Stonks people, stonks. Starting points.
At first glance, we simply can't say how much each resource is worth alone, compared to each other is the better corse of action and some are more directly related to each other, like consumer goods and Alloys, soo, we can start with some that can be reliable.
Alloy Foundries building creates 2
metalogic Metallurgist jobs.
Each job can produce 6 alloys for the cost of 12 minerals.
Each Alloy Foundries building can produce 12 alloys for 24 minerals and consumes 2 energy for maintenance.
From the last development in the theory, a
corvette would mass around 8194 Megatons and it cost us 100 alloys, soo, 1 alloy = 81,94 Megatons of mass or just to be rounded, 82 Megatons.
One Alloy Foundry building can output 492 megatons of alloys a month.
82 Megatons of alloys came from 2 units of minerals, we could assume that one mineral= 41 megatons of material, but it would be probably more, especially because of the process isn´t 100% efficiency, according to BAML, 1,5 tons of Iron ore is needed to make 1 ton of Steel, or 33,3% efficiency, and to turn the steel into the most produced forms of alloy steel (the closest thing we have IRL to the alloys in game) is 100 mols from 105 mols of steel according from Van Nostrand’s Encyclopedia of Chemistry, that makes the efficiency from minerals to alloys around 38,3% efficiency if the reaction is similar, that means 113,4 megatons of minerals will become 82 tons of alloys, with each mineral unit being 56,7 megatons of ore.
It needed around 2,7 × 10^10 Joules of energy to produce 1 ton of Alloy Steel from the most common variates (D6AC 300M 256A) the numbers that I had found are from 2016, soo, maybe it is outdated.
2,7x10^4 MJ of energy per ton of Alloys.
82x10^6 Tons X 2,7x10^4
2,2x10^12 MJ per month (3x10^10 MJs per day) of energy consumed by the Alloy foundry only to actually make the Alloys, or around 2 energy credits. Or 4,4x10^12 MJ per month.
So far, we have.
1 Mineral= 56,7 Megatons
1 Alloy= 82 Megatons
????1 Energy = 2,2x10^12 MJ ????
Soo, how can we know that energy credits are really equal to 2,2x10^12 MJ? Let's see if the numbers with the other productions really fit.
One mining district produces 8 units of minerals, or 453,6 megatons of minerals, and this all is needed only 2,2x10^12 MJ per month.
Our largest mining machines (the Bagger 288) can dig up to 7,2 megatons of ore each month, so, 63 of these machines can dig up around 453 megatons of materials each month, is needed 1,6 tons of iron ore to make 1 ton of iron ingots, that means to make 453 megatons of minerals, we actually need 724,8 Megatons of material dogged up. Or 100 Bagger 288s, consuming 4,2x10^8 MJ each month, if we assume that in 180 years those machines could be at least 10% more efficient they can get the job done alone in the time frame of a month.
To process one megaton of iron ore is necessary 2,45 x 10^10 MJ, considering we are needing to process 724,8 megatons, this is around 1,77 x 10^12 MJ of energy per month.
With the rest of the surrounding infrastructure being responsible to utilize the remain 4,3 x10^11 MJ of energy.
Consumer goods.
That is pretty hard to tell what it is to be honest, we simply don't know what types of new things people would find cool to have or make, it could be from Iphones to Cars, or from Plastic miniatures to Full 4D immersion VR chairs, but what we know is that people probably would still use packages, cans, clothes, vanity products, perfumes, accessories, hygiene products, etc, etc etc
Each factory can produce 12 consumer goods using 12 minerals, assuming perfect efficiency (thing that is impractical, but if you find out an average of efficiency, just plug it here), we would have 56,7 megatons of goods per mineral.
Considering that even workers in decent conditions will consume 0,25x 56.700.000 tons, or 14.175.000 tons of consumer goods every month, remembering that the estimated population of the world to be in 2200 is 11 billion, or 33 pops (there is a pop in the blocker)
That means 333,333,330 persons, each consuming around 170 KG kgs of material wealth every month (187 kg consideration that humans are wasteful in the game), if we are assuming all of this consumer goods will eventually end up as trash, we can compare them to the trash produced by our world and see the average of living standard.
