The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

EDIT: Valaggar is retarded. Please disregard this topic.

OK my cheese ball chemistry classes pay off for an innane thing that don't make me money...

Corrosives: Basically defined as something that causes obvious damage to living tissue upon direct contact.  Think acids and bases here...like Sulfuric acid, Sodium Hydroxide, Hydrochloric Acid, etc, etc.  I don't have the game or source in front of me right now so it's hard to tell how the game defines it....but if my memory is right, this is pretty close. (http://www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/corrosive.html)

Rare Earths: Made up of  Lanthanides & Actinides.  Called Rare earth because they are very rare to find and obtain compared to the other substances out there.  The game is kind of a misnomer since "radioactives" are Rare Earths in lots of cases.  (http://www.chemicalelements.com/groups/rareearth.html)

And to correct you...

Noble Gases: The set of gases on the right side of the periodic table which have complete atomic shells and a very big NON-affinity for reacting with anything.  How are they useful in daily life?  Well, we put them in tubes and run electricity through them and weeellll you know what happens.
(http://www.chemicalelements.com/groups/noblegases.html)

Commons refer to elements you can easily find on earth (oxygen, hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, carbon, etc). They're not necessarily "useless" they're just so common that they aren't worth many RUs

Corrosives are mostly acids (hydrochloric, hydrocyanic, sulfuric, phosphoric, etc). They're useful for industrial manufacturing purposes...also some bases. Again, these are really common (or can be easily made).

Nobel Gases are those in the last column on the periodic table (Helium, Radon, Argon, Xenon, Neon...). But for purposes of SC, Helium is in the "commons" because it is pretty common in the universe.

Some Rare Earth metals are: Cerium, Dysprosium, Erbium, Europium, Gadolinium, Holmium, Lanthanum, Lutetium, Neodymium, Praseodymium, Samarium, Terbium, Thulium, Yttrium, Ytterbium. They basically are metals that you usually don't find on earth.

I guess you haven't taken chemistry?

Damn, pre-empted once more!

you did well.  ;D  Actually pointed out something I forgot to mention...meanwhile, two more questions couched in there I see and forgot to address....

Precious metals have their uses....85-90% of all the silver produced is used in photographic film in the US.  I'm sure it has other uses.  Gold is very useful because it can be made very pure and fashioned very well - you can make very very very thin wires with it.  Actually, it's very useful as a conductor too since it resists rust very well - you'll find gold used in all kinds of electrical applications.  Platinum also has very similar properties....(I'll leave looking these things up as an exercise to the reader)...

No, I did not take chemistry. I took three science classes because I'm too lazy for four and I just so happened to find biology more interesting.

I sort of knew all the stuff you mine is on the periodic table of elements, but I always ignored that because I thought finding a large deposit of solid oxygen, extracting it, then flying home and building ships out of it ridiculous.

Anyhow, I understand what corrosives are now but rare earths still confuse me because I don't know what they would be used for.

Well, maybe you mine large amounts of oxygen, and it is put into the oxygen tanks in your ship after being processed? sort of to allow you to breathe? ;) And Oxygen is solid at some temperatures/pressures.

Since you spend the entire game in space, I doubt they use something as low-tech as the oxygen tanks we use on our current spacecraft. They must have some way of recycling the oxygen, and I don't mean the old fashioned way with plants.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/r1/rarearmet.asp

There you go.

Well, maybe the guys from Perri-Air fill the Oxygen in cans and sell it to your crew - whenever someone is sick of the recycled air and smelly feet, you take a whiff out of your personal stock of goodies (like in SpaceBalls)?

Thing to remember is that the resources used in construction aren't just the things that make up a ship.  I may not want to build my ship out of oxygen, but somehow, I suspect having a good supply of oxygen around would be a good thing.  Not for life support, but to power blowtorches and other chemical processes.  

Rare Earth Elements I believe have uses in building electronic circuitry.  I seem to remember crystaline garnets based on Gallium, Gadolinium, and Ytterbium having quite a bit of value, due to some unique properties they possess.  I'll be damned if I know what they are though.

