This stuff is seriously hampering my game. Let me explain. Going out and gathering crushed stone is a bit of a pain in the ass. The field rocks don't yield a lot of it compared to how much you need for a common concrete base, especially at the start. "Use wood" you say? Well, here's the weird thing. Wood is primarily carbon. Stone is primarily silicon dioxide. So why on god's green earth is carbon substrate gathered from silicon crushed stone instead of wood and plant fibers? In the state of the game right now, a single SS/HV carbon composite block costs 2 crushed stone, which itself is worth eight (8) blocks of concrete. This is... an illogical absurdity. This means the 25hp block that was introduced to the game for the express purpose of being a garbage, place holder, cheap as dirt block is eight times as expensive as a base building block that's got 800 base hp (before shape deductions). I want to believe this carbon from crushed rocks thing is supposed to be the equivalent of grinding up tons of crushed stone for iron, copper, and silicon ores-- but if so, they forgot to leave in the second recipe that lets us distill plant fibers into carbon substrate, and frankly it's absurd to think that a technology base that can bootstrap a shipwrecked person back into space by themselves within a week of landing on a 'habitable' planet with nothing more than their suit constructor, somehow can't distill carbon out of plant cellulose. And if those plants AREN'T made of cellulose, our shipwrecked survivor starves to death because the chemical/organic needs of a human body aren't exactly negotiable given that anti-chiral versions (of the exact same chemical compositions we need to survive) will kill us stone dead, much less stuff that doesn't use carbon as a foundation of its chemistry at all.
Changing carbon to be an ore like any other means it's easier to purposefully acquire. You can even stick an autominer on a carbon deposit. It also means you don't need to grow a bunch of grass or cut down a forest to build star ship components. It's pretty easy to set an auxiliary small constructor chewing a few stacks of stone into carbon substrate, same as you would for other basic ores. It doesn't make IRL logical sense. Instead, it makes experiential game logic sense.
While I can appreciate this notion, it still doesn't make sense that a single carbon small ship or hv block costs the same as eight blocks of concrete. And having two sources of carbon (including from the far more logical one) would be a better implementation than removing the logical one and instead converting a ton or more of crushed gravel into about 1/2 pound of carbon.
I would say that the Carbon Composite and Carbon Substrate we use more more likely to just be badly-named Basalt Fiber. Made entirely from basalt rock, it's used in construction and fireproofing with similar strength and function as carbon fiber. An engine limitation prevents multiple recipes from being assigned to one item. It's one or none.
Recall that crushed stone can also be processed into iron, copper, and silicon ores. If you really wanted to, you could argue from realism that 15 crushed stone should always refine into 2 iron ingots, 2 copper ingots, 2 silicon ingots, and 7.5 carbon substrate because 15 crushed stone contains all these separate potential products within it. But, imagine what that would do to the mining economy. Players would just dig huge quarries instead of bothering to go after first tier mineral deposits. More so, I mean.
I had figured that was more an artifact of the refining process giving refined "a" while generating a lot of waste slag that we magically Clarketech dispose of somewhere. I mean, in chemistry, when we refine one chemical there's a whole chain of reactions and a lot of waste product that's either not possible to refine or is prohibitively expensive and inefficient to do.
Based on the tech level represented by warp drives, easy STO flight, and wireless logistics, I wouldn't be surprised if the machinery wasn't just teleporting the desired atoms right from their bonds.
Yeah, it DOES feel like we're talking about a technology base that does nanoassembly, and very quick nanoassembly at that. Still, I'd believe that some esoteric limitations required discarding large portions of the material. If we weren't so dependent on fuel and solar, I'd guess maybe the remainder of the mass is being burned for power to manage the enormous processing power and overcoming quantum uncertainty.
