How do your asteroid colonists go about their daily lives?

fpbp

All the useless dirt that can't be traded with it is valuable as radiation shielding for your asteroid colony.

In form fitting but thick bodysuits layered with technology meant to recycle air. water and with anal/urethral plugs to extract and recycle waste.

Really fucking fast, depending on the velocity of the asteroid

Would constant resistance provided by the suits help prevent muscular degradation?

Most mining would be automated with only the minimum amount of human presence needed to inspect and maintain the site. That said, if you have the money to do that than fine but a lot of prospectors have to live physically on the asteroid they are mining. Not only to run the facility but also to protect their claims as anything from rival prospectors to pirates will attempt to come in and basically outright steal your facility and kill you or force you to give them a portion of the worth to them in exchange for not casting you into nothingness.

There is a good deal of money to be made as a PMC working out in the belt doing protection duty but then you'll actually have your mettle tested because the chance of dying is way way up.

>feeling a bit flabby
>go outside for a bike ride
>hit a bump
>accidentally reach escape velocity

astroid life sucks

They can, there is a way to adjust how much resistance the suit places on the muscles. This free the user up when they need to preform fine and unimpeded actions.

READ THE EXPANSE BOOKS.
air, water, food is of prime importance. waste is a cardinal sin. not recycling everything is grounds for getting thrown out the airlock.

OCD focus on maintenance checks of everything constantly and forever.

Fragile Allegiance is an excellent Veeky Forums videogame. A very underrated 4X.

>not recycling everything is grounds for getting thrown out the airlock.
this seems like an oxymoron
why not shove them into the fertilizer machine?

I don't think recycling would be as crucial as it is portrayed nor why belters should be more neurotic about it. Any spaceborn civilization will become very good at recycling, but doesn't mean that there's scarcity of resources.

Don't listen to Martians. Ceres is a genuine planet.

Water, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen are fucking everywhere in space. I don't see how the hell would you ever run out of the stuff.

Nitrogen, necessary for plants, is rarer, though.

C-type (Carbon). the most common asteroids, are often overlook, have stuff that Earth would find genuinely valuable besides water: Fertilizers, nitrogen, potassium, and most importantly phosphorus (which is far harder to find on Earth and a major bottleneck for agriculture). That's actually what you want to mine, over iron or nickel, if you intend to trade with Earth. We don't have much us for iron or nickel on Earth when these two resources are not rare on Earth. Other metals are more valuable.

You can use iron and nickel to make your hab though. I think any asteroid colony has to be self sufficient before you can think about trade. If you are dependent on regular shipments of vital supplies to keep your colony going you are gonna have a bad time if relations with your trading partners ever sour. To me asteroid colonies will be less for trade and more for FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNISM.

Obviously.

Did you ACTUALLY read the books? Nobody in the books got spaced for not recycling on a colony.
Being lazy about maintenance and getting a whole block sick because you didn't change the air filters regularly, however. That'll get you shoved out an airlock while the local cops write it off as an "accident."

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. It's not about the scarcity of the materials, but making them available and maintaining the systems that make them usable to people that's important. Water, hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen floating around on asteroids don't do anything for a colony 5 million kilometers away, and are completely fucking useless until mined and processed.

>how do your asteroid colonists go about their daily lives?

Honestly a lot of what this user has to say: The only thing I'd have to add is a few personal details here and there.

People who live on asteroid colonies live, quite frankly, exceptionally dull lives: 'sunrise' is at 6 and 'sunset' is at 6 and that never changes, a space tanker comes in every 2nd week with water, fuel, and food, almost everyone living there is on a guaranteed income and very few if any of the people living there actually do anything we'd consider 'real' work and it's a good thing as land and living space is practically given away to anyone who actually wants it- rent is ridiculously cheap out on an asteroid colony.... Plus, really good television and internet quality; the asteroid belt picks up everything from the Galilean Moons and Mars (with a slight delay) in HD quality reception with yearly rates costing practically pennies.

The worst thing, though, about an asteroid colony is that there is no 'fresh' food: you're either going to settle for fabricated, pre-packaged, or canned stuff, or you growing it yourself (which is fine, some colonies even have community gardens), otherwise you're just eating something that's been sitting in cargo for 2 weeks. Do NOT buy anything grown on Earth or Mars, it's priced up and stale by the time it gets to the asteroid belt, always purchase Galilean produce- especially seafood, they sell it way cheaper than you'll ever find on any of the moons.

Though, people don't move to asteroid colonies for the food or the night life; they pass through them, where the only attractions are a fueling station, local diner, local pub and a post office. People live on asteroids because they want to be left alone: people with social anxiety, people who eloped with an android, people who don't want more out of life than just to peacefully exist and watch the world.

Don't they have fusion power? I believe the Epstein Drive is a fusion reactor. If so, there's no way they have shortage of energy or anything to process stuff.

Was meant to.

I believe they have shortages of water because they are using it all on that dumb project of terraforming Mars in less of a century, which is rather absurd.

I never seem to be able to retain anything from this guy's videos.

Obviously.
Earth will never unify as "the UN." Mars will have its own countries like Earth does. And each Asteroid will be its own city-state.
The only real chances for an Empire to form will be the moons of Jupiter or the moons of Saturn, as they are close enough to each other to have wars and power plays as we know them.

You can also use direct electrical stimulation.

You can also use that to prevent bone loss as bones are piezoelectric.

Nitrogen and Phosphorous are a bitch to come by though.

>hasn't cleared it own orbit

Eh, I doubt it. Once you get to the scale of space travel, the capital investments required, up-front, limit who can establish colonies. Mars' capitol will either be Nabisco City or New New York Brought to You By Coca-Cola.

