Suspension of Disbelief.

How do you visualize the mining process so you need huge number of people? I see it as a huge largely automated platform that uses wedges, grav fields, lasers and magnetic fields to shred entire asteroids and reduce them to very fine dust cleverly separated by element and continually loaded onto a fleet of purpose built multi-million ton intra-system haulers. You have a staff of dozens that changes every 2 weeks, just like an off-shore oil platform.

Relax wrote:
The problem is not the stress. It is the fact that people like to live how they live and because of this, the station is not balanced dynamically. Parts will mass more than others. Unless you constantly impose draconian measures on movement etc.

This will cause the station to always tumble requiring a lot of station keeping drives. True, there will be station keeping drives on a "stationary" station as well, but it will not have the problem of a spinning mass to overcome. Serious problems for docking. Yea yea, the ol, dock at the axis and float through a supposedly rotating seal. Of course such a system sucks wind for transporting cargo.

Really depends on how much $$$ energy costs.

Docking with rotating stuff, doable today without issue despite how imprecise current thrusters and rocket engines are.

People moving around, lol, uh no, just no. We are not talking about some kind of gyroscope style spin here, but a veeery sedate spin of 2 RPM or more likely LESS.
Mass irregularities from people moving around when they don´t even make up 1% of the total mass, it´s going to be a matter for gyro correction maybe once a day if they´re being extremely picky. More likely once a month.

Oh, and you DO remember that energy is extremely cheap?

Grav plates are a really well understood technology in the Honorverse. Why would anyone want to go to a technology that was obsolete 300 years ago? You might as well arm the RMMC with swords and pikes.

hanuman wrote:Fourthly, nowhere do I remember seeing textev re the size of the belt habitats. Each habitat could, for all we know, house millions of people.

The one i quoted, the Susan Hibson story, has an 8k habitat.

But like someone else noted, there are probably bigger ones as well, and clustering is likely to happen regardless how big they are.

hanuman wrote:Fifthly, to reiterate, the habitats are not simply mining camps. We need to stop looking at them through a 21st century lens. Manticore is an advanced, highly developed society, with a very high standard of living and a level of technological development that is appropriate for a spacefaring civilization. It is not bound by the rules of a planet bound society.

Indeed.

hanuman wrote:Firstly, because said asteroid belt is not just a hop away from the closest habitable planet, but literally millions of kilometers. Even with impeller drives, there is no way that the huge numbers of people directly involved in the actual mining process will be able to commute between their place of work and the nearest habitable planet, even if only on a weekly or monthly basis.

12LM/215M km for the habitat in the Hibson story, though it varied. (and nothing was said if this was the closest or most distant part of the belt or anywhere in between, could be either)

Basically, depending on what kind of transport used, anything from several hours to a day of travel time. And that´s only if the planet currently closest is the one they want to commute between.

And yeah, that´s not going to happen much.

Tenshinai wrote:

Relax wrote:
The problem is not the stress. It is the fact that people like to live how they live and because of this, the station is not balanced dynamically. Parts will mass more than others. Unless you constantly impose draconian measures on movement etc.

This will cause the station to always tumble requiring a lot of station keeping drives. True, there will be station keeping drives on a "stationary" station as well, but it will not have the problem of a spinning mass to overcome. Serious problems for docking. Yea yea, the ol, dock at the axis and float through a supposedly rotating seal. Of course such a system sucks wind for transporting cargo.

Really depends on how much $$$ energy costs.

Docking with rotating stuff, doable today without issue despite how imprecise current thrusters and rocket engines are.

People moving around, lol, uh no, just no. We are not talking about some kind of gyroscope style spin here, but a veeery sedate spin of 2 RPM or more likely LESS.
Mass irregularities from people moving around when they don´t even make up 1% of the total mass, it´s going to be a matter for gyro correction maybe once a day if they´re being extremely picky. More likely once a month.

Oh, and you DO remember that energy is extremely cheap?

