The Corps and the riches of the Belt

The Corps and the riches of the Belt, Resource Rush 2.0; Space Version

bibliophile20 View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 05:16 AM Post #1
Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,180 Joined: 22-January 07 From: Rochester, NY Member No.: 10,737	Ok, I was cleaning up/reducing the entropy level of my bookcase earlier when I saw some of my Ben Bova novels, which got me thinking: Many of the corps have space-based assets, to the point where Evo has assets on Mars (which I hope we learn more about, myself being a hardcore space geek); from Mars it's a (relatively) short hop to the Asteroid Belt, the home of incredible riches. To give an idea, it is estimated that, if you consolidated all of the rocks in the asteroid belt, you would get an object between half to two thirds the size of our moon. There are several types of asteroids, but the two most common are carbonaceous and metallic. Carbonaceous are essentially rock, but with all sorts of goodies inside... like water in hydrates, chemicals of various sorts and other sorts of materials that are incredibly valuable in space (water in particular). Metallic are just that--big hunks of metal. REALLY big hunks of metal. Mostly iron/nickel, but with some other bits and such inside, such as titanium, aluminum, and other such metals... and even a few percent of "impurities" like, say, gold and silver? ;) So, now that I've said that, the smallest metallic asteroid that we know of (the last time I checked, anyway, about a year or so ago) was about 1 by 2 by 4 km... of pure metal, not oxidized like it would be on earth, or more metal than would be produced by the combined output of every single foundry on this planet in an entire year. It was estimated to be worth in excess of 1.5 trillion dollars, just in terms of the raw materials it represented, completely disregarding the fact that it was already in space and thus could be used there (as a point, rocket boosters are so costly that every gram you put in space literally has more than the price of silver tacked on to it). So, when do you think the corps will decide to go after this wealth of untapped resources (that incidentally mean that they don't have to continue fouling their own nests), what do you think will happen when they do, and do you think that anyone is going to hire some runners to do 'roid claim jumping? :)

Thane36425 View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 05:49 AM Post #2
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 548 Joined: 21-December 06 Member No.: 10,416	Someone has been doing their research with those numbers. There are asteroids much closer than the belt: the Trojan Asteroids that lead and follow the earth in its orbit. Not much research as been done on them though, so I don't know what they are made of. The problem is that until effective, non-chemical propulsion is developed, commercial mining will be out of the question. Add to that the problems of deep space on humans and the matter of bringing the material down to earth without meteor grade crashes. Now, if someone developed an advanced ion drive or a fusion rocket, you'd start to see the groundwork for that kind of a rush.

Kyoto Kid View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 05:57 AM Post #3
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bibliophile20

Feb 24 2007, 06:03 AM

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QUOTE (Thane36425)

Someone has been doing their research with those numbers.

There are asteroids much closer than the belt: the Trojan Asteroids that lead and follow the earth in its orbit. Not much research as been done on them though, so I don't know what they are made of.

The problem is that until effective, non-chemical propulsion is developed, commercial mining will be out of the question. Add to that the problems of deep space on humans and the matter of bringing the material down to earth without meteor grade crashes.

Now, if someone developed an advanced ion drive or a fusion rocket, you'd start to see the groundwork for that kind of a rush.

Thank you; I didn't take EES 106: Meteorites and Impact Craters my sophomore year for nothing! :D

There are Trojan asteroids, but not many; a better bet would be to go after the NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids); not only are they already in the neighborhood, but most of them already pose a collision danger; perhaps the Corporate Court could actually manage to organize the corps into cooperating on deflection if one was detected on a collision course; as a bonus, they could arrange it so that the corps could all exploit it together (each gets their own chunk, say) after it's in a safe orbit, which is when the runners get called in...

But as for propulsion, I thought they had engines of that sort already; don't tell me that Evo sent them all the way to Mars on inefficient rocket boosters!

Thane36425

Feb 24 2007, 07:24 AM

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QUOTE (bibliophile20)

Thank you; I didn't take EES 106: Meteorites and Impact Craters my sophomore year for nothing! :D

There are Trojan asteroids, but not many; a better bet would be to go after the NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids); not only are they already in the neighborhood, but most of them already pose a collision danger; perhaps the Corporate Court could actually manage to organize the corps into cooperating on deflection if one was detected on a collision course; as a bonus, they could arrange it so that the corps could all exploit it together (each gets their own chunk, say) after it's in a safe orbit, which is when the runners get called in...

