Trade and multiple worlds in the same system

[EDG]

But such worlds *are* generally interested in doing offworld business, if only to bring in things they need. That could be edibles, machine parts, or finished goods, depending on the physical nature of the world, and it does make them part of the economy, even if they are lost below the significant digits kept by the economists on BigWorld three parsecs away.

Oh, I'm sure they'd love occasional visitors I'm sure to drop off parts and gossip. But they don't really have much to offer them in return. Heck, I think most of the low pop worlds actually get sustained by regular supply runs from whatever organisation or government runs the colony/outpost (the idea that an outpost of 90 people all on its own on a planet is in any way shape or form an independent government is ridiculous to me).

And as noted before, "no one ever goes there" has an attraction all its own to certain segments of the populace.

There's plenty of places to go even within a single system where "nobody ever goes" though. All one needs to do is set up shop on a nameless asteroid in a belt or on a small outer jovian moon and voila, instant isolation. After all, if you live on one of Neptune's moons or on a planet orbiting a Far Companion star then you may as well be in another system when it comes to travel time anyway.

 

[dmccoy1693]

There's certainly no need to be shipping ores from one star system to another.

Just curious, but why do you think so? I mean we do that now. Oil to go into a car's gas tank is shipped as the "raw ore" from the middle east to the west. That's what "Light Sweet Crude" is. Reason why its shipped crude is because refineries can turn that raw petrolium into everything from gasoline to raw materials for plastics (to be shipped to other factories) to petrolium jelly. If the mining location isn't set up for manufacturing, then shipping the raw ore makes the most sense. Yea, we could import refined gas, but local variances (like how Pheonix, AZ has significiantly higher gas quality regulations then Tuson, AZ has) there's no way for Saudis can handle orders that small and ship it here profitably. Shipping it crude and then refining it locally makes the most economic sense.

Same is true with the 3I.

 

[klingsor]

This stuff is useful for scenario creation. For example my players are taking a cargo of manufactured goods to Aster (Glisten 0109). I have no background on it at all but I have a nice scenario worked up from the UWP, looking at the map, a good working knowledge of the setting (boosted nicely by the essays in the Spinward Marches book) and general knowledge (degrees in environmental science and history are useful after all).

Aster 0109 C86A410-9 Ni Wa

The planet was too far (4 parsecs) from anywhere (Glisten) that would be a major market which ruled out simple protein, it would have to be something more valuable but not a lot of it also it is a Company/corporation government. So it is has an experimental facility, a combined venture between BT and MagnetoDynamics to extract something from plankton. An organic resin perhaps but they are interested in high value protein as well. Let us complicate things, colonists, sabotage, a traitor and a Sword World security sergeant as a suspect . A vargr marine biologist, a crashed survey pinnacle and pirates. Not to mention interesting and sometimes hostile life - This should be fun.

 

[Vile]

There's certainly no need to be shipping ores from one star system to another.

Just curious, but why do you think so? I mean we do that now. Oil to go into a car's gas tank is shipped as the "raw ore" from the middle east to the west. That's what "Light Sweet Crude" is. Reason why its shipped crude is because refineries can turn that raw petrolium into everything from gasoline to raw materials for plastics (to be shipped to other factories) to petrolium jelly. If the mining location isn't set up for manufacturing, then shipping the raw ore makes the most sense. Yea, we could import refined gas, but local variances (like how Pheonix, AZ has significiantly higher gas quality regulations then Tuson, AZ has) there's no way for Saudis can handle orders that small and ship it here profitably. Shipping it crude and then refining it locally makes the most economic sense.

Same is true with the 3I.

Yes the same is true with the 3I. They will also ship resources from one part of a planet to another part of the same planet. They even have the option of shipping refined ores from planetoid belts to the planet. Probably far more than could ever be made use of by even a Hi Pop world. So why would they pay extra for starships to ship it in from another star system? Starships have expensive jump drives, computers, software, and crews, and they waste at least 10% of their volume on fuel tanks. Sure, travel time is reduced if you use the 100D rule, but travel time is not much of an issue with ores.

Crude oil or natural gas are no a valid comparison, because their impurity ratio is way lower than metals, for example. There might be a case for shipping petrochemicals from one system to another, if that system hasn't had the indigenous life to produce the stuff. But if you're going to export to another star system, you can surely bother to find out what their standards are before you send the stuff. Comparisons between Earth and an interstellar empire very quickly break down if you look into the economics of scale. This is why the PC trader model actually works, and why I disagree completely with the large interstellar trade model.

The concept of large-scale interstellar trade is mainly based on a misconception of how big space is. It's really big. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. A star system contains everything any conceivable population will ever need.

