Today, the big showstopper in mining rock planets would be the cost of surface-to-orbit. In Trek, this is supposedly negated by the transporter, so that Cardassians refine their ore up in orbit rather than down below, this basically meaning they haul massive amounts of worthless rock up several hundred kilometers against the pull of gravity (and then presumably down again, even though we never get the impression they could regain any of the energies spent, not with using the transporter).
Transporting seems dirt cheap - literally, if it really makes it worthwhile to lift all that dirt from the gravity well. But perhaps the particle fountain makes it cheaper still? With bulk, that is, with stuff flowing up in an unbroken stream (of said half a ton per minute), even minor savings should be relevant.
We see a conventional beanstalk in VOY "Rise", with a physical elevator and all. This could simply be its magic beam equivalent, a conveyor moving up some material that has already been extracted from rock down below. But not any specific sort of magic - we hear no technobabble otherwise associated with, say, tractor beams or the like. When things go south, there's "radiation", but they don't even say what sort of radiation. So for all we know, the magic is made out of real-world things this time around, save for the all-important containing "forcefield".
Timo Saloniemi
