You just had it as a parenthetical, but really, any colony that starts out with space capacity is way better off doing a few decades of asteroid mining before putting boots on the ground, if they must.
IIRC I read that the movie “The Martian” got it right that potatoes are a great food source. Easy to grow, lots of nutrients. Assuming you have to produce food on the new planet rather than live on what you carried with you I think potatoes might be a first step for a sustainable food source.
Bring whatever you need to make that a doable thing.
I think the first days/weeks/months on the new planet will be establishing renewable food sources and clean water. Tech can come later.
This might turn out to be a logistical problem which would take some dedication to solve. The asteroids inside the frost line would have more useful minerals and ores, while the ones beyond the frost line would have more volatiles; to collect these resources together would require time, energy and planning. Note as well that the volatile rich objects are located far from the local star where solar panels work less well.
Although an asteroid belt is resource rich when taken as a whole, it is also very widely distributed.
They might be ponies but they are draft animals. On the islands they come from they’ve always done heavy work.
I think you’d start by picking up as much as you can just on your way into the system, where you’ll pass through both zones anyway. Pick one or two large targets on the way, drop off robotic processors, or even a small manned mining station, and that should sort out your colony for generations worth of material.
You say that as if you have one tech, a “chem lab”, and that gives you the capacity to make all of the “chemicals” you need. But every chemical has its own process for making it, and you need the tools and raw materials for all of those processes.
Peace offerings. When those subterranean aliens decide to scuttle out of their dank tunnels to exterminate us pesky surface-dwelling nose-breathers, we’d better come armed with shiny trinkets—like glitter-encrusted rubber chickens, or glow-in-the-dark stress balls—to let them know we’re cool. After all, what better way to say, “Hey, we’re friendly, please don’t vaporize us into oblivion” than a basket of sparkly distractions, right?
I’m saying most chemicals that you absolutely need can be made in a good university-level chem lab. The acids and suchlike that you need to run a fabber, definitely. Not at industrial scales, but that’s hardly a concern for a small colony.
Most of which are fairly standard ones or variations thereof - very few chemical compounds can’t be made with the kind of setup I’m talking about.
Or let’s try a different approach - you name a chemical that would be hard to make in a university-level chem laboratory.
THat’s what the well-equipped lab is for
See above post about getting the raw materials on the way in.
A really advanced replicator technology could do full nuclear synthesis, making obtaining raw materials trivial. But at that point we’re talking about near-magical cornucopia machines, which would make our primitive concepts of colonization obsolete.
ETA: which brings to a head the whole question of science fiction depictions of the future and especially what is to become of humanity. Since the first proto-humans discovered breaking a rock to give it a sharp edge we have been technologists, using and even coming to need technology. Making stuff is a fundamental part of humanity. But we’ve advanced more and more into secondary and tertiary technology– machines that make machines that make other machines that make stuff; and the ultimate end point of this process would be a magic wish-granter (i.e., an AI-controlled universal replicator) that produces anything just by being asked. At which point technology would be at an end and we would no longer be technologists. At what point do we want to stay hands-on and do stuff for ourselves even if a machine could do it faster, better or easier?
And emit lots of energetic neutrons or gamma rays as well, I think. Nucleogenesis/alchemy is a dark and dangerous art.
In the Charles Stross book Singularity Sky a shipload of people from a post-scarcity human world visit a world that has fallen back to a much lower level of technology. For the lulz they dropped a large number of phones to the surface. For anyone that picked one up a voice offered to give them anything that they want. One person asked for a goose that laid golden eggs:
It was a wonderful animal, until you held it close to a railway man’s dosimeter and discovered the deluge of ionizing radiation spewing invisibly from the nuclear alchemist’s stone in its gizzard. Which you only thought to do when the bloody stools became too much to bear, and your hair began to fall out in clumps.
Asimov’s golden-egg goose was a lot user-friendlier. It worked by decreasing the ambient background of radioactive material.
If I’m recalling the same story, the goose somehow converted oxygen-18 to gold-197 because the two isotopes had identical binding energies and so wouldn’t release a huge surplus of nuclear energy. Deactivating the radioactive tracers the investigators attempted to use was a side effect.