I am thinking along the lines that the wording "Starter Mine"...

I am thinking along the lines that the wording "Starter Mine" does not imply a large processing plant, rather a smaller, and, suitable for expansion in 5 years type of plant.

The SS2 showed 363koz production in the first year, if they built a plant that was able to produce say 80koz running pretty close to maximum capacity (assuming the 2g/t RPM feed) then that is a much smaller scale operation. 80koz @ $2200 gold price returns ~ $80 million profit assuming $1200 AISC. And there would be enough ore for the next 4-5 years at 2g/t.

SS2 was processing ~ 5.5Mt of ore per year, if we only need to process 1.2Mt for the starter mine to produce the 80koz's, I just can't see why it wouldn't at least cut the cappex in half, realising it isn't a linear relationship etc., but a plant that is only 20% the size should see a reasonable reduction in up front cost.

I don't know enough about all this stuff, but if we need the economies of scale due to the un-avoidable, high up front costs then so be it.