Beltstrike/ Industrial Growth

[Horatius]

In the old GDW module Beltstrike, there was an operating platform (its name escapes me) whose mission was to serve as a base of operations for multiple Seeker-class mining ships. Does anyone have the specs on this vessel?

This leads to a second set of questions. How much would it cost to purchase such refining equipment and use it to develop an industrial base on a mineral rich, but industry poor world? If a group of belters wanted to refine their own ore, thereby increasing the value of the ore/ refined metals, what would be the results? What would be the value of the refine ore? How long would it take to refine a ton of raw ore? What about the varying quality levels of ore?

Its been a long time since I owned Beltstrike, and now I need a copy.

 

[Tanstaafl]

Type NS: 5000 tons unstreamlined, no jump, power W and maneuver W yield maneuver-1. 1700 tons fuel, model-5, 50 single pulse lasers, 175 staterooms, cargo 30.
25 ton mass driver (no specs) and a 400-ton ore processing bay. Can process 200 tons of ore per watch.
7 ship crew, 10 admin personnel, 132 technical crew. Up to 36 passengers may be carried.
Vehicles include: 1 shuttle, 1 launch, 2 pinnaces, 10 prospecting buggies (air rafts). Up to 10 seekers can be carried.
Cost: 1330.7MCr

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

I reverse-engineered the ore processing bay and came up with this. The Ore Processing Bay requires 5 displacement tons and costs MCr 1 per ton of ore it is able to process per day. I'm working under the assumption that it will process and refine the ore to make it more valuable, but will not spit out finished pure metal ingots.

Oh, look up information on asteroid and lunar mining (particularly an OOP book by T.A. Heppenheimer entitled Colonies In Space) for some added information.

Hope that helps.

 

[Tanstaafl]

This web page has some costs in US dollars you might be able to play around with as a starting point.

Jeff; did that reverse engineering include the mass driver or was it just the processor?

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Originally posted by Tanstaafl:


Jeff; did that reverse engineering include the mass driver or was it just the processor?

Just the ore processor. The mass driver came out to being 3 tons / MCr25 per ton of payload shot from it. Compared to the data on mass drivers as weapons, I don't find these numbers to make much sense. Judging by weapon mass driver info, a unit should be about 400 tons / +1EP / MCr25 per ton of payload shot from it. This conforms more to the results of studies I've seen on lunar mass drivers for space colony construction.

I've got to say, after thinking about the possible traffic control problems, I came to the conclusion that a mass driver flinging payloads of a ton or more is one of the last things you want in a populated system where ships can appear out of jump. The chances of a payload hitting a manned vessel or a habitat just seem too great to be a feasable interplanetary transportation method. YMMV.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

One good reason for always jumping to a point out of the local eliptic. YOU may think it's a bad idea to do this, but the locals might not!

I would think the ore mass driver could be smaller than a weapon (though maybe not 15x smaller). You don't have to make it invulnerable to incoming fire, build a magazine for it, hit a moving object with it (relatively speaking), or sling stuff nearly as fast as a weapon (I don't think a weapon is going to sling nearly as large a load, but it needs a LOT of kinetic energy when it hits an enemy ship).

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

An ore mass driver may be smaller for all the reasons you have given, but a counter arguement could be given for it needing to be larger than the size I came up with. A weapon mass driver does not have to accelerate the payload up to either orbital velocities (for surface to space launchers) or up to that needed for transfer orbits (for interplanetary launchers), both of which are an order of magnitude higher than the weapon mass driver muzzle velocities that I have seen printed. As usual, YMMV, but it does make some interesting speculation.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

But, isn't the ship above going to be hanging out somewhere like a belt? Does it need to have the ore break orbit? What kind of Gs are we talking about?

(I haven't seen any particular numbers for mass driver weapons. Have you got some numbers?)

And, yes, I agree that this is fun - I would much rather exercise my brain than my body....

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Well, based on the design listed in TA Heppenheimer's book Colonies in Space, the payload would experience 170 Gs of acceleration and would leave the mass driver at 2.4 km/sec just so it could reach lunar orbit and get to the ore catcher.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

One question that I didn't notice till now:
Didn't the listing say the mass driver was 25 tons? I am confused a bit by your numbers, because of that. I am obviously missing something.

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

I was working under the assumption that the 25 tons was the payload capacity for the mass driver.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Aaahhh. So, did you make the same assumption on the "400-ton ore processing bay"? I was initially assuming (and I didn't really look at the numbers before) the 400 tons was the size of the bay, but that wouldn't take a lot of room in a 5kT ship would it?

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Originally posted by Fritz88:
Aaahhh. So, did you make the same assumption on the "400-ton ore processing bay"? I was initially assuming (and I didn't really look at the numbers before) the 400 tons was the size of the bay, but that wouldn't take a lot of room in a 5kT ship would it?

Yes. The tonnage listed is the output of the processing bay. I think. It made sense to me, YMMV.