Time for me to think way more deeply than I should about Outlaw Star!This is a stupid thread idea but I was considering this when I rewatched the episode "Demon of the Water Planet" the other day. What got me thinking about it was the basic maths. The numbers just don't add up at all.
Firstly, let's read the opening from that episode:
It was the brain of ether physicist Dr. Sam Kaseinpow, the Chosong Science Co.'s Technology Group that was led by Professor Hata Ikke, the donation of enormous amounts of capital made by every country, and above all, dragonite, that made the Munchausen Drive a reality.
In Year 1 of the Toward Stars calendar, an unknown crystalline material, dragonite, was discovered in a meteorite that crashed in the Arashan Desert in northern China. It was found to be a catalyst that released tremendous amounts of energy from the inexhaustible ether.
In search of dragonite, humanity stampeded into space. It could be considered the gold rush of the Space Age, but dragonite was an extremely rare substance in the vastness of space.
An alchemical method of synthesising it artificially is being researched at this time but has yet to be perfected. As a non-renewable resource, dragonite is highly valued and is considered to be the rarest, most valuable substance in the universe.
There's some interesting info there, but what's most important is the rarity of dragonite and how sought out it is. Most notably, how it's the most valuable substance in the universe and with good reason. But if that's so, why is the sunken dragonite on Heifong VII so... worthless? (Comparatively speaking.) In case you've forgotten, the "Old Man" hired Starwind & Hawking to salvage this treasure. But this wasn't just a case of grabbing a few gems. These were giant boxes containing FIFTEEN TONNES of dragonite!
Side note: I know it seems awfully pedantic, but since it's very important to the calculations here I should mention that I believe the Japanese word for "ton" is actually the "metric ton", written as "tonne" outside of the United States. Japan uses the metric system. Therefore, the amount of dragonite the show had you believe was at Heifong VII was actually a little heavier. This "tonne" is 1000 kilograms, or 2204 pounds, whereas the US (imperial) "ton" is 2000 pounds, or 907 kilograms.
So anyway, that's a lot of dragonite. Good job Aisha was there for the heavy lifting. It equals an estimated 15,000 kilograms of dragonite or 33,069 pounds. The Old Man said there was at least five million wong in dragonite there before Gene and Jim took the job. Presumably he meant a normal density, but for the sake of argument let's say there could have been seven million wong there. Unfortunately for the crew, when they returned with all that dragonite it was only worth 1.8 million wong because it was low-density. That's quite a difference. While even low-density dragonite sure is valuable it (or even normal-density) hardly seems like the most valuable substance in the universe. Let's use another measurement now: carats.
In those crates was 75,000,000 carats of dragonite. I tried to run some numbers to find out what that many carats of diamond would cost. It's a very rough calculation but I imagine it's somewhere in the region of $4,160,000,000,000,000. It'd be something similar in wong, since one wong is close in value to a US dollar. In other words, a lot more money than $1,800,000. But many of us know that diamonds are bullshit. Cartels and "De Beers" set the prices and starve the market with artificial inflation. In reality, diamonds are far more common than most people realise and they're probably worth a fraction of the selling cost. That still doesn't change that even if diamonds were worth a very small fraction of that, this amount of diamonds would still have a value in the trillions.
I'm no mathematician so I'm sure I've got some of this wrong, but going by this a loose one-carat dragonite stone (the actual dragonite they collected) would cost... about $2.5 USD or wong. That's a pretty cheap sparkly engagement ring.(Before some inflation of course.) Yeah, I know I've gone way too deep here.
This topic has nagged me for a long time so I'm glad it's out of the way. I guess the moral of the story is that writers should either do research or basic calculations before pricing something in fiction. Because dragonite is cheap as heck... apparently! I wish I could pay for my energy with it.