The average person in the US produces around 57 Kg of trash every month, our average worker produces around 3,3x more trash per month, and thus, we can infer that those workers have an access to material wealth around 3,3x of the average person in the US, or the equivalent of an average measuring 208.068 US dollars per month.
That is around 7 billion people with the 3,3x times the purchasing power than the average person in the US today, around 208.068 US dollars today.
The average specialist has around 6,5x times the purchasing power, around 409.831 US dollars per month today, they number around 3 billion people.
The average ruler has around 13x times the purchasing power 819.663 US dollars per month today, they number around 0,6 billion people
The UNE manage to create quite the paradise world considering the lore states that in the mid 22th century, Earth was worse than we are today.
One person would need around 12,5 MJ of ‘’food energy’’ per day to survive or 15,5 MJ to live comfortably (you just don't eat the bare minimum to survive every day), and farming and cattle are energy converters from solar to food energy.
1,1x10^10 x 1,55 x10^1
To feed 11 billion of humans, we would need 1,7x10^11 MJ, the most efficient crops that we have is 30% in the open, with 75% efficiency with tailored lighting and controlled temperature, or 2,125x10^11 MJ in maximum efficiency to produce food to sustain everybody. IRL industrial farms still uses most of the energy from the sun but they can supply additional lighting with high efficient red lamps to supplement the plants, that is equivalent to an average of 10% of the energy that the plants needed, and this extra supply of energy (be by light and/or warmth) make them capable of processing in all 12 months in a year, regardless of the season, thing that the farms in Stellaris also do.
If the UNE is supplying an extra 10% of energy to the plants, this would mean 2,125x10^10 MJ to direct food production to satisfy 11 billion humans, this would be around 2 orders of magnitude lower than the one energetic credit per month that one district consumes, (2,2x10^12 MJ), so, even if they supply every ray of light to those crops, would still be 1/30 of the energy, but we don´t eat one type of food every day, and other food sorceress would be less efficient and thus needing more energy, like cattle and fish, and we still would need to sustain the surrounding infrastructure that industrial scale agriculture demands, (water recycling, food processing plants, logistics, etc etc etc)
Now justified the energy expense, we can actually see how many calories are one food in average.
1,7x10^11MJ of Food energy or 4,06x10^11 Calories is 1,2x10^10 Calories per Food unit.
Soo, this is the basic resources, things that we can actually see in 01/01/2200, the strategic resources are things outside our frame of reference to see the mass, what we know is that 22,5 Megatons of minerals entered and one unit of exotic gas, rare critical or volatile mote exit, how much is that we don´t know.
But, from the suggestion made by
u/weir-wight, we could compare the values using the internal market for the goods.
Minerals are equivalents to CGs and Alloys.
The max volume of materials that you can buy from the market is 10K minerals, 5K of CGs and 2,5K of alloys.
You would need 5 minerals to produce 1 lesser strategic resource (Gas, crystals and motes)
And thus, we could say that the proportionally, the greater strategic resources would need 10 minerals to one (Dark matter, Zro, living metal) but we actualy don´t do this because there is no building the player can build.
Zro we know that can´t be produced canonically, because they are the remains of the Zroni, and considering the literally magical properties of the Zro, trying to quantify it is useless
Dark matter shouldn’t be rare, especially because it is the supermajority of the mass in the universe, but if you had to transform normal matter into dark matter at 100% efficiency, it would be around 56,7 megatons per unit, again, we don´t have the idea of how much it would actually translate.
The concentration of Rare Earth Elements (REE), the best thing that I could think to compare with the strategic elements is about 100 milligrams per kilogram of ore in average, or 1 milligram to every 1000 milligrams of material.
REE are actually not that rare in our world, the problem is that few places have enough concentration to actually mine it and be profitable, but in asteroids, they are plentiful.
we could use the same analogy to the lesser strategic resources, we don´t have those deposits inside our solar system because (gameplay reasons) and we actually have, but the concentration is too low that we don´t have discovered those yet, and after the discovery, still could be argued that the concentrations is too low to actually produce something.