Any spin is a gyroscopic spin. No matter the rotation rate. It will oscillate and become larger and larger over time. Especially true when additional mass is added in say, a docking ship. Spin is useful on say long life satellites as there is no additional mass being moved around. No outside forces. Spin actually helps it maintain its balance.

Docking while rotating are not done today for the simple reason that spin must be matched so there is zero rotational delta velocity. Any rotational delta velocity will destroy any interface known to man in quick order. You must match spin first. Do not get your information from Hollywood and the baloney of the movie Gravity.

From a logistics maintenance perspective, forcing every docking craft every day for hundreds of years to match spin is just asking for problems. It violates the KISS principle.

Lets look at logistics. If you have to work from such a a station and there are 10,000 people. It would make sense that one must dock multiple craft at once. On a central spin station, docking options are few. This would indicate a massive problem in logistics throughput.

.... Back to lurking....

PS. Did anyone else really enjoy the movie Interstellar? I did. Sure it was a bit slow, but...

kzt wrote:How do you visualize the mining process so you need huge number of people? I see it as a huge largely automated platform that uses wedges, grav fields, lasers and magnetic fields to shred entire asteroids and reduce them to very fine dust cleverly separated by element and continually loaded onto a fleet of purpose built multi-million ton intra-system haulers. You have a staff of dozens that changes every 2 weeks, just like an off-shore oil platform.

The asteroid belts provide virtually all the raw metals required by one of the wealthiest and most industrialized economies in the Honorverse. Automated or not, I cannot envision a situation where such a mining industry did not require several million workers, and quite likely several tens of millions. Space-based mining would be quite a bit more complicated and complex than planet-based mining, I'd imagine. We really do not have any points of reference OTL, so no one can really say what it will be like.

Moreover, not every asteroid will contain the desired ores, and just as we tend to underestimate the vast distances between planetary orbits, people often overlook the fact that distances between individual asteroids or clusters of asteroids can be similarly immense. That adds yet another layer of complexity.

J6P wrote:Any spin is a gyroscopic spin.

No! Really?

If you know that, you SHOULD know why the spinrate and the magnitudes of the internal forces involved make a BIG difference.

Simplified, the slower the spin, the longer it will take for the "object" to destabilize its spin.

J6P wrote:Docking while rotating are not done today for the simple reason that spin must be matched so there is zero rotational delta velocity. Any rotational delta velocity will destroy any interface known to man in quick order. You must match spin first.

And where exactly did i say otherwise?

J6P wrote:Do not get your information from Hollywood and the baloney of the movie Gravity.

Maybe you should pack up your strawmen and unfounded idiotic assumptions and burn them instead of writing claims that make you look like a moron?

Maybe learn to read instead of randomly making assumptions sometime?

Maybe i should tell you stop using faerytales as your basis for science?

J6P wrote:From a logistics maintenance perspective, forcing every docking craft every day for hundreds of years to match spin is just asking for problems. It violates the KISS principle.

Oh wow, really... And of course, you have to spend the time manufacturing all these objections instead of solving the problem instead. How very unimpressive.

Like say, a solution that was thought up about a few minutes after someone came up with the idea for spingravity habitats?
Have a part at the middle of the spin which compared to surrounding space does not spin...

Shocking possibility!

It´s only been out there most of a century, i´m sure you would notice it soon. Once you stop bothering with stupid hollywoodisms that i don´t even watch.

J6P wrote:Lets look at logistics. If you have to work from such a a station and there are 10,000 people. It would make sense that one must dock multiple craft at once. On a central spin station, docking options are few. This would indicate a massive problem in logistics throughput.

See above answer.

J6P wrote:PS. Did anyone else really enjoy the movie Interstellar? I did. Sure it was a bit slow, but...

No, i rarely watch hollywood movies because they´re so crappy and unrealistic.

Uh, Teni

You missed both my and J6P's palm in face statement.

