The Ultimate Mining speculation thread!

[Limoncello Lizard]

I love the idea of destructible asteroids atleast that way when turning backwards you can see the gravel field after you that you left behind.

(and to mister Limoncello Lizard to destroy asteroid can be done with enough force. Like explosives or even Frequency vibration lasers to find the perfect resonance to shatter the asteroid or even ram the asteroid with other asteroid with kinetic impactor)

I would love to see somekind of specific mining ship to collect the gravel left behind from destruction of asteroid with Giant scoop to collect gravel to refinery.

OK. So you pulverise a million ton asteroid. Then scoop up 0.07% of it in your cutter. Yeah, that makes sense.

 

[YinYin]

If those .07% are all the Painite inside an otherwise pure Bauxite asteroid it does make sense I guess.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

My argument about destructible asteroids is that our mining efforts don't have any noticeable effect on the mass of an asteroid.

Nearly anything can be blown up. But blowing up asteroids doesn't seem like such a smart thing to do. Turning a million ton roid into ten thousand fast moving ship-sized boulders.

 

[Silvar]

OK. So you pulverise a million ton asteroid. Then scoop up 0.07% of it in your cutter. Yeah, that makes sense.

No you scoop Tons and tons of stuff to your ship and spill out the waste and keep the Material Wanted thats what refinery does.

So basicly scooping the big asteroid fully is possible leaving behind dust and sand and gravel. Just takes time.

We do Refinery process allready in Earth i dont see the process changing even when we move to space just more efficient methods used (crush raw ore, Pulverize, Reduce, concentrate, filter, smelt/end product)

And blowing it up might be radical but not impossible (example using Nets to contain the fragments, Or using Harmonic frequency vibration to crush it would also cause minimal spread of the fragments, or just cutting the asteroid into pieces with high powered lasers)

Also if we just blow up the asteroid into fast moving pieces we can design the hauler/refinery to be robust enough to withstand the objects.

 

[YinYin]

My argument about destructible asteroids is that our mining efforts don't have any noticeable effect on the mass of an asteroid.

Nearly anything can be blown up. But blowing up asteroids doesn't seem like such a smart thing to do. Turning a million ton roid into ten thousand fast moving ship-sized boulders.

I know and agree with that.

But if your scanners indicate something valuable enough inside the core of an asteroid to warrant the effort and risk, why not.

There are plenty of ores that are currently either limited to surface salvage or don't exist at all yet. They could be hidden away deep within asteroids.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I'll happily blow up a cruise ship for a chance of getting a couple of chemical manipulators. I'm not particularly worried that it isn't efficient, or safe. Blowing up roids in a RES is likely to earn you a nice bounty from all the innocents that get hit by the rubble. A million tons o rock and metal isn't going to vanish.

It's all a moot point anyway, as FD have said that we will be blasting "special" roids. So it won't be the routine ones. Good thing really, or they'd just be there again next time we return to the same location.

 

[YinYin]

What I've talked about before:

I wonder if destructible asteroids will be new and unique, added in between the existing ones.

Because the procedural ones we have are far too large for this and I think we will neither have entire asteroids respawn nor get a system that permanently remembers which procedural asteroids have been destroyed (that's akin to a second, much larger exploration database).