But as for propulsion, I thought they had engines of that sort already; don't tell me that Evo sent them all the way to Mars on inefficient rocket boosters!

You might want to try Mining the Sky by John Lewis. Its been a while since I last read it, but it is all about mining asteroids and such.

Bringing an asteroid into orbit is one option, but is really dangerous. Even if the Corporate Court approved such a thing, the governments would probably get seriously pissed about it, maybe enough to actually do something for a change. Nudging it into a more favorable orbit and leaving an army of drones on it to do the mining. Every couple of years when the asteroid comes back around, the smaller load of mined materials could be sent to earth more safely.

Humans (dwarves? Lower life support needs and greater resistance to radiation?)would probably still be needed to oversee operations, but that could be handled by sending ships from orbit once or twice a year when earth and the asteroid are closest. That would probably be better than leaving an AI running things since it might decide to steer the asteroid into the earth.

bibliophile20

Feb 24 2007, 07:46 AM

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QUOTE (Thane36425)

You might want to try Mining the Sky by John Lewis. Its been a while since I last read it, but it is all about mining asteroids and such.

Bringing an asteroid into orbit is one option, but is really dangerous. Even if the Corporate Court approved such a thing, the governments would probably get seriously pissed about it, maybe enough to actually do something for a change. Nudging it into a more favorable orbit and leaving an army of drones on it to do the mining. Every couple of years when the asteroid comes back around, the smaller load of mined materials could be sent to earth more safely.

Humans (dwarves? Lower life support needs and greater resistance to radiation?)would probably still be needed to oversee operations, but that could be handled by sending ships from orbit once or twice a year when earth and the asteroid are closest. That would probably be better than leaving an AI running things since it might decide to steer the asteroid into the earth.

Read it, but that was several years back; I read one book last year that was on the topic of asteroidal mining, and the ideas there were intriguing. Did you know that there are enough raw materials in the Belt alone that we would be able to support the entire population of the planet at the level of the richest 1% for over two generations, assuming absolutely no recycling? That kind of thing just staggers my mind.

As for moving the asteroid, you don't have to; just pick one that already comes close and nudge it a bit so that it's in orbit beyond the moon; then it's relatively accessable, but remote enough that any issues will take a while to build to critical (capturing a asteroid is easy; all you have to do is redirect a bit of the orbital momentum. But crashing a roid onto the planet requires removing it's angular moment--in effect, braking it, and for a 2 km across sphere, that's alot of braking needed.

Crakkerjakk View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 07:58 AM Post #7
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 238 Joined: 24-January 07 Member No.: 10,756	As far as life support goes, if you grab one of the smaller ones(asteroids) and a)make sure it's solid, not a "dust-pile" class m(metallic type) and b) mine from the inside out, you have a ready made space habitat. If it has about a 500m radius on it's spin axis, you can get 1 gravity of spin without making anyone sick from the coriolis force. Also, not only will the dense walls serve as an effective radiation shield for all but the most intense solar flares, the air atmosphere inside would further augment this. An ice asteroid could be mined for the atmosphere and water, and either leftover hydrogen from the cracking process used to create the O2 or Helium-3 from the lunar regolith could be used as fuel sources, depending on your power plant type.\ EDIT Also, carrying on with the possibilities of asteroids, if we turned every known asteroid in the solar system with a radius of over 500m into such a habitat, they would have something like 100 times the amount of the habitable surface area of the earth. Actually, I think it's more like several thousand times, but I can't remember the exact number off the top of my head.

Garrowolf View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 09:16 AM Post #8
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 870 Joined: 2-October 06 From: Athens Ga Member No.: 9,517	You might have the very beginnings of that kind of thing but I think that it would still be out of the range of the tech level to focus on it much. It would also be out of the range of the setting as well. Runners are completely wrong for this kind of thing. You would need scientists and engineers on something like that. If you pushed to time line forward a good bit you would be getting into that but it wouldn't mix all that well with shadowrunners. I am actually running a game that uses the basic SR4 rules for a setting several hundred years in the future where people live in the asteroids. You could do something like that.

