Obviously you'd just remove it from the market or drop the price to nearly nothing.
But I'm down with the mechanics too.
Tritium Should Be Mined From Asteroid Belts
- Thread starter sidereal6
- Start date
But I'm down with the mechanics too.
True, however FDEV are entirely responsible for setting prices in game.
Yes - but dropping the in-system prices to a level where fast fuel scooping wasn't financially silly would mean that you could buy it on the markets for barely more than H-Fuel is now, and then it's getting to the point where you might as well say "carriers don't need fuel" if the refuelling mechanism is "park a T-9 by the star for 5 minutes while you charge the next jump".
Which I'm sure is a simplification some people would like.
Even if you need to afk for 5 minutes there is still the effort of bringing and utilizing another ship to do so. Its not engaging but at least it's not yet another forced mining experience which pretty much every carrier owner is all sorts of tired of.
Afk for 5 minutes would be a welcome relief from Elite Mining.
I happned to notice there was some at Balandin Port, Beten.
![[VR] Dr Gentech](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/175/175740.jpg?1623198898){kind=avatar}
I think the "asteroid belts" (sic) are being deprecated, or at least it seems that way to me. Are there any other stellar bodies in game which just don't exist in the real universe? Rings exist, various planets exist, there are reasonable theories on the existence of lifebearing planets beyond Earth, many different types of star exist, black holes exist, moons exist, there are reasonable theories on the existence of double planets, it's a game so aliens are fine, etc... I can't think of any other stellar phenomenona off the top of my head which, like the "asteroid belts" in game, does not exist.
I just noticed the moon part.
Tritium cannot be mined from the moon. The discussion is to mine helium 3 then convert it to tritium through (incredibly slow) nuclear reaction.
Tritium cannot be mined from the moon. The discussion is to mine helium 3 then convert it to tritium through (incredibly slow) nuclear reaction.
If we're going to be "realistic" about it, you're still going to be heading for ice rings, for the lithium hydroxide. The most effective way of producing tritium at scale is neutron capture by a lithium target. Our power plants can supply all the neutrons we need, but AFAIK the hydroxides in ice rings are the only way in-game to get our hands on tonnages of lithium. This is significantly more efficient than the conversion of 3He to tritium because the lithium nucleus has an unusually weak binding energy and is a much "fatter target" for a neutron than the 3He nucleus. Both 7Li and the much rarer 6Li can produce tritium from neutron capture, with the reaction involving 6Li actually being a net energy producer...
I mean. That's how we currently produce it.
If you have some kind of future
Neutron generators of today's age do so by slamming together a couple isotopes of hydrogen to produce neutrons a well as, wait for it - tritium. If you just hand-wave the technology away one could conceivably have a miniature scale high throughput particle accelerator interfaced with the ship's systems to collect excess neutrons generated by the ship's existing fusion reactor. If you mix lithium into the equation then you get two sources of tritium in the process from the "extra" neutrons produced.
Then just mumble something about advanced in particle acceleration and fusion research and output a 1 ton canister of tritium the same way we seem to have unlimited cargo canisters coming out of our ore refinery.
There are locations where asteroids may be found in groups: Source: https://imgur.com/KxnvSBh
I just think, if we're going to have this depicted in the game, we ought to have a use for it. I think that tritium will accumulate on asteroids in greater quantities than it would in rings.
That's why I put "asteroid belts" in quotes, because real asteroid belts do actually exist, like the one in our solar system; they just aren't anything like the "asteroid belts" in the game. In the asteroid belt the average distance between asteroids is ~960,000km, or about two and a half times the distance between the Earth and the moon. They're spread over a huge area and do not contain much mass compared to the planets. You would need to enter supercruise between every asteroid. In-game "asteroid belts" are from the 1979 video game "Asteroids", not an actual stellar phenomenona. Hence my curiosity about whether there were any other in-game stellar bodies that just didn't exist in the real world.
There's kind of the same issue with rings. There are way too many large asteroids. They're also missing the occasional (as in less than a dozen per ring) comparatively large bodies called shepard moons. They'd be about the size of the asteroid bases that a few planets have.
Also, the rings rotate as one piece, like a record on a record player. In real life, there'd be considerable variation in orbital speed. One consequence of this is, there couldn't be any such thing as a "hot spot" - at least, not one that persists.
So, a lot of concessions are made for the purposes of enhancing gameplay. I don't see it as a huge issue that we have clusters of asteroids.
Have you ever dropped in on one of these clusters? There are only a few rocks in each one. I think my suggestion, that these rocks should be the mining location for tritium, is a good idea.
Yeah, I think one of the planetary rings we've measured is only a metre wide, too. The rings aren't perfectly accurate, but at least they exist as an entity that's reasonably close to what it is in-game. The only way to interpret the "asteroid belts" in game as something real would be to assume the game has a large asteroid belt you just can't see, and the markers we have are for specifically M-type asteroids of a certain size that have broken up but not with enough momentum to disperse them yet. I think the assets themselves should stay in the game if they renamed them something like that and figured out a way to indicate the rest of the asteroid belt was there without letting you visit every individual asteroid.
As for tritium, even if asteroid belts were like that they still wouldn't have what you're asking for as other commenters noted. You want a source of lithium and neutrons to get bulk tritium. Maybe a module like a refinery that consumes high power, you fill up your hold with lithium and then crank it and it starts slowly refining that lithium into tritium in some ratio (I don't know the numbers for lithium turning into tritium on this scale). Or a similar module on an FC that could convert lithium to tritium.
I believe you mean to say "thick" - yes, they're much too thick in game.
No, I don't think anyone has noted that. I'm right in what I said: airless bodies (like asteroids) which have been exposed to the solar wind for eons, are the best place to mine tritium.
I even provided citations to confirm this.
FDev should remove tritium hotspots from rings and make tritium mineable from all asteroid clusters (bonus if the concentration is determined by the age of the star, with older stars having more of it). That'd be more realistic.
I didn't say produce tritium. I said mine it.
I made the same suggestion before beta.
forums.frontier.co.uk
Flimley
Make Asteroid Belts (useful) Great Again !....Re-Fleet carriers.
Well, everyone else is posting about them, and one comment I made in another thread seemed to be genius ! Even by my standards. 😂 Make the new unique resource required to re-fuel fleet carriers available only in asteroid belts?! These belts are used for nothing else and being located close to...
Flimley
Yes, thick.
No, you can't mine tritium from anywhere in ships this size in quantities even remotely close to a kilogram, let alone a tonne, it has a half-life of 12 and a half years. The age of the star is completely irrelevant to that timescale. When tritium is produced, within about a hundred years all of it has decayed to He3 (if say, a tonne of tritium was produced by some massive event, one hundred years later there would be 4kg of tritium left). What ends up in relatively large (still tiny, you're talking sifting through tons and tons of rock or asteroidal material to get grams here) quantities is He3 which decays from tritium, which if you put it into a nuclear reactor you can use to turn back to tritium i.e. produce tritium. Or, you can use lithium which is insanely more abundant than He3 and produce much, much more tritium than mining the surface of asteroids or moons for He3 to convert to tritium.
Give me bots that will do this while I'm orbiting the star... I'll be happy then.