Hauling unprocessed ore into orbit to be refined seems extremely inefficient. The Cardassians occupied Bajor for 50 years, so they had plenty of time to build refineries on the surface.
10
-
6Opinion here, we have seen orbital mining facilities before (like the one where Data discovers sentience in the worker bots), I imagine it's easier to move an orbital facility over deposits, rather than dismantling are rebuilding to follow the ore. It also allows some security, harder to bomb by rebels.– user001Commented Oct 5, 2015 at 9:16
-
3Can they not just transport ore too? Straight into the holding bays?– user46509Commented Oct 5, 2015 at 9:21
-
1Excellent question! Even security reasons don't make up for the effort to haul unrefined ore up into space against the gravity well of a planet. Imho it just shows the deep lack of understanding for the energy needed to do so on the writers side. After all the original function of Terok Nor could have been designed to be something else.– GhanimaCommented Oct 5, 2015 at 10:58
-
1@CarlSixsmith, that question has actually been covered: Why do cultures with transport technology use conventional mining methods?– T.J.L.Commented Oct 5, 2015 at 12:22
-
1@T.J.L. Yeah my point is you have the slave labour pulling the ore out of the mine and then that is transported.– user46509Commented Oct 5, 2015 at 12:30
|
Show 5 more comments
3 Answers
I believe that the Bajoran Uridium ore didn't have to come from the planet Bajor. Maybe it came from another astronomical body in the Bajoran system, a body with a small escape body so that the total escape energy and interplanetary transport energy would have been smaller than the energy to lift the ore up from Bajor.
Possibly the Cardassians only abandoned the Bajoran system after they had mined and exhausted all the valuable Uridium and other ores in the various bodies of the Bajoran System.
There is no canonical proof of this theory.
Evidence in favor of it is:
That it takes much less energy to mine an small astronomical body and move the ore to a station in orbit around a planet than it takes to mine the ores on the planet and move them up to an orbiting space station.
In "The Nagus" Jake is teaching Nog to read and Nog says:
The lar, largest planet is Bajor. It has three moons?
- in "Progress" there is the following log:
Station log. Stardate 46844.3. With the help of the Federation, Bajor is about to commence its first large-scale energy transfer, the tapping of the molten core of its fifth moon, Jeraddo.
So Bajor's moons have numbers up to five (or higher) and yet a probably nearly contemporary source says that Bajor has three moons.
Thus it seems that the number of Bajor's moons changes. If Bajor had at least two small asteroid sized moons full of Uridium ore the Cardassians may have totally demolished them to get the ores, leaving Bajor with just three remaining moons.
answered Oct 6, 2015 at 4:35
-
4I had never noticed the discrepancy in the number of moons before.– XantecCommented Oct 6, 2015 at 20:39
-
2Other uses for the station would include ship repair, a haven for visiting officials so they wouldn't need to actually go to Bajor, a trade station, guard "tower" to watch over the Bajoran prisoners/slaves, etc. And in one of the "mirror" episodes we see that the Terrans have even attached a dry dock to the docking ring, allowing for local starship construction.– XantecCommented Oct 6, 2015 at 20:42
-
2I recall references to "strip mining my planet" and widespread ecological devastation on Bajor. That would suggest that there was at least some mining on the planet. Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 3:31
-
2@Xantec Nog was just learning to read, he may've got it wrong.– 1252748Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 1:09
-
4The bridgekeeper will ask us about the five moons. Three moons sire.– revenantCommented Oct 16, 2016 at 3:44
The show's bible (a document created in advance of filming to give writers and producers an idea of the main themes that will be explored) gives us a couple of pieces of information that aren't made explicit in the show, both of which give us some insight into the Cardassian's thinking behind placing Terok Nor into orbit, as opposed to having it on the ground.
Firstly, the station is processing uridium ore from mines on Bajor itself as well as 'monitoring' mining operations on the ground, with a literal overview. Since we can assume that there were mines at various locations on the planet, the proximity of the station to the ground means that transporters (or impulse transports) can be used to easily move the ore from the surface to the station, to be processed for onward transit to Cardassia Prime.
Since the ore will need to be taken from the mine to a processing centre and then taken from the processing centre into orbit, you might just as well skip the middle step and have the processing happen in orbit to begin with, saving a journey.
The station designated DS9 by Starfleet was assembled haphazardly over several years by Cardassian and Bajoran work teams and anybody else who happened to offer services at a premium. It was used by the Cardassians primarily to monitor mining operations on Bajor and to service incoming and outgoing crews. About two hundred people, mostly Bajorans, still live there. By episode three, there will be about fifty Starfleet officers and crewmen stationed there.
Secondly, the surface is simply not a safe place to put a facility like this. The Bajora are a wily bunch who positively revel in blowing up Cardassian-operated complexes. Having the station in orbit gives the Cardassians the ability to prevent infiltration and keep a much closer eye on the Bajorans on the station to make sure they're not up to no good.
Due to the turmoil on the planet, it is deemed unsafe to create a Federation base on the surface so, at the request of the provisional government, Starfleet takes command of a recently abandoned Cardassian space station in orbit of Bajor.
-
Regarding "you might just as well skip the middle step", it takes a lot more energy to move mass into a planet's orbit than along its surface, so it needs a big future-tech hand-wave for that to be reasonable. I guess if the valuable materials account for the majority of the ore's mass, it might make sense, but we're back to speculation: your quote doesn't actually mention them refining ore there at all.– IMSoPCommented Feb 28, 2021 at 18:12
-
@IMSoP What in the setting gives you any reason to suspect anyone seriously cares about energy efficiency outside of emergency situations? The Federation and all the other major civilizations are basically in a post-scarcity economy, all the way down to energy production. Not to mention that things like warp technology means they can completely defy everything we know about energy consumption and limits right out of the gates. Commented Feb 28, 2021 at 19:14
-
@IMSoP - Shuttles the size of small cars are capable of flight from a planet's surface, into orbit and then to other planets in other solar systems. That's a pretty big hand-wave.– ValorumCommented Feb 28, 2021 at 19:24
The season 3 episode "Civil Defence" showed raw uridium explodes when electrically charged when Commander Sisko, O'brien and Jake improvise an explosive capable of breaching a hatch in the ore processing facility with just a pile of ore and some wire stripped out of a light fitting.
Considering the resistance movement on Bajor itself the Cardassians wouldn't want such a potent and easy to weaponise material to be accessible so they instead had it transported into orbit to be processed under the intense security protocols seen in "Civil Defence".
-
Surely the opposite is true. If you have a powerful explosive, the last place you'd want it is on a space station...– ValorumCommented Feb 27, 2021 at 12:36
-
@Valorum Given how ships and everything else in space explode in fantastic and asymmetric ways, I think we can safely conclude that everyone in the galaxy ultimately had to accept that high explosives were just a necessary evil for high tech (post-warp) space operations. Commented Feb 28, 2021 at 0:22