Has science fiction taught us nothing? Asteroid mining never ends well.

Really, Commander?

(sigh) Probing Uranus.

So when do we get to planet-cracking?

As cool as this sounds, wouldn't orbiting solar arrays be easier with our current technology?

Hell, even this seems more feasible.

AmazinTim: So when do we get to planet-cracking?

came here to say this

Their ship?

Thumbs up for Hulks and Retrievers!!!

Yuri Futanari: Has science fiction taught us nothing? Asteroid mining never ends well.

Hey it ended well for Sean Connery in Outland.

Company should use a carebear logo.

Why do I get the feeling that if we do this North Korea and Iran will try to get up there to can flip us?

J. Frank Parnell: Our economic problems are caused by unrestrained corporate greed. This is as much of a solution as a homeless junkie finding a bag of coke on the ground.

Unless you force corporations to stop greedily hoarding all the wealth at the expense of the rest of the human race, things will only get worse.

You sound like a raging socialist.

J. Frank Parnell: FarkedOver: You sound like a raging socialist.

Don't need to be a socialist to see what corporate greed has done to the planet and everything living on it.

True dat. It doesn't hurt to be a socialist either. :)

I read the headline to mean Occupy: Eve Online. I imagined a whole bunch of newbies in shuttles trying to block the entrance to Jita and crying about how all the null-sec alliances are keeping all the Isk for themselves.

The benefit i see to this is that more efficient space travel will be researched in order to make this profitable. Even if they don't actually get to the asteroids its still space exploration.

For now i'll stick to my internet spaceships.

/or should I say Internet Spreadsheets
//Miner/Industrialist/General Carebear since 2007 in EVE Online.
///slashies!

I preferred the asteroid farming in Star Wars: Galaxies. Load up that bohemoth Y-8 Mining Vessel, scour Mos Eisley spaceport for scrubs to man the guns, launch into Deep Space PvP zone, get targeted by a half-dozen Imps/Rebs, run to the escape pod while klaxons blare and the system message THE REACTOR LEAK SCORES THE FLESH FROM YOUR BODY! flashes on screen and your chat log lights up with frantic /tells /groupchat messages from your cremates. Reload overloads, launch back into Deep Space, rinse-repeat.

Goddam I miss that game.

I'm prepared to help.

Hell. Our entire company is.

-Z

Bleyo: As cool as this sounds, wouldn't orbiting solar arrays be easier with our current technology?

Hell, even this seems more feasible.

Depends. Cost of fuel cells is a huge factor, because of the cost of Rare Earth Metals. Even if costs came down, you can't mine enough of the stuff to change all the cars over.

If we suddenly have a steady and vast source of space mined rare earth metals, suddenly hydrogen electrolysis is very, very feasible. Via the sun, air, and oceans we now have an unlimited, green energy. You then make money and bring down costs be volume, slowly as the market demands grow. That also puts terrestrial REM mining out of business, since you're the bulk supplier.

Make me wonder what happens when we start decreasing and increasing humidity in the air dependent on traffic patterns. But my guess is it be less of a problem then melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

more to the point:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/04/rare-earth-metals-u s -wants-chinas-got/50899/

Seems to me the logical thing they're going after.

Gold and platinum are nice, but they're pretty abundant and not nearly as rare, hard / destructive to mine for terrestrially. The Atlantic also has it wrong. While trace amounts are not any rare, large deposits and veins are more rare because of their weight / density. Heavy stuff on the periodic table tends to migrate towards the center of a gravity well over time.

the_sidewinder: Diogenes Teufelsdrockh: Their ship?

[cdnimg.visualizeus.com image 500x364]

I liked these better, if just for their ramming ability

[generalnukeem.hwcommunity.com image 640x512]

That's a mining vessel. You aren't going to get to far with that.

Well, duh. How else can you afford a monocle?

Is it too soon to get a Belter cut?

/probably should do it before I lost all my hair

groppet

Yuri Futanari: Has science fiction taught us nothing? Asteroid mining never ends well.