If you have a spin section, and a person takes a single step inward, outward, or laterally, what happens to the station? If you can't answer this, you really really really shouldn't be spouting off like you know anything. If one person on the station decides to move a couch in and now the balance of the spin section is off, what does this do to the energy required to KEEP the station balanced?

A spin section must be balanced and remain balanced. Otherwise you will be going through an enormous amount of energy(fuel) trying to keep it stationary.

A spin section has never been made except in the minds of authors utterly ignorant of basic engineering. Especially ignorant of dynamics. You will note NASA and company have never even contemplated such a design past the PH.D utterly clueless of basic engineering reality stage for living in. All such idiots see is, gee, can get ~ 1g if we spin. Without the massive problems of people actually moving around and working in such a station throwing the balance off every time they move an object.

It is such a large problem, that NASA even has published papers regarding using a small centrifuge section on the ISS, so the space station does not have station keeping problems. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20060056231.pdf That is for only the use of a single human to enter and set up with the experiments inside. You can look up other massive problems with attaching the CAM module to the ISS if you so desire.

The ONLY objects spun in space are those who are balanced and remain so. A living habitat would never be balanced and it would NEVER remain so.

hanuman wrote:The asteroid belts provide virtually all the raw metals required by one of the wealthiest and most industrialized economies in the Honorverse. Automated or not, I cannot envision a situation where such a mining industry did not require several million workers, and quite likely several tens of millions. Space-based mining would be quite a bit more complicated and complex than planet-based mining, I'd imagine. We really do not have any points of reference OTL, so no one can really say what it will be like.

Moreover, not every asteroid will contain the desired ores, and just as we tend to underestimate the vast distances between planetary orbits, people often overlook the fact that distances between individual asteroids or clusters of asteroids can be similarly immense. That adds yet another layer of complexity.

I'll start by pointing out Manticore is a society where less than a million people produced every single manufactured product.

The entire US mining industry employs less than 200,000 people in 2015. This includes coal mining, which presumably isn't a feature of Honorverse asteroid mining.

Digging into this in the 2011 data (latest I can find) non-coal mining employed about 130,000 people, with 7000 people classified as "supporting mining".

So essentially, using modern US technology, all the mining in the world would employ less than 4 million people.

In contrast, US manufacturing employment is 12,318,000. So manufacturing employees about 100 times as many people as mining. Extended to the entire world using US numbers, world wide manufacturing would employ 320 million people.

So I find the idea that the honorverse is 300 times more effective in automating manufacturing while mining requires 10-100 times MORE people completely and totally absurd. You are going to have a low of maybe 10,000 to a high of 250,000 doing the mining, essentially depending on the productivity of a single platform and what percentage of your platform are productive and how much support you decide to place out in the belt.

Asteroid mining in the honorverse would just reduce entire asteroids to dust, there isn't any hands on "mining". You move your giant processing platform near a likely looking asteroid and using tractors and lasers you cut it into convenient sized pieces and continually feed them into a wedge. It should be easy to produce 100,000 tons of completely sorted material every day per platform. A lot of this is not very valuable, but a lot is.

Ever heard of organic growth? No matter what number of people would be employed directly in asteroid mining, I think it's a reasonable assumption that they would remain on-site for extended periods of time. It would only be natural for them to want their families close by. The belt habitats would not be mining camps, but full-fledged communities, with everything those communities might require. Moreover, those habitats would have been developing into communities for several centuries. As I said before, Manticore is not 21st century America. It is a multi-planet star nation with a much higher standard of living. Even miners, who we today perceive as the rough living type, would expect far better living conditions than contemporary miners would. Add on several centuries of organic growth and suddenly a belter population of 300 million does not seem beyond imagining.

BTW, a city such as Johannesburg with a population of 5 or 6 million and a still-vibrant mining sector, only employs a few tens of thousands mine workers. the majority of the remaining population doesn't have anything to do with mining at all. I suspect the same is true of the belter population.