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Topic: So what exactly ARE these resources? (Read 15930 times)
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Shiver
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EDIT: Valaggar is retarded. Please disregard this topic.
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« Last Edit: June 28, 2007, 10:22:15 pm by Shiver »
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Captain Smith
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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)
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chmmravatar
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WHAT IS DONE IS DONE
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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?
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chmmravatar
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WHAT IS DONE IS DONE
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Damn, pre-empted once more!
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Captain Smith
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you did well.  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)...
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Shiver
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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.
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Shiver
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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.
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AnonomouSpathi
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Spathi? What spathi? You're imagining, hunam.
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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.
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Kohr-Ah_Primat
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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.
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We are the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah.
Our nature, the fulfillment of our fate requires your destruction.
You are filth. It is now your time to be cleansed.
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Pages: [1] 2 3
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And Oxygen is solid at some temperatures/pressures.