Molybdane

I want to add to the discussion of resource extraction by explaining what the effect of energy costs could be.


 
The premise is simple, mining takes energy. If players must make a comparison between the amount of energy spent on mining (in some kind of universal credit) tot he value in credits of the resources gained, and that balance doesn’t turn out well, the resource doesn’t get mined.


 
Thus, energy costs add room for several aspects of mining economics:


 
First of all, mining is no longer free. This will limit the problem of areas or planets being strip-mined; it has to be worthwile.


 
Second, it adds tot he economic balance of the game. As resources become scarce, prices will rise and mining becomes more profitable. This is easy enough for players to understand.


 
Moving along, mining itself can be made more complicated, or taking a bit more thinking than pointing some kind of harvesting beam anywhere. Different deposits could have different energy costs to recover. A deposit deeper underground could require more energy too. Add in the aforementioned option of diluting or contaminating your ores and mining becomes something more exiting altogether.


 
Dilution refers in this case to the concentration of valuable ore  per cubic  metre, contamination means the presence of undesirable or unexpected ores in otherwise valuabe deposits. Getting some nickel-contaminated iron could be workable for you if you know how to separate the ores.


 
It now becomes worthwile to specialize in mining and more apparent how to do so. You’d need the ability to mine at a lower energy cost than the competition, or be able to do so in areas where other players can’t, or be able to work with contaminated and/or diluted ores.


 
Finally, a consequence of this system is that there’d be an economic resource geography of sorts. By this I mean that virgin area’s get surface mined (costs little energy) first. Later on when players end up starved after the quick resource dump made by surface-mining players, more experienced miners can move in to make the investments necessary in profitably recovering deeper layers of ore.


 
Once this golden age of resource gathering has past, truly specialized players with exceptional abilities can gather the few valuable depositis remaining.


 

 
Adding in energy costs in general could have other consequences as well. Resources could get transported and sold where they can be converted into useful materials where the energy costs are lowest, necessitating transport.


 
Also, energy is necessary to recycle waste, be it broken up material or oxidized fuel.

I was going to make a post about energy as a crucial variable. That can wait however since the validity of this thread depends on the maths checking out. This is what I found:


 
The first figure this thread gave me was the surface area of a planet; 50 862 km2. Note that I am avoiding both points and comma’s here and that I will write down integers only, even though I did the calculations up untill several digits after the comma.


 
I converted the 50 862 km2 surface area (PA) into a radius using this formula:


 
PA = 4R2 Substituting PA for 50 862 km2 finds:


 
50 862 km2 = 4piR2 

Apparently this forum is unable to handle the Word symbol for pi) 12 716 km2 = piR2

4 048 km2 = R2

64 km = R


 
That means this planet would have a radius of 64 km, 63,62 km actually, very close to the 65 km number I have seen before and therefore very useful to work with.


 
Next, I converted this radius into a planetary volume (PV) using the following formula:


 
PV = 4/3piR3  Inserting R = 63,62 km I found:


 
PV = 4/3pi 257 510 km3
PV = 4/3 808 968 km3

PV = 1 078 625 km3


 
Finally, I took the excavation rate (ER) from the Twitter message; 56 m3/s to figure out how many seconds it would take for one person to dig up this entire planet:


 
ER = 56 m3/s = 0,000 000 056 km3/s


 
PV / ER  = 1 078 625 km3 / 0,000 000 056 km3/s = 19 261 155 654 102 s.


 
This huge number equals to:


 
222 930 042 days (24 hours) or


 
610 767 years for one person to dig up an entire planet.


 
1000 pleople would thus take 611 years and if they do so in 8 hours per day instead of 24, multiply by 3 to get:


 
1 832 years for the whole planet.


 
That would mean that moving 1 % of this planetary volume would indeed take 1000 people about 18,32 years. So this number matches the Twitter post closely, probably a spot on if a 65 km radius is taken instead.


 
I am reluctant however to consider planetary bodies invioable to high rate strip mining or obvious attempt by players to vandalize planets. That 1% of planetary volume still acounts for more than 10 cubic kilometers of matter to be dumped somewhere. Its because of that that the amount of energy required to mine resources and the varying rate of return per unit of energy may bet he crucial variable in further adressing the effect of mining on planetary integrity and resource limits.