Mercury Ore
AkuMasterofMasters
Join Date: 2017-09-10 Member: 232934Members
Join Date: 2017-09-10 Member: 232934Members
Mercury ore as of now only has one use, the cyclops fire suppression system. It needs more uses, like LOTS more, I can't think of anything that could use it off the top of my head, but if we really can't come up with more uses for it, just scrap it, its worthless.
Comments
It's unlikely that some of these lesser used resources will get much more attention before that point - possible, but unlikely.
Beyond that, there's really no justification for mercury in the Cyclops fire suppression system. Thermometer? Only in high-end scientific applications; everybody else uses alcohol. Sprinkler trigger? Even today we use alcohol burst bulbs or tin fusible-link triggers. Fire suppressant? God, I hope not. You breathe fire-vaporized mercury for even a little bit and you're not going to have to worry about your pension plan.
Warning: science inbound!
Mercury really is nearly down to being a niche material even today. Most of its commonplace uses have already been transitioned to alternatives (mainly because breaking a mercury thermometer in your mouth is a Bad Thing), and even many of its industrial applications are already extinct. Sodium hydroxide production used to be a massive mercury consumer, but that's gone to a much cheaper and safer process called membrane cell processing. (It kinda resembles a funky riff on a fuel cell in design.) Mercury-based medical applications still exist, mainly for dental amalgam and also a few pharmaceutical applications, but since so many people had a world-class hissy-fit over a pile of BS that said preservative mercury compounds are dangerous (when they're not even in the slightest), even those are being phased out.
At present, the biggest consumer application for mercury is fluoro tubes and CFL bulbs, but those are being shoved out of the market by increasingly cheap LED alternatives that are 1. nontoxic, 2. recyclable, and 3. live much longer lives. The other commonplace application is the explosive compound in firearm ammunition primers.
Mercury-based batteries? Dead. (No pun.) Europe outlawed them completely in '91. New Jersey banned them in '92, then Congress decided that unless manufacturers took care of recycling, they were banned as of '96. No prizes for guessing whether the manufacturers wanted to shoulder the financial burden of recycling a hazmat. And, yes, alkaline batteries were designed to use mercury essentially as an efficiency preservative (helped keep down disadvantageous reactions with the cathode metals). But ever since mercury was declared persona non grata in US landfills, the amount of mercury in alkaline cells is way down, and some manufacturers are getting away from it altogether - advances in materials science and particularly nanoscience have produced effective alternatives that are comparable or cheaper, so even if the laws did reverse, there's no incentive to go back to mercury.
Basically, mercury is really down to a few irreducible applications, and pretty much all of them are in high-precision science where other materials just can't provide the same degree of precision. There are some interesting off-the-wall applications, too, like liquid mirror telescopes, but even those have a limited future. The sheer toxicity of mercury vapor and the fact that they're not superior to solid mirror telescopes except in construction cost means they're not likely to have much of a lifespan left.
Just because its on another planet, does not make mercury any different than here on earth
Exactly. Once technology moves on, we generally don't bother remembering how to do things "the old way." You'd have a time finding the manufacturing process for asbestos floor tiles these days, even though they were commonplace 40 years ago.
Besides, it's not like mercury has become a difficult to find resource on Earth. We still have it. We just don't use it very much anymore; we've found better alternatives and technology moved on.
Could we technically make an argument that, since the PDA takes a read on the environment and comes up with survival data to suit, that we could theoretically resurrect old designs that use mercury? Sure. But now we're moving away from good game design practice; rather than creating content that adds to the game in a substantive way, we're trying to justify the continued existence of a mechanic or asset that currently has little to no purpose. From a design standpoint, it makes more sense to remove the unneeded resource and replace it with something that can have a more substantial effect on gameplay.
It would be nice for it to have uses post 1.0, but for 1.0 in general it should be removed, and then added with the post 1.0 stuff
It's only where fiction intersects with reality that this happens. You can suspend your disbelief, so long as you're not confronted with familiar things that you know contradict their in-game reality.