- Joined
- Mar 7, 2022
- Messages
- 40
Last article, we talked about Ship Deeds and Blueprint Chips, and how they can facilitate ship designers and manufacturers to find a broader market for their products. Today, let’s talk about Resource Extraction in Starbase and how it can be improved. Resource Extraction covers any way to generate resources independently of other players, so things like mining asteroids would count, but salvaging ships would not count as that’s dependent on other player ships. Right now, the only methods of Resource Extraction that are available are mining asteroids and mining moon surfaces. I think that these methods can be enhanced, and new methods can be added.
The currently most popular, and most dangerous, method of resource extraction is Asteroid Mining. Whether they’re being sliced into chunks of ore for transport or carried by Cargo Lock Frames back to a station, I think that this method is relatively polished. The only enhancement that I would make is the addition of sensors to be able to tell the general ore distribution in an area, but that is a topic for the next article.
The other method available in the game right now is Moon Surface Mining. Titan Asteroid Mining is not available right now but is closely related in terms of mechanics and can be discussed at the same time. Both involve using large amounts of mining lasers to slowly chew through the surface of a body and expose nodules and veins of ore that can then be mined and stored on the mining ship. I’ve seen some of the huge variety of boring and scraping machines that the community has created to suit this purpose, and I’m happy to say that they seem well suited for the task. The only area where I think that this could be improved is again on the material scanning front. While it’s easy to scan lots of asteroids in an area and get a good gauge of what resources are available for mining, this cannot be done on a Moon or Titan because Material Scanners don’t provide data on anything beyond what the beam is touching.
A potential new part/module could be added called the Ground Penetrating Radar, or something similar. Functionally, it would be very similar to the Material Scanner, but it would only work on Moons or Titans. Users would point the Radar at the desired surface and then trigger a pulse. It would take a few seconds to process, and then it would report back in rough percentages what sort of ore is available in the area. While this may be enough to cover an entire Titan, I think this pulse should not map an entire Moon from one survey point. Nevertheless, this would be enough for companies to send out survey ships to map moons and get a clearer idea of what ore can be found on moons and in what abundance.
The last form of resource extraction that I’d like to raise as a possibility is Atmosphere and Belt Atmosphere Adsorption. This has appeared on the roadmap as Gas Refineries, and it would help boost the usefulness of stations. From the addition of alloy furnaces, we know that at least some moons have atmospheres, and the asteroid belts also have atmospheres. A new module could be added to stations, called the Atmosphere Analyzer, and it would consume electricity to ingest some of the atmosphere around the station and analyze it. It would work both on Moon Surfaces and Moon Belts and would report both the density of the atmosphere to determine gross output and its percentage composition to determine what form that output will take. I think that Moon Atmospheres should be totally uniform, but Belt Atmospheres could potentially have hotspots with differing compositions near things like Titan Asteroids or particularly rich hotspots.
After determining the atmosphere composition, station builders can deploy Atmosphere Adsorbers to collect and process the atmosphere around the station or moon base. The adsorbed gas would be processed into materials and deposited into the station’s inventory areas (to be discussed in the station article) until those areas are full. This module would also consume electricity, and this can potentially be scaled. The Adsorber can work faster for more electricity draw, with a potentially exponential relationship to encourage scaling out instead of scaling up. Furthermore, Adsorbers could require continuous, but small, consumption of a catalyst material that changes depending on the atmosphere. Consuming a catalyst and electricity helps encourage maintenance and consolidation of stations, as opposed to peppering lots of tiny stations all over the game world.
Lastly, Frozenbyte can place a cap on the amount of Adsorbers that can be active in an atmosphere. This could be a simple global limit, or a limit on the amount in one area, or both. By doing this, they encourage conflict over territory controlled near gas hotspots or over entire moons. After all, why should that company be able to profit from those resources when you clearly need them so much more? Next article, I plan to talk about how to identify and begin the process of contesting this territory control: sensors.
The currently most popular, and most dangerous, method of resource extraction is Asteroid Mining. Whether they’re being sliced into chunks of ore for transport or carried by Cargo Lock Frames back to a station, I think that this method is relatively polished. The only enhancement that I would make is the addition of sensors to be able to tell the general ore distribution in an area, but that is a topic for the next article.
The other method available in the game right now is Moon Surface Mining. Titan Asteroid Mining is not available right now but is closely related in terms of mechanics and can be discussed at the same time. Both involve using large amounts of mining lasers to slowly chew through the surface of a body and expose nodules and veins of ore that can then be mined and stored on the mining ship. I’ve seen some of the huge variety of boring and scraping machines that the community has created to suit this purpose, and I’m happy to say that they seem well suited for the task. The only area where I think that this could be improved is again on the material scanning front. While it’s easy to scan lots of asteroids in an area and get a good gauge of what resources are available for mining, this cannot be done on a Moon or Titan because Material Scanners don’t provide data on anything beyond what the beam is touching.
A potential new part/module could be added called the Ground Penetrating Radar, or something similar. Functionally, it would be very similar to the Material Scanner, but it would only work on Moons or Titans. Users would point the Radar at the desired surface and then trigger a pulse. It would take a few seconds to process, and then it would report back in rough percentages what sort of ore is available in the area. While this may be enough to cover an entire Titan, I think this pulse should not map an entire Moon from one survey point. Nevertheless, this would be enough for companies to send out survey ships to map moons and get a clearer idea of what ore can be found on moons and in what abundance.
The last form of resource extraction that I’d like to raise as a possibility is Atmosphere and Belt Atmosphere Adsorption. This has appeared on the roadmap as Gas Refineries, and it would help boost the usefulness of stations. From the addition of alloy furnaces, we know that at least some moons have atmospheres, and the asteroid belts also have atmospheres. A new module could be added to stations, called the Atmosphere Analyzer, and it would consume electricity to ingest some of the atmosphere around the station and analyze it. It would work both on Moon Surfaces and Moon Belts and would report both the density of the atmosphere to determine gross output and its percentage composition to determine what form that output will take. I think that Moon Atmospheres should be totally uniform, but Belt Atmospheres could potentially have hotspots with differing compositions near things like Titan Asteroids or particularly rich hotspots.
After determining the atmosphere composition, station builders can deploy Atmosphere Adsorbers to collect and process the atmosphere around the station or moon base. The adsorbed gas would be processed into materials and deposited into the station’s inventory areas (to be discussed in the station article) until those areas are full. This module would also consume electricity, and this can potentially be scaled. The Adsorber can work faster for more electricity draw, with a potentially exponential relationship to encourage scaling out instead of scaling up. Furthermore, Adsorbers could require continuous, but small, consumption of a catalyst material that changes depending on the atmosphere. Consuming a catalyst and electricity helps encourage maintenance and consolidation of stations, as opposed to peppering lots of tiny stations all over the game world.
Lastly, Frozenbyte can place a cap on the amount of Adsorbers that can be active in an atmosphere. This could be a simple global limit, or a limit on the amount in one area, or both. By doing this, they encourage conflict over territory controlled near gas hotspots or over entire moons. After all, why should that company be able to profit from those resources when you clearly need them so much more? Next article, I plan to talk about how to identify and begin the process of contesting this territory control: sensors.