25
votes
Accepted
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Small-scale harvesting is more art than science.
Your flow of PhoNE is variable and difficult to predict. It changes constantly.
Large-scale operations just throw a huge "net" and sell ...
- 79.9k
9
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Social problems
Two social factors might do the trick:
persistent sabotage by political groups unhappy with the status quo
non-violent people who also want to live off-grid
If your fictional world ...
- 13.7k
8
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
First possibility: there's no difference between PhoNE and gold, today. Large corporations mine gold, but it's valuable enough that medium and small (even hobbyist) miners can make a living (even gain ...
- 116k
7
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Space is dangerous, as we all know. And space around big stars, space that's full of the stellar wind that contains Phone, is extra dangerous.
So if you're a big corporation harvesting Phone with ...
- 36.8k
6
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Artisanship
What's the difference between a McDonalds, a local Fish and Chip takeaway and Gordon Ramsay?
All of these could be considered as real-word proxies for your PhoNE resource. All of them are ...
- 18.2k
4
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
It decays
Your PhoNE might display properties of a fissile material like having a half-life, in cells or outside, therefore even if it's not expended, you would lose the contents of your PhoNE battery ...
- 6,136
4
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
PhoNE is not refinable. At all.
It's a mess of mumble mumble, throws sci-fi dice of entangled particles of some exotic form of matter. Any interference, beyond delicately trapping it, causes it to ...
- 4,829
3
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Although somewhat similar to Cadence's answer in parts, I'd say intensity and dispersion.
The closer you are to the star producing PHoNE, the higher the intensity and the more you can grab per square ...
- 626
3
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Slot Machines and Restaurants
(partly borrowing/expanding on TheDemonLord's excellent restaurant analogy)
The simplest answer is that it is not, largely profitable. It has a slightly-negative EV, but ...
- 18.4k
2
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
OP here. This is my own best answer after thinking about this as much as I could. I don't think this is very solid, and I want to compare it to whatever else the community comes up with.
PhoNE isn't ...
- 3,560
2
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Copy the fishing industry
This just sounds like fishing to me. Giant corps go around with trawlers and serve most of the global demand. But that doesn't mean small operations can't go out and serve ...
- 1,313
2
votes
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
PhoNe is non-fungible information
If entropy is disorder or noise, then negentropy is order or information. It is stored as qubits in exa-scale memory devices. As qubits can't really be copied they ...
- 2,524
1
vote
What makes small-scale private star-harvesting profitable?
Light freight and passenger ship captain here! We do a lot of business in remote areas, so we always mount a sail to sustain PhoNE reserves in an an emergency. If you get caught in a solar storm a few ...
- 1,387
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible