How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?

Lord Skimper wrote:Remember that is 2.8 trillion displacement kg, not mass/weight kg. But still hep station, not going to attempt to spell that, was how many kg?

12,000,000,000,000,000 displacement kg. How many kg of alcohol it would displace. If it would float.

Yeah, I remember.

You should remember that the reason the 0.25 ratio between ship mass and volume was chosen was because David Weber said that would be a reasonable average for the actual density of an unladen ship. So, while ship mass is not exactly equal to real mass, it is a reasonably good estimate of the real mass of an empty ship.

A station is probably not too different from the density of a ship.

And in any case, what I said still stands. The Solar System asteroid belt has enough material for billions of ships.

I was just looking at a show about how Sunseeker is now using an automated 5 axis system to make yatchs 24/7. As they said instead of retooling for modifications that would have taken 6-8 months they now do it with the 5 axis in a week. Entire 135 foot yatchs built in a year. Instead of 3 to 5.

http://www.sunseeker.com/en

Lord Skimper wrote:One wonders if a ship couldn't have its structure just sprayed onto a mold. Be it a thermacrete ship or mold and a hot liquid metal sprayed upon it, like spray painting, one could vary the content of the spray as well. Add ceramic fleck and specific PCB type circuit spray incorporated to structure. Using modular sections not welded together but melted together and designed for removal of any and all needed parts. For easy and quick retrofit.

It wouldn't be to hard to make the new building slips that extrude ships that are easy to retrofit. Modular quick builds easy to alter without retooling. Automated. Think of it like a few thousand industrial 3D printers all working in unison. Lots of plans lots of measuring then mass print ships. Forget building them by hand for a few years each. Print them out en-mass one a month per slip.

My Deity, you actually said something that made sense!





At least as far as spraying material against an object that has the initial form desired. This can be an inflatable balloon with the desired form. This has actually been thought out by present day scientists who were figuring out how the O'Neil space colonies might be built.*

Would NOT work for building completed ships or stations, other than as a first step of laying down a thin outer shell for the hull that would then need major work both externally (armor for military ships, externally mounted sensors etc.) and internally (battle steel or metallic framing members, decks, overheads, bulkheads, life support, power, etc., the list goes on and on).

* For those interested, the technique is called vacuum-vapor deposition. A metal such as aluminum is heated to the boiling point, then is squirted out of an opening into space and then condenses against an inflatable form. If the surface where the aluminum spray is at room temperature, the aluminum has the metallurigical properties of rolled and heat-treated sheet metal. For a high level overview (not the nitty-gritty engineering details), read the book: Colonies In Space by T. A. Heppenheimer, Chapter 7 Construction Shack, pages 137-139 (mass-market paperback). Copyright date is 1977, ISBN: 0-446-81-581-0. A diagram is on page 139.

Vince wrote:At least as far as spraying material against an object that has the initial form desired. This can be an inflatable balloon with the desired form.

There are a couple of tantalizing mentions of a new technique in shipbuilding, "Growing armor." I seems that the armor on the newest RMN ships is "grown" in place as a single piece.

It seems like a technique like that would need some sort of substrate or form to guide the growth into the shape required.

Weird Harold wrote:

Vince wrote:At least as far as spraying material against an object that has the initial form desired. This can be an inflatable balloon with the desired form.

There are a couple of tantalizing mentions of a new technique in shipbuilding, "Growing armor." I seems that the armor on the newest RMN ships is "grown" in place as a single piece.

It seems like a technique like that would need some sort of substrate or form to guide the growth into the shape required.

Re: The bolded part. Not just the newest ships, but those of the last few generations as well. There's an infodump somewhere that states that the armor *is* grown in place around a framework (as well as textev in one of the books), which is why my warship models have no panel lines, or "aztec pattern" like every other damn spacecraft shown in SF nowadays.

That's also why it's so damn difficult to get through the armor to swap out anything that can't fit through the corridors or hatches - you can't just unscrew the armor panels and open up a big hole.

So, while skimper's suggestion *may* be good, it's not really anything that isn't already being done, only difference being that his version needs a "mold" or "form", and the way it's actually done in the Honorverse only needs a framework.

How big the belts are is pretty unimportant. The useful material content is what matters.

If an asteroid belt is formed by accretion of minerals that never formed a planet, it might have very few dense collections of heavier minerals.

If a planet formed, minerals settled, and than the planet was catastrophically torn apart somehow to form an asteroid belt, then there might be some very high concentrations of dense minerals present.

Earth's asteroid belt is something of a mystery. We know very little about it, how it was formed, and what the useful mineral content might be. We know enough to understand that there's potential for industry in the asteroid belt, with no doubt.

As for how ships in the Honorverse are built, I would imagine that someone hauls a fusion reactor up to a building slip, attaches it to a big ball of raw materials and fuel, turns it on, and then drops a few canisters of nanobots into the mix. The nanobots create the armored shell of the ship using the provided raw materials and power, and then the rest of the pieces and bits are attached by hand in the dockyard.

This, however, seems slow and plodding compared to what should be possible using nanobots, provided that mechanical nanobot technology has kept pace with biological nanobot technology.

Vince wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:One wonders if a ship couldn't have its structure just sprayed onto a mold. Be it a thermacrete ship or mold and a hot liquid metal sprayed upon it, like spray painting, one could vary the content of the spray as well. Add ceramic fleck and specific PCB type circuit spray incorporated to structure. Using modular sections not welded together but melted together and designed for removal of any and all needed parts. For easy and quick retrofit.

It wouldn't be to hard to make the new building slips that extrude ships that are easy to retrofit. Modular quick builds easy to alter without retooling. Automated. Think of it like a few thousand industrial 3D printers all working in unison. Lots of plans lots of measuring then mass print ships. Forget building them by hand for a few years each. Print them out en-mass one a month per slip.

My Deity, you actually said something that made sense!





At least as far as spraying material against an object that has the initial form desired. This can be an inflatable balloon with the desired form. This has actually been thought out by present day scientists who were figuring out how the O'Neil space colonies might be built.*

Would NOT work for building completed ships or stations, other than as a first step of laying down a thin outer shell for the hull that would then need major work both externally (armor for military ships, externally mounted sensors etc.) and internally (battle steel or metallic framing members, decks, overheads, bulkheads, life support, power, etc., the list goes on and on).

* For those interested, the technique is called vacuum-vapor deposition. A metal such as aluminum is heated to the boiling point, then is squirted out of an opening into space and then condenses against an inflatable form. If the surface where the aluminum spray is at room temperature, the aluminum has the metallurigical properties of rolled and heat-treated sheet metal. For a high level overview (not the nitty-gritty engineering details), read the book: Colonies In Space by T. A. Heppenheimer, Chapter 7 Construction Shack, pages 137-139 (mass-market paperback). Copyright date is 1977, ISBN: 0-446-81-581-0. A diagram is on page 139.

Actually, it would work, although I have no idea why anyone would bother with printing the gold-plated shower nozzles in the ISLN Fleet Admiral's shower in place during construction. There are cheaper ways of doing it. Come to think of it, that's why they might.

3-D printing is one of those technologies that kind of came up in the last few years and blind-sided all of the futurists. I remember an article about an industrial unit that built an entire, functional automobile in place. It took several months.

Cheopis wrote:How big the belts are is pretty unimportant. The useful material content is what matters.

If an asteroid belt is formed by accretion of minerals that never formed a planet, it might have very few dense collections of heavier minerals.

If a planet formed, minerals settled, and than the planet was catastrophically torn apart somehow to form an asteroid belt, then there might be some very high concentrations of dense minerals present.

Earth's asteroid belt is something of a mystery. We know very little about it, how it was formed, and what the useful mineral content might be. We know enough to understand that there's potential for industry in the asteroid belt, with no doubt.

...

Actually, we know quite a lot about the asteroid belt. The recent Vesta mission showed that it was differentiated; Ceres probably is as well, and possibly a few of the other larger asteroids. Then there are several asteroid groups that seem to be the result of larger bodies that were fragmented in a collision.

There are lots of fragments of asteroids that are here on earth, they're called meteorites. They've been studied exhaustively to the point that we can say some of them came from Mars. There are metallic ones that are almost certainly from no-longer-existing large asteroids that differentiated and then were fragmented in a collision.

The Nice and Grand Tour models of how the Solar System originated have no problems with showing how the asteroid belt came to be.

Asteroids tend to have much higher concentrations of metals, especially heavy elements, than the Earth's crust which is mostly silo cone and iron.

Think of asteroids as planetary core material.

Bery good mining indeed.

JohnRoth wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:But what percentage of the asteroid belt is grains of dust and rock vs refined metals? Space stations are not ceramic or thermacrete are they? Ship aren't.

What makes you think asteroid belts would have refined metals? Ores as we know them here on Earth are the result of geologic processes that occurred over billions of years, many as a result of the Great Oxygenation Event.

Most of the asteroid mining tropes you see in science fiction sort of assume you're going to be able to find asteroids that have concentrations of this or that useful material in easily processable form - that is, they're extrapolating from mining conditions here on Earth. Weber is smarter than that - he's left the entire question of how it works completely undefined.

There's been a lot of speculation about asteroid mining here (and presumably on the Bar). The closest I can remember to a consensus is that it probably involves something that rips the asteroid apart and runs it through something similar to a mass spectrometer, prior to the next processing steps.

Latest hypothesis is that the asteroid belt is a captured nebula where most of the material was sucked into the sun. Obviously nobody knows where it came from.

What they do know it that it is nothing like it is portrayed in the movies. A few large pieces some smaller ones and a hole lot of dust. Kind of like the rings of saturn or perhaps one should say the ring of Sol?

Makes one wonder if Jupiters and Saturn rings are related to it.