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Description

The catfish class mining drone is a fairly typical unmanned mining vehicle common throughout human space. The basic template has been open source for nearly a century with various modifications arising since then. The basic vehicle is fifteen meters long and weighs in at 56 tonnes. Catfish are fully capable of traveling from (for example) Terra orbit to Mars orbit in a matter of months, but it's intended for use within a million kilometers from either it's home base or carrier vessel. Like it's namesake, it's processing power is nothing impressive but is sufficient for the basic tasks it is assigned to.

Typical operations for a Catfish involves being assigned an asteroid within the general volume which it will move towards, decelerating down to bring it's maw upon the space rock softly. A sheet of ballistic textiles expands around the maw at point of impact to prevent loose material from floating away and the mooring arms grab hold of the asteroid to secure the machine. That done, the Catfish goes to work, excavator arms break off material and move them through a series of of grinders with spectrometers which analyzes chemical composition of the material gathered. This is taken to a basic refinery module, which involves the sorting of material by element, separation processes which can involve some degree of melting and the assembly of slugs of either slag or preliminarily refined materials (PRM) which are expelled out of a tube on the machine's rear to be collected by collector drones with their contents etched into them before they are launched. If fed from most asteroids PRM slugs are up to 99% of one type of element, though in most cases 90-95% are more common, which are used to feed larger dedicated refineries. A few Catfish variants have the capacity to produce ingots of material ready for industrial use on their own, but as this is more energy intensive work that decreases total speed, demands more heat dissipation and raises both the up front and operational costs considerably preliminary processing is seen as being sufficient in most cases. Once the catfish has eaten a hole of sufficient depth into an Asteroid, it will use it's mooring arms to move across it's surface. Asteroids in the process of being dissembled by Catfish soon develop a distinctive pattern of regular circular depressions.

The Catfish is by no means high tech in the 25th century. Instead it is designed to be an easily made component in the early stage's of the development of a colony's space based industry. It is cheap, it is rugged and it does not require certain difficult to make components such as Wong Lamps. A dozen Catfish can keep a basic ore refinery churning out usable metals that can be used to assemble either IMDV s to aide planetside development or to build space stations and spacecraft, including more Catfish. In more developed systems, more sophisticated and larger asteroid mining systems are in use. For Space Pirates on the fringes of Terran Space Catfish are low-risk-low-reward targets. On the one hand even to a colony which is just beginning to reach into space the loss of a Catfish is going to be a delay and often the loss of a few Catfish to pirates is seen as part of the the price of doing business. But on the same note the price a stolen Catfish commands on the market is usually pretty low. Never the less the payout is often enough that it's worthwhile to down on their luck crews and if they can't be sold as a unit they can be broken down for spare parts, some of which can be used to keep their battered tubs flying.

Description

The catfish class mining drone is a fairly typical unmanned mining vehicle common throughout human space. The basic template has been open source for nearly a century with various modifications arising since then. The basic vehicle is fifteen meters long and weighs in at 56 tonnes. Catfish are fully capable of traveling from (for example) Terra orbit to Mars orbit in a matter of months, but it's intended for use within a million kilometers from either it's home base or carrier vessel. Like it's namesake, it's processing power is nothing impressive but is sufficient for the basic tasks it is assigned to.

Typical operations for a Catfish involves being assigned an asteroid within the general volume which it will move towards, decelerating down to bring it's maw upon the space rock softly. A sheet of ballistic textiles expands around the maw at point of impact to prevent loose material from floating away and the mooring arms grab hold of the asteroid to secure the machine. That done, the Catfish goes to work, excavator arms break off material and move them through a series of of grinders with spectrometers which analyzes chemical composition of the material gathered. This is taken to a basic refinery module, which involves the sorting of material by element, separation processes which can involve some degree of melting and the assembly of slugs of either slag or preliminarily refined materials (PRM) which are expelled out of a tube on the machine's rear to be collected by collector drones with their contents etched into them before they are launched. If fed from most asteroids PRM slugs are up to 99% of one type of element, though in most cases 90-95% are more common, which are used to feed larger dedicated refineries. A few Catfish variants have the capacity to produce ingots of material ready for industrial use on their own, but as this is more energy intensive work that decreases total speed, demands more heat dissipation and raises both the up front and operational costs considerably preliminary processing is seen as being sufficient in most cases. Once the catfish has eaten a hole of sufficient depth into an Asteroid, it will use it's mooring arms to move across it's surface. Asteroids in the process of being dissembled by Catfish soon develop a distinctive pattern of regular circular depressions.

The Catfish is by no means high tech in the 25th century. Instead it is designed to be an easily made component in the early stage's of the development of a colony's space based industry. It is cheap, it is rugged and it does not require certain difficult to make components such as Wong Lamps. A dozen Catfish can keep a basic ore refinery churning out usable metals that can be used to assemble either IMDV s to aide planetside development or to build space stations and spacecraft, including more Catfish. In more developed systems, more sophisticated and larger asteroid mining systems are in use. For Space Pirates on the fringes of Terran Space Catfish are low-risk-low-reward targets. On the one hand even to a colony which is just beginning to reach into space the loss of a Catfish is going to be a delay and often the loss of a few Catfish to pirates is seen as part of the the price of doing business. But on the same note the price a stolen Catfish commands on the market is usually pretty low. Never the less the payout is often enough that it's worthwhile to down on their luck crews and if they can't be sold as a unit they can be broken down for spare parts, some of which can be used to keep their battered tubs flying.