Hey it ended well for Sean Connery in Outland.

It ended well for Jack Brennan.

/well, sorta

the_sidewinder: Elfich: the_sidewinder: Diogenes Teufelsdrockh: Their ship?

[cdnimg.visualizeus.com image 500x364]

I liked these better, if just for their ramming ability

[generalnukeem.hwcommunity.com image 640x512]

That's a mining vessel. You aren't going to get to far with that.

That's what the carrier in the background is for

Is that carrier or the mining support vessel that let the mining vessels drop off cargo without having to return to the mothership? I haven't played game in so long I can't tell anymore.

I did have a fondness for the missile cruiser though.

Mazianni are very excited.

Orcas? Who needs those carebear machines when you have Rorquals, Hulks, and stealth Lokis?

J. Frank Parnell: Our economic problems are caused by unrestrained corporate greed. This is as much of a solution as a homeless junkie finding a bag of coke on the ground.

Unless you force corporations to stop greedily hoarding all the wealth at the expense of the rest of the human race, things will only get worse.

I'd say it's more akin to a homeless junkie finding an entire mountain made of blow.

TyrantII: Bleyo: As cool as this sounds, wouldn't orbiting solar arrays be easier with our current technology?

Hell, even this seems more feasible.

Depends. Cost of fuel cells is a huge factor, because of the cost of Rare Earth Metals. Even if costs came down, you can't mine enough of the stuff to change all the cars over.

If we suddenly have a steady and vast source of space mined rare earth metals, suddenly hydrogen electrolysis is very, very feasible. Via the sun, air, and oceans we now have an unlimited, green energy. You then make money and bring down costs be volume, slowly as the market demands grow. That also puts terrestrial REM mining out of business, since you're the bulk supplier.

Make me wonder what happens when we start decreasing and increasing humidity in the air dependent on traffic patterns. But my guess is it be less of a problem then melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Did you even read what you wrote?

They're rare Earth metals, not rare Asteroid metals. Do you also shop for pants at 'Just Shirts'?

/unless that means they're not rare, but actually common, on asteroids
//but they're not really rare on Earf either, just hard to find in concentrations that make mining economically viable
///nevermind

John Nash: J. Frank Parnell: Our economic problems are caused by unrestrained corporate greed. This is as much of a solution as a homeless junkie finding a bag of coke on the ground.

Unless you force corporations to stop greedily hoarding all the wealth at the expense of the rest of the human race, things will only get worse.

I'd say it's more akin to a homeless junkie finding an entire mountain made of blow.

Which is why it would be a good thing, since in all their frenzy to capitalize on it there is sure to be a great deal of wealth scattered around.

I think the problem right now is that we're at the latter end of the gilded age caused by the post WW2 years and Apollo. New markets sprang up and the robber barons of our time have secured them all so the wealth can no longer spread.

We can hope politicians will fix that with their promised socialisms (I'm sure they'll get right on that, soon as they stop stuffing their pockets full of cash, HAHAHAHAHA!!) or we can look for another shift in the economy.
A plethora of new space related markets that they'll be too busy trying to exploit to really have a handle on for the next hundred years.

I really need to get back into that game. My primary account is worth about 2bil ISK in ships modules and hard cash. Got a 2nd account as a hard core miner. 3rd account is mostly research and some hauling to work hand in hand with the miner. Goal was to be able to do low sec work with the primary for defense. My laptop can handle it, I just hate gaming on a laptop. Oh well, time to build a good new tower that can run 3 monitors and 3 game sessions I guess.

Bleyo: As cool as this sounds, wouldn't orbiting solar arrays be easier with our current technology?

Hell, even this seems more feasible.

Um, if what you want is minerals an orbiting solar array is the opposite of what you want, since you're taking rare earth elements from down here and, you know, sticking them up in space where they can't benefit you (there's not really a current tech for getting power back down).

