Salvage in the Belt

I've been working on a Gundam Fanfic of sorts that takes place out in the asteroid belt, a big aspect of the story (beyond pirates) is the presence of salvage out in the belt that people use to survive and fight off the pirates. I recently came to a realization though, the belt is lousy with resources and I've got established ideas for companies that sell custom builds. What conceivable reason would there be to salvage old mobile suits and ships from the one year war that drifted out to the belt?

I ask cause one of the companies is called Europa Salvage and it stakes its claim by scavenging and salvaging broken colonies, old warships, mobile suits, and so on. Would they even have a reason to exist in the belt where mineral resources to build all those exist?

We're talking raw ore vs scrap metal. You'll get big corps asking for ore simply because it gives you a more refined product but most private buyers will ask for scrap because you don't need to refine it.

I guess it would also be cheaper to buy salvage and spare parts compared to ordering a custom build which conceivably would be more expensive.

I hope you're either taking into account or deliberately ignoring the fact that the "asteroid belt" has an approximate volume of 1.4 x 10^25 cubic kilometers, with an average density barely higher than that of empty space. You could consume the entire mass of the planet Earth to manufacture spacecraft, fly all of them out to the belt, and explode them simultaneously, and after a few years your chance of finding a piece of debris larger than a speck of dust in a cubic kilometer of that space would be tiny.

Insert that Hitchhiker's quote if it helps.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 5th 2019 at 3:42:03 PM

Considering in Gundam they regularly grab asteroids and fly them out to the Earth Sphere I figured finding Salvage wouldn't be as hard especially since the size of ships are rather large. So yes I am taking into account the size.

So you're just ignoring realistic scale. Fair enough.

Plus a lot of salvage is often dragged out there and can be found drifting around points of activity and known colonies even if they aren't active. Wouldn't that also be easier to find?

In practice, most battles would indeed be fought close to known locations, and any debris from them would take some time to disperse, but you don't have that long — days, at most — to recover any meaningful amount of it. It's really hard to detect small objects in space that aren't emitting radiation.

Edited to add: You reference Gundam, above, which is a space opera anime. Realism is somewhere down on the list of priorities, below giving the females realistic proportions.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 5th 2019 at 3:43:08 PM

Of course, but Acceptable Breaks from Reality is needed to tell stories, I don't think I'll be getting too many people questioning the idea of salvage companies finding old ships and such. Especially since salvage laws appear so often in fiction even in harder stories.

So to get back onto the original question, the idea of this is to determine reasons why salvage would be a thing in the resource rich belt where the ore to make your giant robot or carrier and colonies exist, why would anyone salvage old models for parts and such?

My current thoughts as to why would be cost and ease of access, it's easier to find salvage parts and cheaper than outright just buying a new model fresh off the line.

Edit: Of course I reference Gundam, I outright said this is a Gundam story in the first post.

Edited by EchoingSilence on Feb 5th 2019 at 2:46:11 PM

I wouldn't worry too much about the economics of it. One thought is that not everyone has access to manufacture or legitimately purchase ships and weapons, so there's a significant black market for them. This would increase the profit margins of salvage operations.

Given the density of the asteroid belt, searching it for salvage would pretty much be the same as searching empty space for salvage. Your chances of finding anything would be very low. I can’t see a salvaged ship or MS ever being cheaper than just buying a new one in that case, which means they’d have to be salvaging them for reasons other than straight monetary value.

Well considering the finding them for salvage is the acceptable break from reality needed for this story, what reasons could there be for finding salvage? Spare parts that aren't as easily replicated? Every MS carries a nuclear fusion or fission reactor so that could be a reason to grab salvage.

Those reactors could give off radiation that would be detectable at a distance, allowing salvage ships to locate them. There's your realism hook. That said, I'm not sure I'd want to put a nuclear reactor in my spaceship that had recently been in another ship that blew up. Quality control on the refurbishment would be a significant concern.

Also, if you've got both fission and fusion reactors in your work... in terms of efficiency that's sort of like comparing a bow and arrow to a long-range artillery piece. Depending on technology, fission reactors could be much easier to build and maintain, but a ship powered by one isn't going to go much faster than a ship powered by chemical rockets. Actually, less, because although the mass of fuel is much smaller, the power output compared to exothermic chemical reactions is far, far lower. (I suppose ships could employ backup fission plants to provide power in the event that their main reactors fail...)

As we are on the topic of fuel, if transuranic elements are still rare in this 'verse, and fission reactors remain a significant source of power for many folks, then it would be worthwhile to salvage one from a wreck simply due to the value of the uranium in it. However, fusion reactors use hydrogen, and you can get that basically for free. Then you're looking at a cost-benefit analysis between locating, salvaging, and refurbishing a reactor from a wreck versus building a new one.

You can get around this a bit if your fusion process works most efficiently with rarer materials. Deuterium and tritium occur naturally, but are much much rarer than plain hydrogen, so if your reactor runs on those (tritium especially), then salvaging it might be worthwhile. For what it's worth, hard sci-fi often assumes that fusion reactors work with a variety of materials. While tritium is best, you can shove plain old hydrogen in them, or even water, since you can use waste energy from the reaction to electrolyze it to extract the hydrogen fuel.

