occur with some judicious application of induced gravity (either from centrifigal force from spin or grav plates).

Afterwords, you mine the rock yourself, hire subcontrators, or sell the rock to someone else to mine it. Obviously, the latter two are common for very rich rocks (very rare), but most Belters want to keep their costs to a minimum to maixmize their profits so do it themselves.

Obviously, in the more resource-rich belts, large companies dominate the mining, probably putting massdrivers in the belt to throw rocks to the inner system. In belts that are "mined out", wildcatters (ie; player-character belters) probably still lurk around the belts looking for that one missed asteroid to strike it rich. The mining company mass drivers are probably still in the belt (left there since it's probably cheaper to assemble a new one than disassemble and move one already in place).

This presents all sorts of oppurtunity for claim-jumping / piracy and getting ripped off by processor operators. Belters have to weigh the relative density of resources in the rock to see if the bulky (but low mass) rock is worth the time to tow to the inner system for processing. Mind you, while you're waiting for the processor to heat your rock up, you can visit the space station where there's your typical casinos, pawnshops, prostitutes, and so on, which is an adventure unto itself...
 
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