I imagine huge amounts of resources go into the manufacturing processes.  Used for welding, etching, purifying, refining, molding, and doing god knows whatever else you need to do to build a ship.  Others are chemically altered, used to make plastics, ceramics, crystals for lasers, and god only knows what else goes into a 23rd century human cruiser, let alone a precurson workhorse vessel.

Plus you also have to keep in mind that even though precious metals aren't exactly a valued commodity in the war against the Ur-Quan, they're very dense compared to most other metals. If the humans have some sort of recycling device to convert one sort of matter to another, or matter to energy, precious metals will have much more density (mass, atoms, molecules, etc) than a similar amount of say....helium.

Commons are probably still useable, but their efficiency after refined into a useable source of building material/fuel is probably marginal. It probably takes about as much energy/material to turn them into something useful as they would provide in the end. They could still be used as is for marginally useful purposes, and that's probably the value they have in freeing up RU around the starbase that would be wasted by crew having to make do without these common resources.

Corrosives are probably denser and more useful as actual building materials, but are dangerous enough in their present state that they have to actually be processed to be not so...corrosive. Which makes them slightly less valuable than commons.

....just ignore what I said guys. Primat-info is very very sketchy and unreliable, after all.

Why exactly are these resources?  They're little blue, red and green dots of course!  I think P&F did a great job organising the different types of resources you pick up with the lander.  It makes logical sense that commons like Helium and Hydrogen, etc. would be the cheepest ones.  It was good of them to use rare lathinides and other elements on the periodic table, but I liked how they invented new radioactives and exotics, many of which are just fictional creations of chemsitry rather than actual substances.

You know, when I first played the game back in the days, the very first time my lander touched down on a planet I was eating some M&Ms - Déjà-Vu!

The resources are nothing but chocolate-filled treats for the crew and especially for the base-commander!

*sly look*
Ohooooo! I get it! Hayes has a giant warehouse full of spare parts for your ship, but he ain't unlocking it until you bring him back some chocolate goodies!

More uses for Precious metals: Silver has the lowest "pure" resistance of any known metal (although it only beats out copper by somewhere between 10^-8 and 10^-9 ohm-meters, it's still about half of gold, the next best).  There are cheap-to-manufacture alloys, only slightly more expensive than buying silver, which have resistance another 10 or 11 powers of ten behind it, but if resources and energy are a problem, then refining, manufacutre, and experimentation wouldn't be a possibility.  For the curious, most of the alloys are Copper or Bismuth based, the one I was forced to memorize was Bi-Strontium-Calcium-Cu-Oxide
Gold, along with being the third best pure conductor, is very ductile and malleable, meaning it's much easier to make into thin sheets or exact wires.  Emergency replacement parts for the ship as damaged in battle (why do you think it never loses performace as stuff blasts away?) that work almost as well and go up quick are better than asking for a three-hour "time out" while you try to get the gun hooked up again.
Platinum is THE inert metal in electro-chemistry.  Meaning, if you're trying to make a battery and both or either of the ions in solution don't turn into a plain, uncharged metal, then you use platinum.  Since the ions in solution determine the voltage and they're not all metals, if you need an exact voltage you sometimes don't have a choice (and, since it doesn't let the ions bond to it, the problem of losing voltage as time goes on doesn't occur).  And again, if you don't have time to make something perfect and it's fried in mid-fight, can just stab attach a Pt rod in place of whatever was there, and it'll work better.

Wow... It's sad I could recall all of this (except the relative resistivities of Silver and Gold) off the top of my head.  At least I don't know many practical applications of Lanthanide/Actinide series metals.  Many.

All the radioactives are real.

*is wowed as she reads #999's quite flat and factual response* Very Kohr-Ah of you! I'm sure soon you'll be promoted to #998! Wouldn't that be something!

They may be real, per se, but most of the radioactives listed off in the game don't seem to have a real use in our world.  In fact, most of them are creative uses of substances that would often be used as ressources like that.  Anyways, that's what I meant by invented... stretching the chemicalogical boundaries.

Not to mention, some of these materials you would have to severely doubt the usefulness of, in almost any circumstance.

I never doubted a single material in that list. why? because Hayes told me he could use those. And Hayes was my mentor. He was my friend. He wouldn't lie to me, would he? He really needed all those minerals, didn't he? Please tell me he did.... I'm so confused.

