FrankManic wrote:

Basically - How much infrastructure support is needed to make feedstock, or can you literally shovel dirt in to a disassembler and let it fish for useful elements?

Essentially, yes.

Quote:

I'm asking because mining is constantly mentioned as an important economic process and I'm not clear exactly what mining entails. Is a mining machine a big disassembler with a drill on the front that eats ore and poops out ingots and slag?* Are ores and raw hydrocarbons processed in to usable form on site or do they need to be freighted to distant processing facilities to be turned into usable form?⁑ If I crack open the cargo containers on a transport moving from the belt to mars, or a railcar going from a mining installation to a city, what am I going to actually find in there?⁂ If my mining team discovers a rich uranium deposit in an asteroid what do you do to turn that in to fuel rods?⊛ Are you mining the raw (apparently very low yield) ore and shipping that to a processing facility or do you have a fabber of some kind turning it into plates of uranium metal right there?✣

* Mining machines are probably not a big disassembler with a drill on the front. Economies of scale and the benefits of specialization will really make a difference for industrial applications, and once you scale up past a certain size, shoveling everything into a generalized disassembler is less efficient - read, speedy - than trucking/hauling/otherwise sorting it into like materials to be further processed. At smaller scales, mind you, the difference either won't be noticeable, or setting up the requisite industrial infrastructure is just not in the cards, so you will just use a disassembler, of whatever size is practicable, crapping out ingots of material. ⁑ This probably depends on (a) what you're processing, and (b) what kind of set-up you have. I would expect in general, however, that material will be sorted into elemental or molecular ingots of the material you want at the production site, as pure as you can practically make it, before more than one shipment of bulk unrefined material is made, if that. If you're mining for silicon, for instance, by shoveling silica (silicon dioxide) into a huge disassembler, there's no reason that two-thirds of your shipment should consist of oxygen. (Unless there is,in which case SiO[sub]2[/sub] may be a convenient way to transport it.) ⁂ Ingots, containers full of powder, tanks of gas and liquid. I don't see bulk material being transported more than twice, max, before it reaches the processing location, and that's going to have happened [b]long[/b] before it sees a standardized shipping container of any sort. Think of it this way: You go down the mines on Mars, what do you find at the mine-head? A big fuck-off drill. Behind that is a huge conveyor belt which transports it (that's once,) to the top of the mine (or to the subsurface, in-mine transshipment/processing facility.) If it gets processed there, it might go out on a shipping container, but it might also be transported by gigantic truck to a centralized processing center, that's taking inputs from several mines in a region. ⊛ Swear like a sailor, because anything involving hard rads (or extremes of temperature) isn't going to be a process which you can do with nanites. For that kind of thing, you [b]need[/b] an old-school industrial infrastructure to enrich your uranium, which is a misnomer. While nanites might conceivably be able to begin the process of separating the U-238 from the U-235, as the concentration of -235 goes up, the amount of radiation they're putting off will fry nanobots before they can mess with them. ✣ If you're working with Uranium, you're probably going to need traditional processes at some point or another, unless your whole plan is to seperate out the U-235 and then ignore it so you can have fun with the superdense but stable and relatively safe U-238.