while it is true that the CSN would have alot more options thanks to certain BT technologies. i would assume that it would be more focused on industry, space and military application's .you can after all rebuild those buildings but only if your still alive and kicking
Think of it this way, if your colony buildings are all built, internally, as if they were solid blocks of metal alloy, rather then open girders today... Just how much effort will it take to finally level a building that's got THAT MUCH structural support? Anyone attempting to raid a CSN held colony will find themselves in a situation where even farmhouses have the same armoring as a damn CBT pillbox, and likely the 'core' of a colony would have a tunnel network arrangement specifically for using buildings just for that purpose. If someone wants to raid a CSN world, and they somehow survive the orbital defense grids, plus the sub-orbital stuff as well, they'll get down to the ground to discover the whole thing is a giant slaughterhouse for any invader dumb enough to come visiting.
wouldn't it be easyer and safer to just build everything underground with a few cheap town house on top to ward of cabin feaver?
Building from metal only makes sense if metal is as flexible and cheap as wood, bricks, and concrete are. Even with nigh infinite free energy (fusion) limited manufacturing capacity and flexibility may place additional constraints on metal's cost. There's also post construction modification. How the heck am I supposed to knock out a new window or door if the wall I'm cutting through is strong enough to withstand a battlemech laser?
Answer: You don't. You just buy a new wall that is rapid-prototype'd with an extra wall or window in it. If the entire structure is built to withstand impacts (energy or kinetic) that are normally knocked around by at least a light battlemech/light tank, you by rights should be able to take out an entire wall, the whole thing, and not even come close to compromising the entire structure's stability. Remember, we're talking about the CSN going extremely, almost excessively, into orbital mining, which generally means that just within Earth's own solar system, it'll have mining resources available to it that can be stripmined COMPLETELY away, that are in many cases, chunks of rock & ice larger then Mt. Everest. In at least 50 cases, chunks that are larger then the entire state of New York. That's a whole new ballgame when it comes to how cheap metal is about to become for the CSN. Actually, it's such a paradigm shift that it's effectively four or five magnitudes larger of a shift then what level of mining is done today planetside.
There was a lecture on weird stuff U.S. military imagined in 1950s they 'd use in 50 years. Like flying tanks and personal helicopter platforms for single infantrymen to stand on completely uncovered... (Wasn't one of the big "why combat mecha are a bad idea" arguments that putting one person in control of both moving and shooting splits pilot's concentration too much? Imagine adding a third dimension?) Anyways, one of their predictions was that everything would be made from titanium, because production would be made cheaper just like they did when aluminum was needed for planes in WW2. Except it turned out you can't just throw money at the problem and make more titanium, or at least you cant make it cheap enough. Asteroid mining and cheaper power may get you cheaper titanium but you'll also get steel and aluminum that are still much more common and cheaper than it.
i would suspect that each metal would be put into what ever project could make the most use of e.g milatary stuff get titanium commercial air line the aluminum and steel to anything noun vital
titanium is an incredibly common metal on earth today. There are tons of minerals that it can be extracted from in vast quantities. Except it takes a F*ckton of electricity to do it. This means titanium is expensive. the cheapest (least energy intensive) way of refining we have today doesnt start with refining titanium. Instead you first concentrate certain salt water bodies that have high concentrations of magnesium salts. Then you seperate out the magnesium salts and use electrolisis to refine large quantites of magnesium. THEN you go and take the magnesium and you use it to reduce the titanium ore (a specific type of ore). THEN you have your pure titanium. You are basically refining magnesium then throwing it away to get titanium. That is the cheapest method of refining titanium. The other ways, while simpler, take more energy. understand why titanium, one of the most common metals in the crust is so expensive now? It sure as hell isn't because its rare. It just forms very strong bonds and it is a bitch to break them. Aluminum is also very energy intensive to refine, but its a simpler process. New aluminum is very expensive. Its literally only because humans have been recycling aluminum ofr nearly a century that aluminum is so cheap today. If we didn't recycle aluminum it would be several times as expensive today. There just isn't enough titanium in the market to bring the overall price down through recycled goods. With fusion power driving the price of electricity down to near zero, i have no doubt that C*Earth will see cars being built from titanium alloys within a couple years instead of traditional steel. Titanium is pretty easy to work with so long as you use displace the oxygen in the air with nitrogen when you weld it. And with cheap energy, its cheap to do huge amounts of fractional distillation of air to gain the required amounts of whatever gas you want.
