[TML] Molding Ships

[Richard Aiken]

On 9/23/07, Jerry W Barrington <jursamaj at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In any case, I believe uneven inflation is inevitable, and would cause the
> bubble to burst rather than form a useful shell.

No way to know in advance, of course.  But the "glassblower" method
someone mentioned should allow even inflation, particularly if one
uses several lances.

> And in reference to the utility of this shell, if feasible to build, I
> recall Niven looking at a *rock* asteroid.  Even the "nickel/iron" asteroids
> are still nickel & iron *ore*, not pure lumps of metal.

Yes.  But smelting the asteroid should turn that iron into steel
(assuming you have a mass with the proper proportion of components and
include the proper amount additives).  In this case, uneven heating is
actually a plus, as the convection currents involved mix the steel for
you.

BTW, in preparing to use the Bowman system in my new campaign, I read
somewhere that "ore" isn't the proper term to use for what makes up
asteroids.  Ore is - technically - the highly-concentrated mineral
deposits provided for us by the action of water erosion here on Earth.
 When "mining" asteroids (or other bodies without a water biosphere),
we probably won't find convenient pockets of ore.

Instead, the minerals will likely be more-or-less evenly distributed
throughout the mass of the asteroid.  To retrieve them, we'll probably
have to process the entire asteroid.  So smelting the whole thing
would be pretty much standard procedure, anyway.   For non-terrestrial
planets, we would have to use large-scale strip-mining.

In other words, independent prospectors would be concerned only with
finding likely asteroids, not with processing them (as that requires a
major facility).  So the mining procedures given in the Bowman
adventure for use with characters simplify down to registering and
selling discovered claims.  Further, as all the Seeker's cargo space
can now be used to carry life-support supplies, groups can stay "on
the hunt" for much longer between port calls.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein