I'm trying to come up with things that can happen to you and choices for how you respond if you could be an asteroid miner in the future. The gameplay depends pretty heavily on resource management and response to situational or random events. What can happen is broken down based on where you are, the type of characters you're with, the asteroid you're mining and who you work for. Most choices revolve around risking a resource (like air or physical energy) for some gain (bonus cash or better relationship with fellow miners). What I have so far goes a bit like this: Type of Asteroid

• Affects amount of bonus materials you get to personally keep (like water ice you can turn into air, lowering your weekly air cost)
• Claim jumpers - Report them, let them bribe you, fight them?
• Dangerous rock pockets - Spend time working around? Risk suit damage which uses patches and costs time and lost air?

Type of Company

• Chance of gear breakdown - Repair or replace (time cost)? Redline your gear and possibly cause an accident?
• Company might not pay - Keep working hoping they recover, quit at a loss, threaten sabotage?
• Work hard - Impress boss, maybe injure yourself, maybe earn respect or envy of coworkers?
• Types of fellow miners that you work with (inept amateurs, jerks, professionals)

Crew You Work With

• Troublemakers - Defend your honor against insults at the risk of racking up demerits which eventually get you fired?
• Thieves - Spend time setting traps to catch them? Buy better / redundant gear? Make them friends so they don't target you?
• Snoops (affects players / other characters trying to smuggle) - Help or hinder them?

General Events

• Radiation (solar flare, emergency ship thrust) - Get to safety or leave ore (which might be contaminated or stolen)? Leave gear, possibly losing new find data?
• Passing ship - Competitors (new work opportunity), bandits (fight, flee, bribe), "Leisure" ship (gambling and carousing at the cost of a lower rep with moralist characters), church ship (join new religion and switch careers or work to convert your coworkers so you all gain productivity bonuses)

Hopefully this gives the general idea. Any thoughts? PS: Feel free to make up any random stat if you need to justify an event-- it's what I'm doing [grin]

Shouldn't that be 2049er?

In a cavern, in a canyon,Excavating for a mineDwelt a miner forty niner,And his daughter ClementineOh my darling, oh my darling,Oh my darling, Clementine!Thou art lost and gone foreverDreadful sorry, Clementine...

Today heard mostly reworked as a football chant.

Don't forget the natives. They might be hostile. They might not like their sacred places being mined. Don't forget the mega-corporations trying to steal your claim in court as they try to sabotage your works on the ground. The HBO series Deadwood portrayed some of the hazards faced by independent miners. Even though it wasn't set in the California Gold Rush, that was quite a show, unmatched in many respects. Definitely worth "mining" for ideas, imo.

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Original post by LessBread Shouldn't that be 2049er?

Heh. Maybe he went with 2099er to set it further in the future?

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Don't forget the natives. They might be hostile. They might not like their sacred places being mined.

You're mining an asteroid, though. It doesn't have natives. It's a transient system that passes through, so you can't even have planetary-based peoples who regard it as a sacred celestial object. You can, however, have it mistaken for a comet which has spiritual significance to people (imagine a sect that held Haley's Comet as sacred, for instance), but that would effectively be a random event.

As an aside, I never watched Deadwood. Maybe I'll give it a shot someday. Couldn't sit through There Will Be Blood, though, so if they have any similarities beyond superficial setting markers, I might not like it.

Why not call it 2199 then, that would be even farther into the future? I'm just saying if you're gonna use the "Miner ###9er", keep it in line with the source, which is 1849er California Gold Rush, San Francisco 49er's and all that.

As for natives and the like. You're right, but all that's open to imagination yes?

"Deadwood" is more like "Unforgiven" than "There Will Be Blood". For starters, "Deadwood" is set in North Dakota in the 1870's. "There Will Be Blood" is set in California in the 1900's. "Deadwood" is an ensemble show, "There Will Be Blood" was all about the character played by Daniel Day Lewis. The only thing the two have in common, really, are an American setting and intense dramatic moments. "Deadwood" is a Western - barrooms, gambling, brothels, mining, shootouts, plague, calvary, pinkertons - but it doesn't present a sugar coated idyllic past - just the opposite. The prurience isn't as interesting as the language of the dialogue, which is remarkable. There are 36 episodes. The plot lines build from episode to episode. The first few few episodes lean heavily on the mythology of Wild Bill Hickok, mostly as introduction to the locale. The show really takes off towards the end of the first season and keeps flying well into the second season. The show began to meander in the third season. Imo, it was canceled due to personality differences between David Milch and HBO after HBO dismissed Milch's patron at the network. It's really a shame that they didn't shoot a fourth season to properly wrap up the story.

You might want to read Ben Bova's 'Rock Rats' series, which covers exactly this kind of thing, for inspiration.

Some random ideas:

Corporate espionage. Infiltrate agents into your competition's ships so you can keep tabs on where they are and what discoveries they're making. And keep an eye out for enemy corporations doing the same thing to you. Good intel might mean you can skip thousands of 'dud' rocks already scanned by your competitors.

