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How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?

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How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 11:31 am

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Supposedly they are mined for most of the resources for ship building tech space stations missiles etc....

The Sol Asteroid belt sounds impressive but is very small if all gathered together. 0.1% of the mass of the Earth. Mostly just dust with a few big chunks of rock and a little metal. Doubtful one could create 100 km space stations out of them plus 1000's of ships. Millions of missiles etc....

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge13 ... eroids.pdf
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by BobfromSydney   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:07 pm

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Lord Skimper wrote:Supposedly they are mined for most of the resources for ship building tech space stations missiles etc....

The Sol Asteroid belt sounds impressive but is very small if all gathered together. 0.1% of the mass of the Earth. Mostly just dust with a few big chunks of rock and a little metal. Doubtful one could create 100 km space stations out of them plus 1000's of ships. Millions of missiles etc....

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge13 ... eroids.pdf


Just to avoid wading through that article, I consulted Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_b ... cteristics

"The total mass of the asteroid belt is estimated to be 2.8×10^21 to 3.2×10^21 kilograms, which is just 4% of the mass of the Moon.[2] The four largest objects, Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea, account for half of the belt's total mass, with almost one-third accounted for by Ceres alone."


This doesn't include the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud etc.

Now this means there are approximately 3 quintillion tons, or 3 exatons of material in the Asteroid belt.

Or 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms of matter.

Now Remember space ships and space stations are hollow objects. They might have quite solid and dense sections but large parts contain nothing but air (or cargo).

Now 296 Solarian SD's massing approximately 6.8mt each were destroyed in the second battle of Manticore.
2,012,800,000,000 kilograms of ships.

That is 0.0000000000006.7% of the mass of the Solar System's asteroid belt.

It's been said before and needs to be said again. Space is really big. Objects in space are really big. Humans cannot intuitively grasp the size and scale of objects and distances in space because we have nothing earthly to compare them to. Hence we need to use scientific notation and tables and do the calculations.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by SWM   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:21 pm

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Bob has it right. You could build every ship (military and civilian) that has ever existed in the entire Honorverse, once a year, every year for thousands of years, before running out of materials from just the one asteroid belt in the Solar System.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:22 pm

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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.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:37 pm

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Perhaps ships should be built out of poured thermacrete. CoG goes on about how nuke proof the building are. Why not pour a ship in a mold in a fully enclosed varied gravity environmentally controlled slip. No need to build a ship just pour mold and wire it. Add a armour nano weave around it and your new ship is done. Thermacrete is stronger than metal, heat and energy resistant unlike metal, etc...

A new option that would work for missiles too. Make them Hexagonal instead of round easier to stack, easier to fit in pods too and makes pods easier to stack.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by SWM   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:51 pm

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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.

Actually, the shortage would not be in metals. It is the lighter materials that would be harder to extract from asteroids, for making plastics. But don't worry, there's plenty. The Solar System asteroid belt, supplemented with cometary material, easily has enough materials (and the right kind) to build billions of ships, or tens of millions of space stations.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by JohnRoth   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:38 pm

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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.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:44 pm

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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.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by Lord Skimper   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 2:08 pm

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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.
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Re: How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?
Post by kzt   » Fri Jun 13, 2014 2:38 pm

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JohnRoth wrote: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.

That's been my assumption. Essentially it's more a deep ocean drilling rig then a traditional mine. Extremely capital intense, with a small of highly trained, highly paid crew running the process 24/7, probably rotating out every few weeks.

They methodically rip the asteroid apart and deliver the separated materials into a short haul freighter that delivers it to a manufacturer or processing plant.
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