Robo-Mining

As the Republic expanded and its population ballooned, its need for various raw materials increased exponentially. Unfortunately, drawing resources directly from Umbria and her colonies presented challenges which negatively impacted the habitability of those worlds and the long-term sustainability of their natural biospheres.

While terrestrial mining on habitable worlds continues to this day, the majority of resource extraction has shifted to space, where stellar debris fields and barren and lifeless planets can be easily tapped for their raw materials. The recovered resources can then be shipped from their origination to a final processing facility at a fraction of the cost.

The tradeoff though is that this work is much too dangerous to be performed by a person and require specialized tools to support the workforce needed to mine the resources. Long gone are the days when Umbrians themselves would labor in the mines. Instead, mining has become a high-tech industry, where even entry level positions require certifications in robotic piloting, mechanical engineering, or natural sciences.

These highly skilled professionals work together to identify deposits of valuable material and map out a plan for exploiting them. Once that plan is in place, the basic infrastructure needed to support the initial mining effort is transported to the site. This can be as simple as a specialized starship which will stay on site and serve as the main base of operations or as complex as a station with the ability to manage the mining efforts and refine raw ores into intermediate goods which are then sent on to manufacturing facilities.

Once this infrastructure is in place, swarms of automated or remotely piloted machines begin their work. First come the machines which chip away at the surface, using crushers, borers, and drills to reduce the rock into manageable chunks. Next, a second group of bots recover the freed aggregate. Finally, the aggregate is loaded for transport and taken to a processing facility, where it will be further pulverized for ease of storage or be immediately refined onsite.