Geez, I used to think I was smart until I read this post.  Color me stupid.  I didn't know Jeopardy's writers played SC2.  One of you guys needs to spend a little time and come up with a cure for cancer.  At the very least, invent hover-boards, or something.

Umm, that's my job.
;)

As for the radioactives, well, yeah, we don't have uses for these NOW. But I can think of some uses, along the lines of the gamma ray laser method (pump in a gamma ray with the energy that a nucleus could emit, and it will emit one, and also let the one you sent in pass through. Massive amplification of gamma rays!) Tons of pure astatine might be how the point defense works.

It's called chemistry class.  I know, it's hard to believe that I of all people attend school, but I do.  The one type of subtsnace that P&F left out was alcohol!  Now there's a necessary resource for space exploration.

"Light load this time Captain?"

"No, we found quite a lot."

"But your storage bays are empty!"

"Well, see, we kinda drank it on the way home."

"But captain, what about the ur-Quan war?"

"Screw the war, what about my hangover!"

Hayes: "Captain, we've transferred the alcohol aboard the station... ...  processing materials.
...
...
...
... .. huh?  What's happening?  Why am I so...  happy all of a sudden?  Captain, this strange liquid seems to be having an effect on the citizns of the station.  In fact, their sexual urges have risen tenfold and most have caught a virus we have named 'dance fever'.  Captain, whatever it is, the people of the station are demanding more!  I WANT MORE!  *gurgle, burp*  ..  ...  *hick* ... Have I ever told you how much I love you, Captain...?"

heh. if you've ever talked to your Talking pet out of boredom, you'll find that there are two ensigns who have a crush on you.... ;D

...and you will soon learn that once word getse out, all of your crew will think of nasty violent deaths for the Dnyarri whenever he attempts to read their minds again.

So okay... the Captain needs lots of booze...but no pretzels? No snack foods? No Aguuti Noodles?

Captain has a full complement of tasty molluscs aboard if he is hungry. There is also the possibility to have some hot Yehat wings, genuine Umgah Jell-O, wok fried Supox, or Peking Pkunk.

A Zoq-Fot-Pik salad is always a healthy option, or why not simply go fro Tradash tartar? Lots of food in space...

Fried squid-like VUX, and the ever-popular Mycons with garlic butter.

Why, space is a gourmand's delight!

Yeah, but those you have to rip out of destroyed ships... Which is a bother if you're drunk already. That's why I go for the "Eat your allies" option, it's so much easier to catch the little buggers. and my Iron Chef, Shigeru the Shofixti really cooks some great meals....

Just to throw some more facts into the mix, I would like to add that Carbon (definately a common element) and Gold (Precious of course) have found some interesting uses in nanotechnology.  No doubt some of you may have heard of carbon nano-tubes and perhaps less of you have heard that when Gold is arranged in a certain 20-atom (or so, I'm not good at remembering numbers) it becomes a perfect insulator.

Oh yeah, you might as well throw in some common elements to turn into plasma as well. :P

Thraddash Fruit Cakes are the best.

Try as we might, we just can't make this friendly thing work, Teacher.
Even your idea about exchanging the ritual gifts, the `Fruit Cakes' has had problems.
It seems that nobody actually wants to eat the Fruit Cakes
however, on the plus side, due to the Fruit Cakes' density and other physical characteristics
they make excellent projectile weapons!

Very healthy for your teeth.

And to remain on-topic, I'd like to stress that:
20 kilotons of oxygen have the same value as 1 kiloton of Tzo Crystals. And all resources are processed and transformed into RUs. And an Eluder can be made of a lot of Commons or a few drops of Exotics just as well. Which means that they, in fact, "cut down" them somehow, probably breaking them down into neutrons, protons, electrons and some energy (hey, it's sci-fi).

Hey now, theres an interesting thought. What if specific ships needed x amount of RUs + some combination of minerals. Maybe some precious + radioactives, or zome tzos

I've no idea why Valaggar choose to resuscitate this thread, but this piques my interest. Why did Shiver go back and edit his original post three years after the fact? What secrets where hidden here, deep within the heart of the forum?

I don't even remember what this topic was about, don't ask me.