Whereas, buy a nice big tract of land and you can literally just divert asteroids and drop huge chunks of Yb, Ru, and various other uncommon transition metals in your lap with minimal continuing cost once you've gotten over the initial capital investment.

//Also, I am angry that someone got to my "China will can-flip us" joke before I did. Grrr.
//And worth noting that the Mining profession in Eve Online was inspired by NASA briefs more than SciFi as such, albeit through other games. This has been a goal of space tech for a long time, since rare metals in asteroids are neither segregated not locked in oxides the way they are on Earth.
//Side note: no one gives a shiat about Gold. Literally, almost no one. Industry couldn't give less of a shiat if it tried, science is more or less indifferent to it save for nanoparticles, engineering only really uses it for corrosion protection... literally the only people that even think of it as a rare metal are low-IQ folks with lots of jewelry and/or Glenn Beck's viewers.

mcmnky: TyrantII: Bleyo: As cool as this sounds, wouldn't orbiting solar arrays be easier with our current technology?

Hell, even this seems more feasible.

Depends. Cost of fuel cells is a huge factor, because of the cost of Rare Earth Metals. Even if costs came down, you can't mine enough of the stuff to change all the cars over.

If we suddenly have a steady and vast source of space mined rare earth metals, suddenly hydrogen electrolysis is very, very feasible. Via the sun, air, and oceans we now have an unlimited, green energy. You then make money and bring down costs be volume, slowly as the market demands grow. That also puts terrestrial REM mining out of business, since you're the bulk supplier.

Make me wonder what happens when we start decreasing and increasing humidity in the air dependent on traffic patterns. But my guess is it be less of a problem then melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Did you even read what you wrote?

They're rare Earth metals, not rare Asteroid metals. Do you also shop for pants at 'Just Shirts'?

/unless that means they're not rare, but actually common, on asteroids
//but they're not really rare on Earf either, just hard to find in concentrations that make mining economically viable
///nevermind

I found this article while searching on the topic. Pretty good stuff.

Link

In earths upper crust, the more common REEs are as or more common than nickel, copper, lead, or tin, and even the rarest of the REEs are more common than silver, gold, platinum, or mercury. (Long et al., 2010) They are primarily dispersed in the crustal rock, however, at low ppm levels of distribution, rather than concentrated like these comparative metals. Only in the most extraordinary geological circumstances are they concentrated to recoverable proportions in rock (Walters et al., 2010) and it is not likely that these circumstances have been achieved on any other rocky body in the solar system.

The active, long term, and ongoing recycling of earths crustal rock allows a degree of sorting of incompatible (ed rare earth) elements by repeated exclusion that is not duplicable in the short lived cycles of geological activity that seem to predominate in the other inner solar system planets, and certainly have not occurred in the frozen rocky moons or even the largest commentary or asteroidal bodies. As for the geologically active low temperature moons of the outer solar system, however, all bets are off.

jclaggett: I really need to get back into that game. My primary account is worth about 2bil ISK in ships modules and hard cash. Got a 2nd account as a hard core miner. 3rd account is mostly research and some hauling to work hand in hand with the miner. Goal was to be able to do low sec work with the primary for defense. My laptop can handle it, I just hate gaming on a laptop. Oh well, time to build a good new tower that can run 3 monitors and 3 game sessions I guess.

I've been playing EVE since 2006 (I think) on and off. I still have no idea what low sec is for. The minerals suck balls. The rats suck balls and if someone does come along who you think would look better on fire you can't shoot them or the gate guns open up on you. Then your sec standing takes a hit. Farking that shiat.

/0.0 dweller
//Really fat care bear as well.

original content...i actually took the SS the image came from. 0.0 fleet warfare ftw.

SashiRomanenko: original content...i actually took the SS the image came from. 0.0 fleet warfare ftw.

HIC's... almost as unloved as the Basilisk right up to the point they drag an enemy fleet out of warp at your optimal. Or run around High sec lighting cyno's (Devouter bugged out when they changed the model cue mom's in trade hubs... I *think* they fixed it).