Value of Ore and mining

[Agmen of Eladesor]

The thread that Thexare had about factory ships made me think of something that is probably a bit too realistic for people of this game.

But hopefully everyone realizes that raw mined ore prices in the game are ridiculously out of line with the actual processed metal prices.

Yes, I know mining is something that can bring lots of people together for an activity. I've done it myself. But I have to ask - if all we're doing is simply busting up the rocks, then why are those broken rocks so much more valuable than the actual refined metal? Mining ships at least make sounds that simulate that they're actually doing something with the ore that they shoot with mining lasers and then tractor in.

I'll use two real world metals for an example. A very good, gold bearing vein of ore is going to net you 1 ounce of gold for every ton of rock processed. So you're going to get 100 ounces of gold, you need to figure on processing at LEAST 100 tons of gold ore. A good bed of copper is going to be around 1% yield, so that puts you getting 200 pounds of copper out of each ton of copper ore processed.

I know there's no specific and set size on what a ship can carry - we simply say that they're 5,000 unit cargo ships, for example. But it's sort of ridiculous that 5,000 units of ore is worth so much more than 5,000 units of the actual processed metal. 5,000 tons of gold ore - which is roughly 4,000 cubic yards in size - is worth the same as 5,000 ounces of gold - which is only 312.5 pounds, or the volume of 11 standard gold bars.

For reference, you're talking 500 truck loads of ore of trucks this size:



to end up with a finished product that's only 11 of these:



I'm just throwing this out for discussion purposes - I don't really have a fix, and I realize that it's a game. It's just something that has bugged me for a long time.

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Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.