What natural minerals and metals are considered precious or rare?

[Andrew]

This excludes things like the alloys and things made for manufacturing like Zesuanium etc.

I was reading an article the other day about asteroid mining. In the article, the author described how in an age of asteroid and off-world mining that we would see minerals and metals like platinum, gold, diamonds, etc that we consider rare or precious on earth no longer be considered that due to their abundance on various asteroids, outer planets, etc. It made me wonder, what gemstones, metals, and minerals are considered precious in the setting?

 

[Charmaylarg Dufrain]

Believe it or not Its Water. Mainly ice. There's reasons behind it but they arent relevant to SARP where the baseline tech already exists, only us lowly earthnoid losers.

For SARP tho?

Nothing, i think, if you ignore faction-restricted stuff like zesu and the neshatens crystals and the like. And would instead be rare phenomena that the settings tech doesnt understand or cant replicate.

Resources are plentiful and abundant and for as long as i've been here the only time anyone ever bit off more than they could chew was Osman, who ended up trying to produce more military ships and stuff than they could afford and that was only cause they didn't have the infrastructure to produce it all step by step.

The only things in setting hard to produce are the lorath materials they are renown for as well as Nerimium, and Zanarium, etc. And these are only hard to produce because of the sheer logistics (Bulk resources, alloy mega forges, etc.) you need to create them that factions smaller than yamatai or nepleslia cant achieve on their own. Lack of resources has never been the focus of any of the factions save 188604 as it would mean leaning a bit too far into hard-scifi which no other group in the setting has really focussed on as much as them since or possibly even before them for as long as i've been here.

I think its not a bad idea if there was a resource that was important enough for all factions to want and could be used as not some power creep feature but as an RP tool, however. But im not imaginative to think of what that could be or how to do it~

 

[Soresu]

After so many wars and population booms between 'discovered' races, or amongst many of the established races. Or just simple rebuilding, I kind of want some kind of scarcity to happen. Or perhaps some establishment of rarity regarding certain ores, rare earths and the like. Gold for example is a very versatile metal beyond just looking pretty. Including silver, platinum etc etc. Some of these things could be very abundant (Since we seem to have a hard on for writing 'Resource Rich' systems all over the place) or incredibly scarce. But yeah! I'm very interested in such a discussion regarding this subject.

 

[Ethereal]

No clue really - whatever the base components are for those superalloys, although I'm unsure anyone actually decided to state that anywhere. Those alloys surely can't just appear from thin air, right? Other than those, nothing much really matters, especially as matter/atomic reassembly technology exists, which might entirely invalidate what I've just said. I guess eventually it just boils down to whatever is the densest or atomically heaviest substance so you can get the most particles into the smallest space for transport?

 

[Ametheliana]

The Value of Gold & Other Assorted Resources?

So, recently, in the SCSC giveaway, my character Jax came into possession of a tractor trailer full of gold. In our standards, we would be set for life, and so would our children. But as I understand it, the Yamataian government is able to produce unlimited quantities of gold using aether...

stararmy.com

In this thread Wes spitballed 2 million KS per metric ton of gold and 25 million KS for 112.5 cubic meters of rhenium. Hoshi has sold a storage container each of palladium and phosphorus for 10 million, too. So if you can find the right buyer, you could definitely sell mined materials for pretty pennies.

 

[Andrew]

Thanks. I suppose it doesn't hurt to show what I was reading that led to this question. Just some reading I found interesting -

Mission to rare metal asteroid could spark space mining boom

Scientists think it is mostly made of nickel and iron, but could also be abundant in more valuable metals such as platinum and gold.

www.nbcnews.com

Precious metal hunters look to outer space

Two firms have announced plans to send missions to asteroids within the next three years in order to mine the ore and metals on the space rocks.

www.cnbc.com

Giant golden asteroid contains enough heavy metals to make everyone on Earth a billionaire – and Nasa is heading there in 2022

NASA is eyeing up a nearby asteroid that contains enough gold to make everyone on Earth a billionaire. Psyche 16 is nestled between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and is made of solid metal. As wel…

www.thesun.co.uk

Reading these articles was what caused me to ask the question just for reference. Theoretically in the SARPiverse companies like the Mining Guild are mining these metals and materials en masse which in turn would drive their value down.

Anyway, beyond that, it makes me wonder on a personal level what kind of gemstones would be considered exotic, what kind of jewelry would be considered a luxury. For example, what really cool space gem would be the hot prize in an engagement ring, etc.

But, thanks to those who gave answers so far!

Also @Charmaylarg Dufrain I loved your answer due to being a huge fan of the Expanse, where water is a serious commodity, to the point their much lower than SARP tech has developed water mining vessels that capture water asteroids that are taken back to be melted down for places in the belt and Mars.

 

[Wes]

This is not a complete answer to the question (sorry) but water does have a rough value in SARP: 2.5 KS per cubic meter.

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=water

 

[Alex Hart]

Water is actually incredibly valuable in SARP, it's between 5 and 10 times its value on earth (at least in developed nations, based on my memory of some research from a while back. That could be wrong though in which case ignore this part of the post). This does check out, given that relatively few planets on SARP have water that can be made drinkable/usable (Most of them are gas giants or rocks) and mining comets is time consuming, which drives up cost.

Beyond that, certain naturally rare elements (Strontium, Thulium, chromium, etc) would likely still be valuable, but less so by about the amount that gold is.

 

[Whisper]

I think SARP is largely at the point where most materials can be created synthetically, provided you have the raw atoms to do it and sufficient energy. Energy is pretty cheap whether you use aether or one of the other very advanced techs - hell, aether itself can be used to create materials.

So I don't think anything necessarily has to be rare. I think 'hard to produce' or 'hard to transport' are the real driving factors. I'll second Char and other's mention of water. It's needed in large quantities, takes up a lot of space, and isn't very common. It's absolutely crucial for almost any settlement, too, which guarantees its value.

Even a planet made entirely of potable water presents challenges in terms of acquiring the water, storing it for transport, and the transit itself. I wouldn't be surprised if such a planet had been emptied out at least once.

Other materials might be more valuable, but they're needed in substantially smaller quantities.

I can't imagine that any of the factions really struggle with acquiring and transporting water, but I imagine it's a crucial element of all their logistics. Water reclamation and purification systems are probably a big deal, too.

'Breathable atmosphere' is a fast follower to water itself.

 

[Alex Hart]

I do wish there was more stuff that was rare or that we couldn't manufacture FWIW. The fact that anyone can make anything with no real consideration for natural resources kind of eliminates a lot of the consideration to settling somewhere.

 

[Whisper]

Aether's not super common, especially for civilians, and I think that it's probably still more efficient to collect natural resources (especially those that require minimal processing, like asteroids, gas giants, etc, compared to a planet that supports life) than to synthetically create them.

I do suspect that synthetic manufacturing of materials is pretty common in markets that have high prices for small quantities, like platinum, gold, or copper. The cost-benefit ratio on that production is probably pretty good so long as the market isn't over-saturated and the cost-to-mass ratio makes long distance transit pretty attractive. Compare this to synthetic diamonds today.

The NDC is probably a good example of a faction that can't/isn't printing materials left and right. In my head, we collect raw resources and process them down to something that can be used by things like the Multistruct or Daedalus. That means there's probably a lot of intersystem travel from miners, cargo haulers, etc, feeding both the civilian and military sector.