Neither has Pluto yet everyone sucks it's dwarf dick

My fucking niggah.

Why not post the cover that illustrates the effect of the black market virus missiles that you send on your competitors between two public takeovers, tho?

Similarly to and it is largely boring because there isn't a whole lot to do so an asteroid colony will have only two very specific kinds of people: the lonely and the desperate. Neither of these people has much inclination to cause trouble, their lifestyle makes the meager resources feel abundant, and generally there ain't a lot of things to fight over, so it is work and boredom for those who are up to it.

Interesting things only happen if something does provoke a fight. Rare, but the results tend to be quite brutal because it goes down between a bunch of heads already on the edge from desperation and various borderline psychopaths.

They don't, as there is no day or night.

I like these ideas, but they neglect there will be another type of asteroid colony: the kind inhabited by lawless criminals and low lives.

They lay low on the colony and take advantage of the introverted populus to vanish and reappear for months at a time with ill-gotten gains and almost none of the colonists bothering to report suspicious activity or be able to give authorities any leads.

If the mining color is really bad though, a skilled criminal might be able to hack all the electronic security systems to give them free backdoor access and quietly take over. And God help them if the mines yield something terribly valuable, because then the cromelord will call in his posse and push out or enslave the people and claim legal stake over the asteroid, turning it into a lawless haven boomtown.

>how do your asteroid colonists go about their daily lives?

Aside from working?

Exercise to prevent atrophy, card games, watching movies/spaceflix, and getting drunk.

Same as earth, basically.

Throw in a little cross training, and you've got a solid, realistic crew with minimal space madness.

oh, and sex dolls.

fucking LOVE the homeworld games.

Relic entertainment was the shit. The single reason that I love adagio for strings.

>They spend a lot of their time on the internet and get most of their social interaction from that, feeling like they're not even cut off from other population centers.

When the idea of self sufficient space habitats has been brought up before, it came to my attention that the time to communicate within a singular space habitat would take much less time than communication between space habitats (assuming they were far away). Also, the most common form of communication between habitats when light speed lag was taken into account would probably be text due to the relatively low amount of bandwidth in mind. The relative difficulty between communicating with other stations in a casual manner due to light-lag could potentially gradually shift each station's operating culture and social norms. If one is to use an internet analogy, it could be like diverging forums that change over the years. Perhaps these various stations and asteroids could be like internet groups of their own, and with "flame wars" of their own?

Depends on whose asteroid colonists we're talking about. There's some similarities of necessity across all groups, but from there things are free to diverge some.

The main belt in Sol is full of the descendants of techies and engineers sent out to wrangle the autominers during the first big expansion. It never quite developed the rough-and-tumble industrial town attitude you'd expect. These days it's more like the solar systems upscale suburb. Populated by O'neill can residents who really can't puzzle out what was so great about planets.

The oort cloud and outer rocks on the other hand, are populated mostly by eccentrics, hermits, self-imposed exiles and overly emphatic scientists.The system rim is pretty well associated with people who are a few fruit short of a basket.

Out in borderworlds you've got the Alaerin-colonized system of Jarasgin. Which is pretty much just rocks, a gas giant, and more rocks. Given the Alaerin's clannish, somewhat feudal social nature, you have numerous habs and warrens occupied by clans competing and bickering in one of the largest industrial economies in Orion Expanse. They've got a exactly the reputation human belters tend to have in other settings, and tend to take offense at the human idea that you can claim resources with a radio beacon and a flag. So some interesting day to day conflicts going on out there.

I'm sure asteroid colonies play a vital role in just about every inhabited system's economy, for every species. So I could probably spend weeks coming up with cultures and quirks for this. A note to flesh this bit of every system out more has been made in any case. Thanks for the thought.

Literally it's because of his voice. He should be researching and writing a script for someone else to read, like Bazbattles.

Corporations need profit. Their capital, as well, still doesn't approach the numbers by superpowers yearly. It is far more likely to evaporate.

Corporate BACKERS might be common, but NASA/ESA/JAXA/ASA/CSNA/ROSCOSMOS or whatever will be the ones providing everything.

It's absurd because we have literal moons of water. All Mars needs is a few of the gas giant moons. Drawing it from the Asteroid belt might work on a 'time' basis but they have torch drives: time is no longer really a factor of concern.

And then it becomes more absurd because the arms race between Mars and Earth has set back the terraforming project. The Expanse could easily have shoved in another point of conflict by saying Martians now feel comfortable with what they've accomplished and don't really feel a need to waste time fully terraforming Mars, thus another point of contention between Earth and Mars (maybe stoked some more by some idiot populist painting Mars as a 'sixty acres and a mule' solution for the masses of Earth either as living space or an agri colony).

Asteroid colonists in my setting are invariably bound to a real planetary government. Bigger planets provide landmass and resources to count on, since it's militarily harder to capture and control an area the size of at least Africa as compared to a town the size of Dothan, Alabama.

As client states of planetary governments, they're usually part of a massive Cold War esque game of land and resource exploitation as well as strategic military posturing. This works best for "independent" asteroids which all seem like Casablanca in space, but winds up full of spies and mercenaries that wind up turning pirate because of the various borders around this place.

There's also the futas/hermaphrodites, because by interstellar law, a colony isn't worth mentioning until it has a population of 10,000 or more, so genetically engineering a third sex that can sire and bear children is useful for governments that want to get to the magic number quickly. There's a brewing social problem with them, but so far it's okay. Sure it is.

user from here.

Criminals are not a separate group because the space on the asteroid colony is very limited, the loners have too much time, the desperate are too trigger-happy, and both have a heightened sense of privacy. So if you are a criminal and you try to earn your fortune on an asteroid colony, then you are desperate.

My man have you heard of SpaceX