Recent content by phavoc

To your points I think we are still seeing a gap here. Smaller ships to take into account the myriad of other locations and cargos not traveling in the holds of the larger ships. We'd still see corps doing it, but more along the lines of smaller corps (who may be just localized and...

I think its pretty clear that nobody took into account the design of cargo holds vis-a-vis transporting containerized goods when they came up with the ship designs. Gravity inside the ship is pretty easy since you control the grav plating. But once you get outside that your are subject to local...

1 TEU in today's world is a 20' container (half the size of the 40' standard). The weight you have is about right. I think that would be at the upper limit for a free or far trader to deal with. The ship itself would be able to easily have it's own grav equipment to load/unload cargo. Any...

Where are you getting your data from, and what period are you referring to? As I stated it's an up and down issue depending on numerous factors. Just a few years ago, during Covid, Chinese shippers were desperate for containers and they could not manufacture them fast enough, so prices were...

Free traders are more akin to semi-trucks than the smallish freighters that ply the waterways of today. You'd have to go back to the early 1900s to really get into the tramp freighter model, where smallish freighters (in the 5k displacement ton class) plied the worlds oceans and carried the...

If we are talking contemporary (i.e. current), containers do make it back across the pond and then back again - at least for half dozen or so trips on average. After that you start seeing a drop-off in getting them back. The challenge is the US and Europe don't do as much trade TO Asia as they...

Lots of good discussions here about the future of containerization. One major point to keep in mind is that ocean-going containers are built differently than standard domestic containers. Ocean-going ones are much more sturdy since they stack higher and are exposed to corrosive sea water and...

I think this is another one of those places that the rules can only be used as general guidance and you have to toss out specifics. An "average" shipyard should be an oxymoron because they shouldn't exist. If we use actual history as a bellweather you'll find that shipyards are going to be all...

Nah, no extra cost. However streamlined cargo would lose carrying capacity since its conformal. Rather than 20% cost increase, do a 20% Dton decrease. That better reflects the fact that curves are not as handy to store stuff in as flat lines. Liquid cargos would not suffer a penalty though.

Well, when Traveller was first proposed you had very large computers. That's been changed since more power microelectronics came into being and showed that it was possible. The idea of conformal fuel tanks didn't exist at that time, so large tanks (boxy or external streamlined on hard points)...

Umm, have you heard of the Quechua of the Andes? They are descendants of the Incans and their lungs have a greater capacity then us lowlanders as they have adapted to living at higher altitudes over many centuries. There are other groups around the world that have adapted to their conditions...

This is one of those places where reality and the game rules diverge. It used to be that Traveller-ideas were mirrored in the real world. However, as technology concepts have changed the game did not change with them. There is a concept called conformal fuel tanks that aircraft such as the...

To put this into perspective, how many people have travelled to outer space? Excluding the more recent space tourists who have gone up for a few minutes and come back down, only about 600 humans in our history have travelled to space. A few hundred have lived for a period orbiting the planet...

Palletization of cargo works for some things - it's certainly not the standard for FedEx, UPS or USPS ground packages. Or air packages (those get loaded individually into containers). Palletization of a refrigerator works great - but it's also wasteful from a cubeage perspective as you cannot...

On paper, you have XX, where each X is 1.5 by 1.5 x 3m tall, and represent 1 Dton. Ship layouts use the same dimension. So a 3Dton container is XX XX XX And so one, up to the standard 10Dton. That correlates to todays containers.