On 9 May 2020 at 17:59, Richard Aiken wrote:

>
> On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 4:29 PM shadow at shadowgard.com (via tml list)
> <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>     Digging *big* caverns is easy with nukes. With nuclear dampers,
>     it's easy to decontaminate them, though the tests in Nevad show
>     that there's not that much to do anyway (most of the really
>     radioactive stuff gets buried with part of the ceiling collapses
>     into the pool of molten rock at the bottom of the chamber).
>
> I like this! I'm definitely going to steal it for my current game.
> Mining hellworlds just got more probable: "dig" your initial site with
> a nuke in the middle of the most promising region, then send out your
> boring machines from there. The only evidence of your mine from above
> would be the barebones landing pads each with it's ingot loading lift
> (because you're doing basic ore-processing below) and a central,
> relatively-small elevator for use by sophonts and perishable imports.

Dig several caverns far enough apart that you don't risk cracking the
walls on the old ones as you blast the new ones.

The cavities are basically a cylinder with a hemispherical top. As I
recall, the cylinder is a couple times as high as the hemiphere.
Check reports on Project Plowshare to get actual figures.

You'll probably nedd to seal the walls to help prevent air transfr
and water leakage in/out thru cracks in the rocks. One proposed usage
was as water reserviors.

But you could run mine shafts off if you wanted to. You could alspo
grow crops under artifical light. With several inter connected
cavities with descending "floor" levels (eith the actual bottom or
constructed "floors" you can set up aeries of marshlands that will
receclye the air and water (the marsh grasses take up things like
heavy metalls and you can even harvest and burn the ones from the
early stage marshes to produce ash that can be added to the ore
processing)

Baceteriam, fish and other things deal with organic and some
inorganic pollutants. And you can even harvest fish from the final
pond (that's one of the easons tilapia is cheap :-)

Water from the final pond(s) gets fed into the water system at a rate
matching the rate sewage goes into the first set of lagoons.

And air recycling happens naturally as it flows thru the system.

Obviously, you *don't* feed air and water from the ore processing
cavern(s) into the above without processing it a fair bit first.
Besides, most of the pollutants in that air and water are likely
recoverable as useful material (sulfur and nitrogen oxides can be
converted to sulfuric and nitric acids which are useful in ore
processing and other things. There'll be valuable stuff in the
wastewater too.)

and even if it's not worth the trouble of processing the stuff in the
wastewater *now*, you can use another cavity as a settling tank so
all the solids settle out before processing it to be reused in the
ore processing facility.

Seperating things into different caverns greatly increases safety
too. An accident in the ore processing area doesn't affect the living
areas nor the crop areas.

> You could even "dig" the same sort of initial site on a large
> asteroid - boost it up to 1 G before you set off the nuke, then flip
> and decelerate it once the temporary "floor" cools off.

Have to be a *big asteroid or a very small blast to avoid cracking
the asteroid into pieces.

Oh yeah, with Traveller tech, maybe you'd use a big meson gun instead
of nukes.

That'd make for a *rude* surprise for anybody that tried to raid the
colony. So would the mass drivers for getting ingots into orbit. Load
the containers with rock, explosives and a detonator (maybe a
proximity fuse, maybe radio detonated) and you could make it *very*
hazardous to approach the planet.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com