If we assume that the gases, motes and crystals would have an entire order of magnitude lower of concentration, they would be around 10 milligrams per kilogram of ore.
10 kg of material in one megaton of ore, or 2,8 tons of rare crystals or motes and stretching things much, exotic gases from 283,5 megatons of material.
The energy credits.
Energy credits are literally the worst to scale, not because we don´t have world analogs, but because we have too much analogs, especially because you can easily generate 40 energy inside a planet, but at the same time this is 1/1000 of the output of a Dyson Sphere Sun, one energy credit variates from 2,2x10^12 MJ to 9,8x10^32 MJ per month , this variation alone is larger than the amount of grains of sand in every beach on the world,
so we could rule out all this work as invalid.
Not really.
From the basic resources, energy credits is the only one that is out of the curve, the only one that variates that much, but, not knowing how much an energy credit really is, we still know the mass of all the other basic and advanced resources, including a far shoot of the lesser strategic resources (Gas, Crystals and Motes), and all the energies from the processes are being counted not in credits but in Joules.
We could say that 1 energy credit in 2200 is way less than a 1 credit in 2300, but we don't have any in-game evidence of that.
We can say that the planet bound and system view talks about different magnitudes of resources, but we would be wrong, because both units are equivalents in the empire storage.
We can remake the counts with the energy production that we find and remake everything, but what we would be doing is, getting numbers found from a wrong theory to try to make a right theory.
The Alternative.
Some energy power plants actually need an input of energy to start producing, like the example of our experimental fusion reactors that still generates a net negative of energy.
We see that the spheres are built extremely close to the star, too close to orbit it in the conventional sense.
And with that we can say that the frame does not orbit normally, and it doesn't use the pressure from the stellar light to keep it ‘’floating’’, it uses active support.
Active support in the form of hyper accelerated particles can made massive structures ‘’orbit’’ much closer and slower than it would be possible naturally by making those particles inside orbit fast enough to compensate the mass above them, thing that Stellaris could call as ‘’Frames’’ Those frames would consume a stellar amount of energy to keep the structure from falling in the star, but also would have a stellar amount of energy right below.
That is why the frames don't cost any energy in maintenance, they are around net 0 in power production, and with each stage, the panels added a net positive of 1000 energy credits for each stage until it is completed.
That said, this could mean that the dyson spheres in stellaris with its current design is extremely wasteful and if it would be build further from the star in a place it could normally orbit, it would produce a dozen orders of magnitude more energy for little more than 1 order of magnitude of alloys, but this extremely flawed design can be the reason why if you Dyson sphere the Sun, you would receive only 8,8x10^14 MJ per month.
YES!! YES GUYS! WE DID IT!!!IT!! WE ACTUALLY DID IT!! We found out how much energy is 1 energy credit! It is still coherent with the energy produced in space and planetside!
And now, calculating how much energy one energy district makes in net positive.
2,2x10^12 MJ x 7 (8 from jobs – 1 for the maintenance of the district)
1,54x10^13 MJ per month.
And thus, we have the base resources of the game.
Energy: 2,2x10^12 MJ Per Unit.
Minerals: 56,7 Megatons Per Unit.
Food: 1,2x10^10 Calories Per Unit.
Consumer Goods: 56,7 Megatons Per Unit. (A more realistic estimative would be 90% of this value, or 51 Megatons per unit)
Alloys: 82 Megatons Per Unit
Volatile Motes: (Dubious) 2,8 tons per unit.
Rare Crystals: (Dubious) 2,8 tons per unit.
Exotic Gases: (Dubious) 2,8 tons Per unit.
Living metal: Unknow, possibly tens of megatons
Dark matter: Unknown, possibly hundreds of megatons
Zro: Unknow by its nature.
Nanites: Unknown, possibly in the tens of megatons.
The Economical power of UNE´s Earth in 01/01/2200
Energy=1,88x10^14 MJ per month
Minerals=2853 Megatons per month
CGs=1499 Megatons per month.
Alloys=1084 Megatons per month.
1st edit:
Had corrected some numbers and the math and applied some suggestions from the comments.
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