Trigger View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 09:57 AM Post #9
Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,468 Joined: 5-December 06 From: Somewhere in the Flooding, CalFree Member No.: 10,215	Although you cut magic down majorly if you do anything in space, as space has no ambient mana and thus nothing to cast spells with. You would have to fill those habitats with regular and awakened plant life to even get a smidgen of the mana sphere that gaia has.

Thane36425

Feb 24 2007, 10:09 AM

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QUOTE (bibliophile20)

Read it, but that was several years back; I read one book last year that was on the topic of asteroidal mining, and the ideas there were intriguing. Did you know that there are enough raw materials in the Belt alone that we would be able to support the entire population of the planet at the level of the richest 1% for over two generations, assuming absolutely no recycling? That kind of thing just staggers my mind.

As for moving the asteroid, you don't have to; just pick one that already comes close and nudge it a bit so that it's in orbit beyond the moon; then it's relatively accessable, but remote enough that any issues will take a while to build to critical (capturing a asteroid is easy; all you have to do is redirect a bit of the orbital momentum. But crashing a roid onto the planet requires removing it's angular moment--in effect, braking it, and for a 2 km across sphere, that's alot of braking needed.

I thought that it was just one kilometer long metallic asteroid that could that. I seem to remember something along those lines and that there were hundreds of them out there.

Rotbart van Dain...

Feb 24 2007, 11:16 AM

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QUOTE (bibliophile20)

So, when do you think the corps will decide to go after this wealth of untapped resources (that incidentally mean that they don't have to continue fouling their own nests), what do you think will happen when they do, and do you think that anyone is going to hire some runners to do 'roid claim jumping?

The same thing as everywhere else?
Target: Wastelands has a nice chapter about space and Corps.

knasser

Feb 24 2007, 12:59 PM

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QUOTE (bibliophile20 @ Feb 24 2007, 05:16 AM)

Ok, I was cleaning up/reducing the entropy level of my bookcase earlier when I saw some of my Ben Bova novels, which got me thinking:
Many of the corps have space-based assets, to the point where Evo has assets on Mars (which I hope we learn more about, myself being a hardcore space geek); from Mars it's a (relatively) short hop to the Asteroid Belt, the home of incredible riches.

To give an idea, it is estimated that, if you consolidated all of the rocks in the asteroid belt, you would get an object between half to two thirds the size of our moon. There are several types of asteroids, but the two most common are carbonaceous and metallic.

Carbonaceous are essentially rock, but with all sorts of goodies inside... like water in hydrates, chemicals of various sorts and other sorts of materials that are incredibly valuable in space (water in particular).

Metallic are just that--big hunks of metal. REALLY big hunks of metal. Mostly iron/nickel, but with some other bits and such inside, such as titanium, aluminum, and other such metals... and even a few percent of "impurities" like, say, gold and silver? ;)

So, now that I've said that, the smallest metallic asteroid that we know of (the last time I checked, anyway, about a year or so ago) was about 1 by 2 by 4 km... of pure metal, not oxidized like it would be on earth, or more metal than would be produced by the combined output of every single foundry on this planet in an entire year. It was estimated to be worth in excess of 1.5 trillion dollars, just in terms of the raw materials it represented, completely disregarding the fact that it was already in space and thus could be used there (as a point, rocket boosters are so costly that every gram you put in space literally has more than the price of silver tacked on to it).

Knasser: Reads thread. Thinks back to wading through rack after rack of magazines in Smiths half and hour ago about which celebrities you'll never meet is are shagging which other celebrities you'll never meet and endless features on fifty ways to look good this summer. Sobs for the priorities of the human race. :(

We could be out there by now...

bibliophile20

Feb 24 2007, 05:45 PM

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QUOTE (knasser)

Knasser: Reads thread. Thinks back to wading through rack after rack of magazines in Smiths half and hour ago about which celebrities you'll never meet is are shagging which other celebrities you'll never meet and endless features on fifty ways to look good this summer. Sobs for the priorities of the human race. :(

We could be out there by now...

*pats knasser* I know, I know... bread and circuses, the opiate of the masses, right? Honestly, some of these pop-culture-obsessed mono-synaptic organisms... I'm ashamed to belong to the same species.

But getting back to the thread...

So, hypothetical situation here: Ares has managed to capture a 500 meter radius metal rock, valued at about 2 million nuyen plus because the material is already in space, and is planning on using the materials to construct several extremely large space stations and thus almost effectively cement its superiority in space.