 

[Shiloh]

Yes the same is true with the 3I. They will also ship resources from one part of a planet to another part of the same planet. They even have the option of shipping refined ores from planetoid belts to the planet. Probably far more than could ever be made use of by even a Hi Pop world. So why would they pay extra for starships to ship it in from another star system? Starships have expensive jump drives, computers, software, and crews, and they waste at least 10% of their volume on fuel tanks. Sure, travel time is reduced if you use the 100D rule, but travel time is not much of an issue with ores.

That's assuming that interstellar transport really is that much more expensive than in-system. It will depend on system characteristics: not all systems will have nickel-iron asteroid belts less than a week away by low-G drive, and if the general culture thinks that ballistic delivery is too risky, you're having to run ore-buckets back and forth. How many Gigacredits of infrastructure do you have to invest in "domestic" asteroid mining before it becomes cheaper than the additional cost of interstellar over sublight spaceships?

The concept of large-scale interstellar trade is mainly based on a misconception of how big space is. It's really big. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. A star system contains everything any conceivable population will ever need.

But that population might not have the ability to access it, or the will. Leaving aside ores for the moment, there's an assumption, it seems to me, built into the background, that high-pop planets won't be able to feed themselves, for a variety of reasons, and that there exist lowish pop agri-worlds with massive automated farms which export their foodstuffs to the other worlds. There are also reasons for large vessels packed with manufactured goods to be moving around, in the same way that vehicles are shifted around the world in the C21st. Sure, car manufacturers tend to try and build assembly plants in the market country, but there are still subassemblies and parts that need shipping, and even some imports from the "home" country, if the geography is right.

So, tractors to agricultural, food to mining (could be an asteroid belt in one of the worlds) and metal to manufacturing worlds makes a nice triangular trade when your ship's never empty.

 

[atpollard]

A star system contains everything any conceivable population will ever need.

Except the pre-existing infrastructure available just 7 days away using the safe and ubiqitous Starship. (although most Traveller Trade systems make iron ore uneconomical to ship interstellar, so trade should concist more of widgets than ores.)

 

[dmccoy1693]

Maybe I've played d6 Star Wars to long but I think of each planet as being wholey uniform. If a planet is a city planet, it has little to no agriculture and has to import all its food. If its owned by a mining company, then they don't have the infrastructure to refine it there. If a planet is rich in Nickel-Iron, it doesn't have good growing soil elsewhere. And so on.

For a mere Cr 1000/ton, you can have the ore shipped to a world within a parsec in only a week's time. When all is said and done, total shipping might add Cr 1000/spaceship or wheeled vehicle or etc. But its still reasonably economical.

Distances in space do not really matter when you have a drive that can take it just about anywhere in a week.

 

[Vile]

A star system contains everything any conceivable population will ever need.

(although most Traveller Trade systems make iron ore uneconomical to ship interstellar, so trade should concist more of widgets than ores.)

That's what I'm saying ... :wink:

 

[Jame Rowe]

And as noted before, "no one ever goes there" has an attraction all its own to certain segments of the populace.

There's plenty of places to go even within a single system where "nobody ever goes" though. All one needs to do is set up shop on a nameless asteroid in a belt or on a small outer jovian moon and voila, instant isolation. After all, if you live on one of Neptune's moons or on a planet orbiting a Far Companion star then you may as well be in another system when it comes to travel time anyway.

Which isn't entirely the point - given Traveller's commo assumptions, there's less value in going to an asteroid in the same system, where if some advertiser finds out where you are he can aim an advertisment at you, while in another system, you not only might find a place with few people, you're also
faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar
away from any advertisers on your homeworld with a commo device,
*and you might just have an atmosphere where you can walk around without a vacsuit in*.




Please forgive me for drawing out the word "far" so very very much, but I do want to give an idea how very far away you'd be.

 

[EDG]

Distances in space do not really matter when you have a drive that can take it just about anywhere in a week.

It can't though. Jump itself takes a week (or maybe it won't, if you misjump). Travel to and from the 100D limit adds probably about a week to that time - so really it takes between 10-14 days to get from starport to starport in a single jump.

Plus, not every ship can make the distance in a single jump. Two J1s (+real space travel time) adds up to about 20-30 days of travel.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Well its not economical to ship small amounts long distances. If you're going over Jump 5 with ore, you're looking at a minimum of a 1000+ ton freighter. Probably 10000+ ton freighter. There's no way 60 tons of ore going Jump 5 is going to be economical.

I mean we don't have cargo ships the size of personal yachts transporting oil. We use giant tanker ships. That's economical.

Also, plenty of factories are in the middle of nowhere because a raw material that costs alot to ship is mined nearby. I use to work for a fiberglass insulation company in a part of the country no one willingly lived. The factory was there because sand was close by. Like 100-200 miles. We got shipments as frequent as 4 trucks a day. Other raw materials had to be imported from places as far away as africa. How was that economical, we got few shipments but when we got them, they were huge.