I should note that locating a wrecked reactor via radiation only really works for fission reactors. Fusion leaves very little ionizing radiation behind once it stops and does not irradiate the materials that interact with it. Even tritium, the ideal fuel for conventional fusion, does not emit very much natural radioactivity.

I don't know much about the Gundam 'verse, but are nukes a thing in it? Nuclear warheads would be immensely valuable salvage from any battle.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 6th 2019 at 10:08:59 AM

I’m not sure the material value of the debris would justify the difficulty in recovering it, but for things like mechs and ships the debris would have tremendous intelligence value. The US went to some pretty wild lengths to recover K-129 in the 70s, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see a lot of effort expended to recover wreckage in space. Recovering intact computers and cryptologic equipment would be a ridiculous intelligence coup, even just getting a good look at enemy hardware could potentially reveal weaknesses or discern previously unknown capabilities.

Of course, by the same virtue you’d likely see governments going to significant lengths to prevent wreckage from being recovered.

Nuclear Warheads do exist, as for reactors old Zaku 1s and 2s make use of Nuclear Fission reactors compared to later suits which use the Minovsky Ultracompact reactor which uses Helium-3 from the Jovian system as fuel. Ships themselves use fusion reactors but logically a ship would also have a backup power source in case it fails so conceivably I could justify finding salvage by having ships and such identified by backup reactors still emanating power.

All ships also fly using nuclear rockets as their thrust base except for the asteroid ships which use large engines called thermonuclear pulse engines.

Of course the question here isn't "Is it realistic" or "How hard sci fi is this", the question is "Why bother with salvage in a mineral rich area" to which comments of scrap for private usage compared to companies and lack of access to legitimate ship and mobile suit purchase whether due to cost or availability has seem to have covered it.

Edit: As for , the story actually lacks the main governments of the UC setting due to its nature of being set out in the belt, a area considered trouble and only worth visiting to grab mineral resources. Though would this intel still be of use to the pocket governments that have formed out there?

Edited by EchoingSilence on Feb 6th 2019 at 9:30:37 AM

It would be useful for any government. Who wouldn’t want access to enemy communications and orders of battle, detailed specifications of enemy equipment, hints at enemy scientific and manufacturing capabilities, and much more?

Capturing a small portion of K-129’s wreck is considered possibly the greatest intelligence coup of the Cold War. If your salvagers are picking up mobile suits and ships intact enough to be restored to working condition they’d be absurdly, unbelievably valuable to certain interested parties.

Wow, even if the conflict has been over for about 8 years? Cause the One Year War started in 0079 and ended in 0080, the story itself takes place in 0088.

8 years is not a long time at all. In terms of military hardware that’s practically brand new. In fact, to use the same example I keep bringing up, K-129 was built in 1960, sank in 1968, and was recovered in 1974.

I’m not familiar enough with Gundam lore to know exactly what’s going on in the setting at the dates you’re providing, but governments would absolutely be interested in hardware only 8 years old. Communications and crypto gear or recent orders of battle would be even more valuable.

Well to give a idea of the advancement of technology, Mobile Suits used shell firing weapons as particle guns needed more power to be effectively useful, at the end of the OYW Zeon got around this by making a gun with its own reactor and actually managed to match the Federation and even had suits with enough reactor power to match the Gundam in terms of Beam Weaponry though lacking in the "Luna Titanium Alloy" armor that made the Gundam resistant to autocannon fire.

That was UC 0079, during UC 0087 all mobile suits had the reactor power to support firing multiple beam rifles as well as every single one being made of a Luna Titanium (Renamed Gundarium in honor of the suit that proved the concept) complete with the Panoramic cockpit that gave pilots a view of everything around them.

Add in the fact that Psycommu technology that worked with the settings psychics needed to be fitted to mobile armors due to the power needed for the technology during 79 could be easily outfitted into mobile suits in 87.

A lot changed in those 8 years.

That’s more from the straight scientific perspective, I don’t think you’re looking at it from a military perspective.

First and foremost, those advancements aren’t going to have percolated to all parts of a large military in under 8 years. Large portions of those fighting forces will still be using older hardware, so any insight gained from looking at said older hardware will still be valuable. Second, you’re not just learning the specs of the equipment but things like manufacturing techniques, materials sciences and design principles, all of which would be relevant even for later models. Finally, the big thing you’d be looking for are computers and communication gear. Not only could these hold sensitive information, but exploiting communication or cryptologic gear is obviously massively beneficial. If your enemy is still using similar code schemes and datalinks and you have a stack of his code books and a link system you ripped from one of his warships, well, he’s probably not gonna be too happy.

Okay so tactical info would be useful, even if Zeon and the Federation aren't in the Belt Fighting, the pocket governments and various pirate clans could make use of this tech and info, got that.

They could sell it to interested parties for far more than the material worth of the items in question, at the very least.

Zeon Remnants came out to the belt, the antagonists of Year 1 make heavy use of Zeon Psycommu tech. Pirates could also very much use every bit of data and suit they could grab. This could work as well as just general salvage jobs.