You made a very good point, but what of the economics of switch over to the other refining method you just can’t get BT grade teck one year and get titanium the next year. Refiner’s would need to be design or redesign then tested then built. all the while you got delays, corporate bigwigs poking things that should not be poke, hell even corporate espionage/sabotage by those dim witted people that can’t see beyond there own wallet And even then most of the materials would end up being pumped into defenses
actually the designs are all there, and are used for other metals. they could have the new refineries open and running at high capacity within months of electricity becoming cheap. Its not a matter of designing a new process as it is ordering the equipment from a manufacturer and maybe doing some minor modifications to it (such as sealing it and making it so that it will have a pure nitrogen atmosphere. Oxygens bad for molten titanium. It rapidly 'rusts', forming titanium oxides. so molten titanium rapidly develops titanium oxide slag if its exposed to oxygen) The cool thing about near zero elecity costs is that there are certain refining methods such as electrowinning that can extract any metal you could care to have out of dirt. of course certain metals would be rare (meaning you would get almost nothing), but it can be done to gain pure metal from just about any source... mix a molten salt with the ore and run a current through it and you can pull any metal out you want.
While I've been arguing against Tibbs earlier in the thread, he's 100% correct here. If you have access to cheap electrical power, and fusion is about the cheapest (and produces the most) you can get once you've got it working, unless that is, someone figures out total 1:1 energy conversion (not M/AM, but straight up E=MC^2 direct conversion), you can do mining at levels that boggle the mind. If you picked up a 'mere' Omni 25, like what's in a Savannah Master, and have access to certain salts, and a good electrical conductor, plus even 1800s level ceramic melting pots, you'd damn near be able to do electrotwinning until the pot finally subsumed, without break. And that's just from a cursory view of the method. The main problem today in attempting is is that you need something the size of a major dam, or a nuclear power plant, to actually break even on power costs. It's that, or dozens or more coal/gas/etc power plants just to constantly power a single relatively small facility. Hell, I could almost see this being done on colony worlds long before they get their orbital mines up and running. Need an area leveled and scraped? You call in the MINING company with scrapers that are fusion powered and have a big hopper in the back, and they, literally, scrape away the ground soil, and then separate it right there on sight into it's separate elements. Even the 'crap' leftovers probably would be worth something somewhere on the planet, even if it's just making flowerpots for around a house. I mean, just look at all the elements that make up generic/average topsoil on Earth: Quartz: SiO2 Calcite: CaCo3Feldspar: KAlSi3O8Mica (biotite): K(Mg,Fe)3AlSi3O10(OH)2 (odd, I can't do the subtype numbers in forum code, no matter what. bleh)
and aftre hearing all this i carn't help but ask the question that has been ask multiple times already: how the hell has the inner sphere not doing this themselfs. becuase the only thing i can think of is that they flat out don't know about it
Its a mystery... With near unlimited (ultra durable) protium fusion power commonly available its economical to mine common dirt for rare minerals. The IS should be swimming in every rare element (except the ones you have to transmute to get). Thats not even accounting for asteroid mining. Just processing dirt... Its slow and doesnt yield a whole lot of rare elements, but it works. If nothing else they should be swimming is iron, aluminum, manganese, magnesium, etc... basically all the common metals. You don't have to find ores. You don't have to move machinery around. just start scooping rock and dirt up and melting it.
could be Cameron dickery hell more like Terran Hegemony dickery. it would be the perfect way to keep the colonys in check if the best way to refine metals just seem to vanish into thin air
except the process has been known since the 18th century i believe. Its used for refining valuable metals out of ores today, and has been for a long time... Its a vital technique to produce any high purity metal... Any vaguely technologically sophisticated civilization has to use some variation of the process for manufacturing highly refined metals. Its literally just electroplating, only from molten rock with salts added in (to promote conductivity) Hell, its the only process used to produce aluminum in the world today!
but did the colonys ever produce those highly refined metals? or did they simply export the ore to the Hegemony so they could then import the metals they needed? and remember this a econammy that was set up were having a whole world to just produce shoes was considered normal
Option 1: Pre-FTL Earth had few wars and all the free-floating data went poof to the electronic heaven. If the theory that BT datanets are based on cloud storage and computing is true, you only have to lose a few central computer nodes. Colonies have whatever tech they were given to build with and I personally do not believe the claims that TH gave the jumpships to the dissident groups they exiled. Hel, maybe they just dumped the colonists down and even the dropships left, it would explain a lot. They were trying to keep them from being problems so their tech base would be minimal and anyways, whatever tech better than those bulky and crude mechs they had 300 years ago has been reduced to scrap either by wars or simply breaking down, your PC may be X times better than IS computers in other ways but it will not last couple of decades in useable condition. Then C* and sabotage from enemies destroyed any traces of advanced methods you still had left. Option 2: Actually they have this knowledge and so on. Any planet more advanced than periphery slums that was not desrtroyed in Succession Wars has all the implied advantages. However, a colony still has to build the tools to build the tools to build the stuff or import everything so it soon gets expensive to uptech many colonies and advanced colonies need more military protection. End result is that improving a colony actually ups the costs faster than the income it will produce in near future. Star League could have handled the drain but had no reason to waste money on anyone not loyal or willing to do the work themselves. Since the wars, central worlds haven't had enough cheap ores from colonies to feed their industry so they could spare the effort and trying to uptech one world at time to keep costs down draws sabotage, pirate invasions and political pressure from your other colonies. Option 3: They had the tech, as well as those advanced mining techs discussed before, and have used them for almost a millenia. There aren't enough easily useable minerals left on those planets to build fleets of jumpships, and the scraps aren't worth the massive operations required. However, finding and exploiting new resources is impossible as long as your enemies will hinder you and you do not have the money to set up new fully industrialised colonies. Recycling is more efficient and requires building less new infrastructure. Option 4: Physical laws of BT universe differ enough that this would not work. If those minerals were easy to melt, they would not make so strong armor, or something like that. Or the soucebooks were wrong about stuff like fusion being cheap enough to be easily availabe to civilians.
option 3-4 wouldn't work first because just one world could produce evey jumpship ever built with the methods desribed let alone all the worlds put together and the secound becuase clanky earth would stop working itself if the laws of Physical were different i would put my money on somthing between 1 and 2
Considering Irian, Defiance, Hesperus II, etc, and others, I'm 99% percent its option #2. Basically the mega-corps flat out do NOT want people to use the tech, let alone remember it. Why? Pure, undistilled, and overwhelming greed, and not a damn thing more. If someone were to link supercheap electricity to ultra-easy mining, the megacorps would see whole sections of their internal economies and profit margins shrivel and die. After all, it's vastly more profitable for them to build 'cheap' mining equipment, while keeping fusion reactors expensive, and then be able to charge enormous prices for raw materials which still take days or months to mine from a planet's surface, while also paying their workers cheap. If knowledge of electrotwinning were to hit the open market, ANYONE with a fusion reactor in their possession, and a couple of hundred C-bills at most, could suddenly start 'mining' in small, but in ever increasing (if still small, at first) amounts, literally by walking into their backyard with a shovel and/or a pickaxe. And it's likely not only the mega-corps that want the tech dead & buried. Comstar would likely be more then happy to slit several hundred thousand throats as well. After all, if metals were suddenly flooded into the open market and drop the bottom out of the normally accepted prices, it'd disrupt a LOT of plans. There are certain things out there even today that are known of, but frankly, are kept deliberately buried simply to avoid market rushes, job losses across certain areas, balances of political power - Senator A, who has major support from mining concerns, can't stand Senator B, who's district/state is heavy into certain techs that could destabilize the mining industry, and Senator A is on the DoE's senior committee, while Senator B is not. Guess what ends up buried? There's a host of reasons.
I’m still sceptical, assuming I understand you correctly. As a consumer, or a developer, my answer to that would be, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." The first group won't be interested in buying a home if they need to rent out multi-million dollar equipment just to hang a new wall lamp, and the second group won't be able to sell a home like that to the first. Metal homes are one thing. I can see that, as well as stronger homes. But mech-proof housing is going to cost more than (say) hurricane-proof housing. 10x more may not be unreasonable. Unless it's government mandated, and I'm not sure the construction lobby would tolerate that. Safe rooms or aftermarket cladding I would happily agree with, but not the whole house. Ore and power costs are only a small part of the problem. If the rapid prototyping construction equipment and/or heavy lifting crane/mech needed to install it has an 18 month backlog, then that's going to dominate the price. And the amount of equipment will depend on average demand, not peak demand. If you don't have enough, you have a waiting list and high prices. If you have a lot of excess you're potentially adding recommission and then decommission fees. Plus there are health and safety issues, which means certification fees. A one ton wall while in motion is never going to be safe for anyone, which also adds to the cost. Even if rapid prototyping/fabbing massively reduces construction costs, this method of defence still has to compete against others. Not to go too much into the big gun thing but Brahmos carries a warhead twice as heavy as an entire LRM-20 missile, and Storm Shadow carries a warhead 3 times heavier. Fabbing 20,000 large anti-mech missiles (or a few really big lasers) may simply be cheaper and more effective than fabbing 20,000 (or 20,000,000!) mech-proof homes.
A simple rapidly built home doesnt have to be anything other than 4-5 steel shipping containers welded together. Its pretty easy to outfit one in a pleasant to live in home with nothing more than off the shelf power tools and the like. And a shipping container home built out of a higher gauge of material could probably be at least machine gun resistant. prefabbed FTW A home made from prefabbed boxes welded together built out of steel (or material of your choice) is anything but difficult to make, fragile, or hard to assemble.
Make the outer structure and the main supports able to take mechs. The internal walls are less vital to make super strong.
You have to remember with the size of computer in BT would limit the internet and factory machine Make them more like go for the “one BIG plant” idea not the many smaller plant, as they can always ship what need to where it need. Given time in RL think what 3D printers will do to larger factories and what they could do in BT
On the note of prefabbed shipping container houses, there's one that's currently being built near me. The guy stacked seven of them (four at ground level, and the other three as a 2nd story) together, with the top three turned 90 degrees, and he's got wood paneling he's adding to it to make the final version look like it's more of a log house. He's got plans that one of the top three will have it so you can lower down the outer wall to act as an upper balcony/patio (42ft x 8ft...sheesh) for parties facing the lake.