How do the other corps react? Hijack the rock, hijack the metal shipments, what?

Butterblume View Member Profile	Feb 24 2007, 07:54 PM Post #14
Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,150 Joined: 19-December 05 From: Rhein-Ruhr Megaplex Member No.: 8,081	What I always say, we could launch a spaceship with 10 million tons (about a 100 aircraft carriers) with todays tech with propulsion costs of less than one euro per kg. Of course, that would still be almost 10 billion euro, and thats just for fuel (actually a kind of fusion bomb), you still have to build the ship. The drawback would be the 5000 tons or so worth of fusion bombs you'll need just to get into orbit. Built for a different purpose, they would have significantly less fallout then a fusion bomb built to be a weapon, but since thats more than 1000 bombs, that's still a lof radiation. That said, I haven't placed shadowrun into space -yet-, but I will sometimes in the future. I am in no rush, it might be years until then.

FrankTrollman

Feb 24 2007, 08:23 PM

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QUOTE (bibliophile20)

But getting back to the thread...

So, hypothetical situation here: Ares has managed to capture a 500 meter radius metal rock, valued at about 2 million nuyen plus because the material is already in space, and is planning on using the materials to construct several extremely large space stations and thus almost effectively cement its superiority in space.

How do the other corps react? Hijack the rock, hijack the metal shipments, what?

Million? Million? Please, this rock is 523.6 million cubic meters. That's 4.66 billion tonnes of metal. Now, Iron Ore goes for like $50 a tonne, but this is high grade iron ore that is essentialy already smelted through to an aceptable purity level. That stuff goes for about $900 a tonne.

Now let's consider this in :nuyen: ... It's already in space (which isn't nearly the concern it was back in 2006 and because you have movement and psychokinesis that can bypass gravity wells out to 70 km), and the demand for metals is even higher, and the supply of metals on Earth is lower (more reclaimed awakened lands, more defunct mines, more toxic contamination). So the price of this stuff is what? 1500 :nuyen: per tonne? 2000? More?

Let's call it 1000 though, because it's easy to multiply by. That means that you have a rock that is over 4.5 trillion :nuyen: - that's a crap tonne of money.

That being said, what are you gonna do about it? Metals in space aren't actually worth anything, because nothing is worth anything until you get it back into a gravity well where people live. You can have a mountain of gold the size of Texas and it isn't worth anything until you can sell it to another human being or use it to create something that you can sell to another human.

With Evo's bases already placed in defensive positions in the trenches of Mars, an orbital bombardment is unlikely to remove them. And with land-based static personelle, Evo can probably fight off an incursion of more than a few people. A pile of several billion tonnes of steel is all well and good, but it doesn't actually give them victory on any planet...

-Frank

Thane36425

Feb 24 2007, 08:32 PM

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QUOTE (FrankTrollman)

Million? Million? Please, this rock is 523.6 million cubic meters. That's 4.66 billion tonnes of metal. Now, Iron Ore goes for like $50 a tonne, but this is high grade iron ore that is essentialy already smelted through to an aceptable purity level. That stuff goes for about $900 a tonne.

Now let's consider this in :nuyen: ... It's already in space (which isn't nearly the concern it was back in 2006 and because you have movement and psychokinesis that can bypass gravity wells out to 70 km), and the demand for metals is even higher, and the supply of metals on Earth is lower (more reclaimed awakened lands, more defunct mines, more toxic contamination). So the price of this stuff is what? 1500 :nuyen: per tonne? 2000? More?

Let's call it 1000 though, because it's easy to multiply by. That means that you have a rock that is over 4.5 trillion :nuyen: - that's a crap tonne of money.

That being said, what are you gonna do about it? Metals in space aren't actually worth anything, because nothing is worth anything until you get it back into a gravity well where people live. You can have a mountain of gold the size of Texas and it isn't worth anything until you can sell it to another human being or use it to create something that you can sell to another human.

With Evo's bases already placed in defensive positions in the trenches of Mars, an orbital bombardment is unlikely to remove them. And with land-based static personelle, Evo can probably fight off an incursion of more than a few people. A pile of several billion tonnes of steel is all well and good, but it doesn't actually give them victory on any planet...

