Tinkering with cargo units and the mining rules & enconomics

The book says a cargo unit is the amount of cargo that can be carried in one hull size point. Under mining equipment in the ship design and build rules a ship can bring back 5 tons of ore per Hull Point Since Each hull size equates to 5 hull points this makes one cargo unit 25 tons? (There is also the refining process- takes 1000 tons of iron ore to make one cargo unit of the just iron that will sell for 20,000 at source) This would mean that a Hull size 5 prospecting ship (I chose HS 5 so that it could have grapples which I think would be useful to its mission) could spend 40 days prospecting (includeing travel time to and from the belt) looking for good mines, 40 days is the period of time the typical Frontier loan compounds at 4%. plus deploy a hvy duty mining bot that would fill its hold (70 tons) in 17.5 hours. When it goes to sell the mine it would also sell the unrefined ore at the ore processors: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document" /><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 10" /><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 10" /><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CGandolf%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List" /><style>

</style>Selling unrefined ore: The HS5 ship can bring
back 70 tons of ore but, as per the Raw Mineral Chart (Knight Hawks), it takes
1000 tons of unrefined iron ore to make 1 unit of Iron that sells for 20,000Cr.
This means that the HS 5 ship will have brought back 7% of 20,000Cr which is 1,700
Cr. It’s not a lot but since one mining robot can excavate 70 tons in 17.5
hours it’s still worth the effort every trip to the asteroid belt. If the ship
brought back 70 tons of unrefined plutonium ore that would be 3.5% of 100,000Cr
which is 3,500Cr. (formula for determining the % is the number of tons brought back times 100 divided by ore/unit vale for the ore off the Raw Material Chart on page 89 of digitally remastered Knight Hawks) the value of the refined ore is alwasy the "at source" price Having just priced out a HS 5 prospecting ship at 1,800,000 Cr (all prices figured for class 2 construction centers to compute price) a ship owner with a loan of say 1,600,000Cr on the ship would need to bring in 64,000 Cr every month just to cover the interest. not sure how many trips to the belt and back to the processors a ship could do in that time, 2-3? so that would be 3000 to maybe 13,500cr for unrefined ore every 40 days which would mean they'd have to make up the rest 61,000 to 50,500 in mine location sales which go for 1000 to 10000 depending on number of resources. Call it an average of 5,000Cr/ mine location that would mean finding 12 or more/per 40 day period. If all the mine locations can be sold. prospectors would avoid over head like the plague. This sort of ship would have a small crew pilot and engineer (maybee the pilot double as an astrogator or they never leave the system) or a family run operation with spouses and children and everyone works and no one takes a pay check and the ship is home. There'd be other opportunities to pick up a regular freight cargo and deliver it as the ship does have a hold - it carries 70 tons of ore or 5 cargo units.

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