Rescue missions. In the middle of the asteroid belt, there's no one but your competitors to come and help you if something goes disastrously wrong. Asteroid miner ethics might say you have to help anyone broadcasting a distress signal. Help and gain unwanted crew members (greater drain on air/water/food) but potentially gain salvage and intel. Refusal to help might have no bad consequences if no-one finds out, or massive loss of respect amongst your miners (leading to decreased ship moral, loss of trading parters, higher costs when resupplying).

Military test zone. Accidentally stumble into a section being used by a government for testing of new military tech. Ignore the automated warnings and maybe you'll get a nice quiet area with no pesky competitors around, and possibly find abandoned/lost millitary tech. Or you might be spotted and have half an army asking serious questions. Or you might get caught in the explosion of a new weapon under test...

I'm not sure how the big picture is supposed to work exactly, but I'd incorporate some form of risk/reward scenario. For example, asteroids orbiting the event horizon of a black hole (I have no idea if the physics can even work that way) are far more valuable than those in a normal planetary orbit. Obviously though, there is a great deal more risk there. So, you might have something like:

-Orbiting a star = very easy, low reward
-Orbiting a planet = easy, slightly more reward
-Orbiting a planet, but close to the sun = medium, average reward
-Orbiting a binary sun = medium hard, slightly more than average reward
-Orbiting a comet (or is a comet) = hard, high reward
-Orbiting anything in hostile territory = very hard, very high reward
-Orbiting a black hole = impossible?, unimaginable rewards

Whatever numbers are associated with this is meaningless at this point so I haven't listed any. There are also other things in space that could act as modifiers to this scenario such as star type, nebulae, planet type, etc. If you want to make the game seem exciting however, trying to mine a rock in the middle of a war zone that is being sucked into a black hole sounds kind of cool to me :)

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Original post by LessBread I'm just saying if you're gonna use the "Miner ###9er", keep it in line with the source, which is 1849er California Gold Rush, San Francisco 49er's and all that.

Oy! Here I go and make it 2099 so I hopefully evade pedantic comments about how we probably won't even be on Mars by 2049 let alone in the asteroids with freelance corporations and private concerns and what do I get?? Thematic curmudgeonry!

Okay, just for you Lessbread there WILL be native life in the asteroids-- exotic, cosmic background radiation drinking intelligent microbes with a penchant for exactitude in wordplay. Happy now?????!? :P

OK, but don't you dare forget the Pinkertons! [grin]

What about haulage firms? You might not have the cargo space to haul large quantities of ore to make mining profitable. So you outsource the cargo hauling to a haulage firm. Different firms would have different rates, reliability rating, and defensive ratings. Do you use Big Ron’s Shipping who charges a fixed 2000 credits and he might turn up once a month, and is know form dumping is cargo and running when attacked. Or Q Armed Haulage who turn up like clock work once a week, and have veteran pilots flying fighter escorts, but charge 30% of the cargo delivered as a fee.

You could also have claim based game play, maybe that asteroid you found doesn’t have as much H3 as you first hoped but with a few bore holes here and there topped up with purple algae the scans should make it look like its does long enough for you to sell the claim on to some other poor chump.

What about different mining styles? Sending in suited miners with laser cutters ensures that you have no wastage but is the slowest. Detonating charges and breaking off chunks of the asteroid is the most dangerous but is quick and has only limited wastage. While using an orbital gravity crusher allows your harvest an entire asteroid quickly but can only be configured to harvest a single substance at a time and so produces a lot of wastage. All have the uses and advantages you wouldn’t use the gravity crusher on an asteroid rich in a variety of minerals, but it would be your best bet if you wanted to harvest trace elements in any reasonable sized quantity.

Also don’t forget about alien artifacts if scifi books have taught us one thing its that asteroids are filled with ancient alien artifacts whether they be alien spaces ships or crystal keys that unlock the fountain of immortality.

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Original post by TechnoGoth What about haulage firms?

Brilliant! I think this would make good mid-level miner gameplay where you're in charge of a team breaking in a specific claim. Even better, as a rookie these are the sorts of decisions you could learn about over time, especially if you don't get paid because the hauler chickened out.

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You could also have claim based game play, maybe that asteroid you found doesn’t have as much H3 as you first hoped but with a few bore holes here and there topped up with purple algae the scans should make it look like its does long enough for you to sell the claim on to some other poor chump.

[grin] Okay, got to add this. It should be flipped, though, so you can be burned by the same.

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What about different mining styles? Sending in suited miners with laser cutters ensures that you have no wastage but is the slowest. Detonating charges and breaking off chunks of the asteroid is the most dangerous but is quick and has only limited wastage. While using an orbital gravity crusher allows your harvest an entire asteroid quickly but can only be configured to harvest a single substance at a time and so produces a lot of wastage.

I like this, plus the crusher could be extremely dangerous / hazardous because it flicks fragments toward nearby miners or in orbit of the rock if it's big enough.

Mixing this with OrangyTang's good ideas, I'm starting to see diplomacy possibilities. You have N concerns, private and corporate, mining a certain area. Each could have different relations to the other and your company, and this could affect rescues, banding together against raiders and claim jumping.

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Also don’t forget about alien artifacts if scifi books have taught us one thing its that asteroids are filled with ancient alien artifacts whether they be alien spaces ships or crystal keys that unlock the fountain of immortality.

Hahaha, like LB's natives, it may not make much sense but it's still fun.