-Frank

Even if it isn't pure, it would be easy to refine. With solar mirrors focussed on a crucible, the heating and smelting of the metal would effectively be free. If the temperature could be precisely controlled, it would be possible to cause an aggragate lump of metal to dissolve into layers, each layer a different metal. Then you just skim off the different layers to get refined metals. Don't forget also all the higher metals like gold, platinum and iiridium.

Thane36425

Feb 24 2007, 08:36 PM

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QUOTE (knasser)

Knasser: Reads thread. Thinks back to wading through rack after rack of magazines in Smiths half and hour ago about which celebrities you'll never meet is are shagging which other celebrities you'll never meet and endless features on fifty ways to look good this summer. Sobs for the priorities of the human race. :(

We could be out there by now...

More comisserations. I have been disgusted this last week or so with the 24/7 coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith trials. Just shows what we have to look forward to with Brittany Spears shortly.

Bread and Circusses indeed. Keep the people distracted so they don't noticed just how badly the elites are screwing them. That's one thing in SR that carries over plainly from the real world.

FrankTrollman

Feb 24 2007, 09:15 PM

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QUOTE (Thane36425)

If the temperature could be precisely controlled, it would be possible to cause an aggragate lump of metal to dissolve into layers, each layer a different metal.

I don't think so - it's essentially at zero gravity, so molten metals don't really go anywhere. To get a separation you'd need to provide acceleration of your own (ex.: centrifuge). That hurts, but remember that this works for you going the other way - you can make any alloy you want just by putting the appropriate materials together and letting them cool.

-Frank

Thane36425

Feb 24 2007, 09:19 PM

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QUOTE (FrankTrollman)

I don't think so - it's essentially at zero gravity, so molten metals don't really go anywhere. To get a separation you'd need to provide acceleration of your own (ex.: centrifuge). That hurts, but remember that this works for you going the other way - you can make any alloy you want just by putting the appropriate materials together and letting them cool.

-Frank

It shouldn't hurt too much. If you got the whole rig spinning that problem should be solved. There probably already are solutions to all these problems, I just don't have the time to reread the books on the subject right now.

Kyoto Kid

Feb 25 2007, 07:47 PM

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QUOTE (Thane36425)

QUOTE (knasser @ Feb 24 2007, 07:59 AM)

Knasser: Reads thread. Thinks back to wading through rack after rack of magazines in Smiths half and hour ago about which celebrities you'll never meet is are shagging which other celebrities you'll never meet and endless features on fifty ways to look good this summer. Sobs for the priorities of the human race. :(

We could be out there by now...

More comisserations. I have been disgusted this last week or so with the 24/7 coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith trials. Just shows what we have to look forward to with Brittany Spears shortly.

Bread and Circusses indeed. Keep the people distracted so they don't noticed just how badly the elites are screwing them. That's one thing in SR that carries over plainly from the real world.

..to quote from Shadowbeat:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH..."
--another satisfied [simsense] customer.

tisoz View Member Profile	Feb 25 2007, 09:27 PM Post #21
Free Spirit Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 3,944 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Bloomington, IN UCAS Member No.: 1,920	Link to a previous dicussion about space mining.

Cray74

Feb 27 2007, 01:08 PM

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QUOTE (Crakkerjakk)

As far as life support goes, if you grab one of the smaller ones(asteroids) and a)make sure it's solid, not a "dust-pile" class m(metallic type) and b) mine from the inside out, you have a ready made space habitat. If it has about a 500m radius on it's spin axis, you can get 1 gravity of spin without making anyone sick from the coriolis force. Also, not only will the dense walls serve as an effective radiation shield for all but the most intense solar flares, the air atmosphere inside would further augment this.

Speaking as a materials engineer: You really don't want to spin even a metallic asteroid. They're so full of crap and impurities that habitat air pressure would blow them apart (well, pop a seam) if they didn't rip apart under spin. Hell, even pure iron would probably pull apart under the rotational strain of its own mass.

You're better off using the asteroid material to build a separate, rotating habitat on the surface or inside the asteroid. For radiation shielding, blocks, bins, and sandbags of asteroid soil should do fine. Or water tanks. If you're lucky, the asteroid will have plenty of water. From that perspective, a "dustball" stony-iron asteroid would probably be a better start-up project for mining than a purely metallic asteroid.

Also, if you have the budget, you'd want to increase the spin radius so you can get 1G from 1rpm or less (which starts at about 1700-1800m diameter). Some people are nauseated in 1-3rpm environments, and many people get ill when they move in 3+ rpm environments.

QUOTE

That being said, what are you gonna do about it? Metals in space aren't actually worth anything, because nothing is worth anything until you get it back into a gravity well where people live. You can have a mountain of gold the size of Texas and it isn't worth anything until you can sell it to another human being or use it to create something that you can sell to another human.

Metals in space may not be worthwhile to people on Earth, but they're very useful in space. You could avoid all that headache of launching new space station materials if the material was already in space, and SR megacorps build some BIG space stations.

Crakkerjakk View Member Profile	Feb 27 2007, 01:29 PM Post #23
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 238 Joined: 24-January 07 Member No.: 10,756	Shrug I'll trust your judgement, since you're the professional(or at the very least a hell of a lot closer than me currently.) The point remains(and I think you're agreeing with me on this one, so I'm not directing this at you) that there are lots of resources in space, and within a few decades it may become cheaper to exploit them than to try to lift everything out of earth's gravity well. As I understand it, the two chief health hazards to space-dwelling humans with current technology is a)calcium loss(among other problems) due to long exposure to microgravity and b)lots o' radiation. Asteroids offer a much cheaper path to solving these problems than lifting all building materials off of earth, especially once the technology becomes available to smelt, produce, and assemble structures in space. It also loosens up building constraints, since the structures don't have to be designed to endure gravity in the first place, unless humans are going to be living, and maybe working, in them. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of metals, period available in a chunk of high grade ore. A few mirrors and a centrifuge and you've got your very own refinery. A few molds and you have a manufacturing center. Hell, if you wanna be paranoid, perhaps the easiest first products would be Thor-shot bundles. All they basically are is steel I beams with rudimentary sensors and a small pair of thrusters. Build the sensors and thrusters on earth, then attach em in orbit.

Cray74

Feb 27 2007, 01:59 PM

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QUOTE (Crakkerjakk @ Feb 27 2007, 01:29 PM)

*Shrug* I'll trust your judgement, since you're the professional(or at the very least a hell of a lot closer than me currently.)

I used to like the idea of Cole habitats until I took my first metallurgy course and learned about the impact of impurities on metal strength.

QUOTE

The point remains(and I think you're agreeing with me on this one, so I'm not directing this at you) that there are lots of resources in space, and within a few decades it may become cheaper to exploit them than to try to lift everything out of earth's gravity well.

Yep.

QUOTE

As I understand it, the two chief health hazards to space-dwelling humans with current technology is a)calcium loss(among other problems) due to long exposure to microgravity and b)lots o' radiation.

Yep. Hence the value of a rotating habitat with a thick casing of asteroid material. You need about 10 tons per square meter to equal the radiation shielding of Earth's atmosphere.

Though, borrowing from GURPS:Transhuman Space, a way around the calcium loss would be a genefix. Shadowrun now has the biotech and genetech necessary to duplicate that, though muscle mass loss would remain a problem.

QUOTE

Asteroids offer a much cheaper path to solving these problems than lifting all building materials off of earth, especially once the technology becomes available to smelt, produce, and assemble structures in space. It also loosens up building constraints, since the structures don't have to be designed to endure gravity in the first place, unless humans are going to be living, and maybe working, in them.

Yep. They'd be enormously useful means of building those big space stations SR seems to have, and a better choice than the moon (which is starting to look rather depleted in life support-critical materials and has an obnoxiously deep gravity well.)

QUOTE

Not to mention the ridiculous amount of metals, period available in a chunk of high grade ore. A few mirrors and a centrifuge and you've got your very own refinery. A few molds and you have a manufacturing center. Hell, if you wanna be paranoid, perhaps the easiest first products would be Thor-shot bundles.

You'd have to rename them. Regrettably, Shadowrun decided to define Thor shots as big mass drivers firing "space garbage" in Target: Wastelands.

Kyoto Kid

Feb 27 2007, 06:43 PM

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QUOTE (cray74)

Metals in space may not be worthwhile to people on Earth, but they're very useful in space. You could avoid all that headache of launching new space station materials if the material was already in space, and SR megacorps build some BIG space stations.

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