[Loser]

New Technology for 2408.1

Core Mining Facility

Drawing minerals from the depths of the planetary bodies on which we live not only means setting shafts deep into the ground, it means developing equipment and shafts themselves that can withstand the torrentous currents, hellacious pressures, and incredible temperatures that exist deep within any body large enough to support a population.

To reach these depths, and more importantly to provide equipment with a useful lifespan at these depths, it must be possible to extend solid structures into the mantle of a rocky world or the equivelent inhospitable area of an icy or gaseous world. These structures must allow the passage of quipment to draw minerals from deep in the mantle or even the rich core of a world, must be maintainable and accessable for said maintainance, and must be able to hold back the mammoth forces that surround them.

To achieve this, a diamond ceramic scafold is lowered into the magmic masses a a borehole established at the crust-magma discontinuity. Supercoils capable of generating powerfull magnetic fields are brought down to the surface of the magma, and then down below the discontinueity, as they travel down the scafold and push the magmic mass, high-pressure gasses, or dangerous fluids away from the scafold.

The next layer of the scafold is wider, and the process is continued, with the scafold slowly being lowered below the dinscontinueity, pushing the surrounding material away from it as it goes. Eventually, a conic strucutre will extend down to the core of the world, from which rich metalics may be mined, if the world possesses them.

Because the gravity involved decreases as the mass 'below' the work is decreased, as the work approaches the core of the world, this cone can be of a relativly narrow width, making it feasible to actually reach all the way to the core, or at least the core/mantle interface. Nonetheless, the scafold is a truely immense constuction project, and will consume the major portion of its own mineral yeild in its maintainance.

The design incorporates a total of fifteen layers of redundancy in the magnetic field, as a breach would result in magma or other dangerous super-heated, super-pressurized substances flooding the entirety of the cone almost immidiately. The would destroy any equpiment within the scaffold, kill any personel working below the crust/mantle interface, and likely render irrecoverable the remainder of the scaffold, if it did not simply destory it.

While the constuction costs of this titanic project are two-thirds again those of our original Mineral Mining Facilities, it should yield entirely on quarter more general minerals anually, allowing the project to pay off its additional costs, even with its extravagant maintainance fees, and continue returning superior mineral yeilds.

Vaporizing Miners

By using the same diamond ceramic consturction materials and close manipulation of magnetic fields, the Ministry of Science, in cooperation with Avalon Heavey Industries, has developed an advanced means for remote minging of general minerals.

Rather than physically extracting the valueble minerals form asteriods or other uninhabited bodies by means of digging hardware or conventional explosives, this new design brings to bear powerfull close range T/CT accelerators much like the Anti-Proton Beam.

Individual ions of anti-hydrogen are thrown at the target from a close range, and the resulting heat of the reaction converts much of the target area into a vapor. These vapors are cought by the same machinery on whch the vaporizing beams are mounted, and diverted from their ballisitic courses byu powerfull magnetic fields.

The diamond ceramic construction of major components of the vaporizing miner machinery allows the robotic drone to keep up this abusive behavior for extended periods, likely outLasting the usefullness of the mined body.

The sorting process in the magnetic fields and the comprehensive gathering techniques of the explosive, vaporizing extraction technique allow an increase in productivity in excess of thrity percent over the original design, while intial constuction and maintainance costs are increased by fifty percent. However, this technique will wear down the mineral content of any given body no faster than our original approach, thereby making it a far more efficient course to pursue.