(Spoilers!) Question about the ending...
WhiteWeasel
Join Date: 2012-11-25 Member: 173197Members
Join Date: 2012-11-25 Member: 173197Members
While I am fully aware that the stinger at the end of the credits is a brick joke from a PDA blurb at the beginning of the game, what does that mean for the player? Are they just stuck in orbit until they run out of supplies since I doubt they can pay off their outstanding balance of 1 trillion credits?
While funny, that's kinda messed up in hindsight.
While funny, that's kinda messed up in hindsight.
Comments
Perhaps that's a problem for the next fanfic author.
You've never dealt with a corporate legal department, huh?
On the other hand - I do wonder how much inflation has taken place by the time of the story? Like - how much does a bagel cost?
From what we know of element formation, gold is always likely to be scarce. It forms only in supernovae, so far as we can tell - and silver is the same, just a bit less so. Rubies are expensive today but honestly we've been able to make them in labs for nearly two centuries. Diamonds are similarly peanuts to manufacture with the tech level we're talking here.
Other than the gold and silver, nothing is that inherently valuable (as opposed to situationally valuable - e.g. a bottle of water to someone dying of thirst; if we're getting into situational value then Alterra can charge whatever the heck it wants) except for the ion cubes. Those are probably the bulk of the value.
Regardless, the whole thing is almost certainly a ploy to get the protagonist to sign over the movie / game / book rights.
Not sure I'd agree there, @Talanic, my friend.
All that glitters is not gold...
Much of the gold that we mine is thought to have been brought to the Earth by meteor bombardment after the cooling of the surface. That, coupled with the gold that just didn't sink gives us what we mine. But that's planetary bodies in general and this planet in particular. An organization with the degree of space industry that Alterra has to have to be building starships like Aurora - not to mention launching super-long-distance expeditions and building interstellar infrastructure - would have access to gigatons of asteroids to mine, some of which will be fairly rich in precious metals. Between that and strip-mining uninhabitable planets (which at that tech level would be pretty easy), gold, silver, and platinum wouldn't be rare at all, nor would elements like iridium which is vanishingly slight on Earth but abundant in the asteroid belt.
The key here would be purity. Gold mining, at least terrestrially, is extremely inefficient. The density of gold in gold ore is very, very low. If your monitor screen represented the average tonne of gold ore, then about 2 pixels would be actual gold. (Actually less than 2, but I'm rounding up because a third of a pixel is hard to visualize.) Gold ore is a boring looking rock. Having seen it myself in mining, I can tell you that it's the dullest, most worthless looking rock you can imagine - basically looks like granite with a chest cold. But hidden in that matrix of rock is a tiny, tiny amount of gold you can refine out. In-game, though, we're picking up relatively high-purity chunks the size of our head. Now, they should be heavier than the average anchor, but laying that aside, that's a lot of gold in one lump, so your mining in-game is a lot more cost-effective than hard-rock mining we do today. That ups the value just through sheer efficiency, but not enough to really throw the balance.
Rare Earth Elements would have greater staying power for industrial value, but even those would likely rapidly cease to be as rare when you're mining out asteroids and planets in multiple solar systems.
Shiny rocks...
So where did the huge bill come from?
But mainly this is a case of "Alterra wants something, and can do what it wants to secure it." Single person found something of insane value that you don't want to pay fair market value for? Apply enough pressure to him to make him sign it all over. From everything we can see in PDA downloads, this is Alterra's MO.
Which is why I cured myself, left the QEP on, built several resort-quality bases, and am sitting in my observatory chaise lounge with a creepvine colada (with umbrella) and not going back to that corporate hellhole. Cheers.
Or is interstellar flight cheaper and easier than in-system flight, making planetary mining far more economical than tearing up (or sending drones to mount an engine on) a mineral-rich asteroid? I would assume that every system mankind has started to exploit, all the easiest deposits went first. It takes the Sunbeam a week to come in and try to pick us up from the outskirts of the system, but given the phase gate that I assume the Aurora set up, the Neptune rocket appears to deliver the player back home in minutes. This could just be artistic license for the credits scene, of course, but it raises enough ambiguity in my sleep-addled mind to be worth bringing up.
I believe you and I agree about the company's motivation. I still think they're mostly after the story rights (after all, we do encounter references to other castaways that they've jazzed up into games and tales) because after all, they already claim to own the planet.
All good points, and I've never had a problem with the "put him in debt so he signs it all away" hypothesis on Alterra's motivations. My equally sleep-addled mind failed to come up with another reasonable source for your bill:
Licensing fees.
Everything that fabricator runs off is Alterra property, as is the fabricator. So everything you produce is a licensed Alterra product. They're hitting you up for the raw materials, sure, but also the going retail value of everything you're making. A portable laser cutter capable of hacking through multiple doors on a single battery charge? That's not $19.95. A Seamoth? At least as much as a midsize car. A Cyclops? All of those base parts produced by an Alterra base builder, which probably runs off the same licensing agreement as the fabricator?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. With Alterra, the product (probably) won't kill you, but the EULA is murder.