Based on shipping rate of KCr1/ton how far can you ship goods economically?

Also... I just took a minute and re-read the OP.

It seems a bit incomplete regarding unit cost to manufacture, retail price and shipping cost. You list retail and shipping cost, but don't mention cost of manufacture.

Shipping is an add on cost regardless. It's important, but the most important numbers are the actual cost of manufacture and the price a customer is willing to pay. If the former is higher than the latter, you could have free shipping and it wouldn't matter. Conversely, if the cost of manufacture plus the shipping cost is lower enough than the local manufacture cost, profit ensues, regardless of the actual numbers, and someone will probably be shipping freight.
 
MarcusIII said:
Scenario: The planet China manufactures iPhones that retail for Cr200 (1977 price). In a 1.5m x 3m x 3m space you can fit about 28,000 packaged phones. For each parsec shipped it costs 3.5 "cents" per phone.

So for relatively small, high priced products you could ship them all over a sector from one planet economically based on macro econ comparative advantage situation like China and iPhone manufacturing.

Something to think about in the T.U.

Thoughts?
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Hrrm.

For the 200Cr phones, it's .035 Cr per parsec in shipping costs. So, what is the price that the market will bear? What is the price that the market will bear on each world that the cargo ship can deliver to? That creates the range. The maximum range is where the cost of shipping increases the price of the item to the maximum price that the market on each world will bear.

Now consider:

Each sector has a number of high TL worlds which can easily mass produce the phones. Now, where the shipping ranges of these manufacturing worlds overlap, this overlap will lower the maximum price the market will pay on each world. Then the manufacturing world with the Comparative Advantage in manufacturing and shipping will be able to offer the markets of worlds in the overlapping ranges with the lower price.
 
MarcusIII said:
comparative advantage (David Ricardo 1817)
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You are not discussing Comparative Advantage (particularly not Ricardo's model). That requires a number of criteria that are not present in your scenario. For example any restrictions on the movement of labour, a common value of labour, other opportunity costs of production etc. Since your discussion completely disregards the production aspect of the price of goods and just posits a scenario that a particular planet produces goods that retail at a set price without reference to what the price represents or without reference to any other planet C.A. is completely irrelevant. The key word there is comparative - you need to be comparing two entities and there needs to be a mutual trade aspect for it to work.

If planet China produces phones at Cr10 per unit and planet Elsewhere produces phones at Cr20 per unit then we can infer that planet China has an absolute advantage. We would need to know that planet China also produces cars at Cr5000 per unit while planet Elsewhere produces cars at Cr6000 per unit (and both have a domestic market and value those goods at a particular level) for us to do any comparative advantage analysis. If you know that planet Chinas efficiency per Cr in producing phones is higher than it's efficiency in producing cars and it makes sense for it to focus on phones and trade for cars even though it can produce cars more cheaply than importing them. Once you know that you can work out what the overall import costs are and what the trade balance needs to be.

You cannot conduct any Comparative Advantage assessment or even discussion of the principles of it (which are not necessarily applicable to the Traveller economic model) with only one producer and one product specified. You are just talking about arbitrage, selling something to someone that can produce more cheaply than they can. You are only considering a single price influencing factor - transport costs and you are doing it in the context of a made up example that does not reference established Traveller trade costs and goods. Since you are only discussing retail price we don't even have any way of knowing how much profit per phone is being made by planet China and at what point shipping becomes cost effective.

What response are you hoping to elicit?
 
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Ask yourself, why you bought your last cell phone, and what you expected of it.

I think three aspects, at the planetary scale would need to be considered:

1. Subscription business model

2. Good enough

3. Customer service

And, of course, cost.

And, possibly, aspirational lifestyle.
 
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