I'd call anything that can be done in a single jump economical, anything else I'd say it needs a larger order on a longer range vessel or its a special shipment.

 

[EDG]

For all this talk about what is or isn't "economical", has anyone actually calculated out how much it really costs in Traveller to transport 1 ton of cargo between two systems at J1 (including real space travel time)? And then compared it to how much it would cost to transport the same item at sublight between two worlds within a system? It'd be nice to get some hard numbers, then we can really see what is economical or not.

(I guess the numbers depend on what version of Traveller we're using, so assume MGT for now).

 

[dmccoy1693]

For all this talk about what is or isn't "economical", has anyone actually calculated out how much it really costs in Traveller to transport 1 ton of cargo between two systems at J1 (including real space travel time)? And then compared it to how much it would cost to transport the same item at sublight between two worlds within a system? It'd be nice to get some hard numbers, then we can really see what is economical or not.

(I guess the numbers depend on what version of Traveller we're using, so assume MGT for now).

Also depends greatly on what tonnage ship you're talking about. Fuel alone required for a 100 ton ship to do jump 1 is 10 tons vs 100 tons of fuel for a 1000 ton ship.

The real benefit comes for something like a 1200 ton ship doing a jump 4. Requires 480 tons of fuel and if its built to be a cargo ship first you might get something like 400-500 tons of cargo (rough guess). That's approximately 1 ton of fuel per ton of cargo.

Compare that with a 100 ton scout. To transport its 20 some tons of cargo two jump 2s, you're looking at 40 tons of fuel. That's about 2 tons of fuel per ton of cargo. Plus there's time to stop and refuel.

Having larger ships jumping further with larger cargos is much more economical.

 

[EDG]

Why is fuel the issue? Fuel is piffle, you can get it anywhere and can get it easily and cheaply. The things that are going to determine the economics are the maintenance and running costs of the ship, crew salaries, etc. Either way, it seems to me that the shorter the time the ship spends in transit (where it's not really earning any money), the more economical it will be - so if it's shuttling stuff around in realspace within a system within a couple of days then that's always going to be more economical than spending a week doing nothing in jump space.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Why is fuel the issue?

Fuel is an easy measure. Its a simple way to demonstrate general inefficiencies.

The things that are going to determine the economics are the maintenance and running costs of the ship, crew salaries, etc.

Ok. Well, its going to take about 20 shipments of scout crews to equal the quantity of the 1200 ton vessel. If they were handled by seperate crews, that's 20 pilots, 20 engineers, 20 etc as opposed to the 1-2 you'd have on the 1200 ton vessel. Plus the scout crews would have to be paid for at least twice as long as as the 1200 ton since the scouts have to stop and refuel half way through.

Either way, it seems to me that the shorter the time the ship spends in transit (where it's not really earning any money), the more economical it will be - so if it's shuttling stuff around in realspace within a system within a couple of days then that's always going to be more economical than spending a week doing nothing in jump space.

Sure. But someone should also pay much less for it. You don't need a jump drive capable ship, so the company won't have to pay as much since a lower tech crew can handle the job. If its routinely patrolled, then the ship doesn't need weapons so it is going to cost the company less.

The basic flaw in this discussion is that you're examing the economics of a factory that gets all its raw materials from a single source. In that case, having the factory/refinery close to the point of extraction is a great idea.

But lets examine a more realistic model. A factory that gets its raw materials from 10-20 different sources, half of which are not even in this sub-sector. Where are you going to put your factory? Near the source that provides the greatest quantity of raw material makes the most sense. But what if a different planet offers a significiant tax break to put it a mere parsec away, and that break would be significiant enough for that tax break to make it economical.

Now say another raw material is only 3 parsecs away, but there is civil unrest there and it causes the flow of raw materials to be less consistant (yes, this is a genuine industrial concern). So you shop around and find the next closest supplier to be 12 parsecs away. So do you move your factory or import from a great distance? Will the civil unrest resolve itself quickly enough to allow you to resume your supply from your original source? Do you take action to force a resolution (aka war over resources)? Or do you just buy in bulk from your far away supplier and have it shipped rarely?

Now say another supplier start selling a variation that is trendy (i.e. organic produce, non-polluting generators, etc) and you feel you can capitalize on this. But its 4 parsecs away, your previous supplier is only 1 parsec away. Do you use capitalize on this opportunity or do you let your competition have it? Do you move your factory or do you import from a distance? What if this raw material is only a minor ingredient in your final product? Do you move your entire operation for something you use 100 tons a week when you use 100,000 tons of your main ingredient every week? Or do you just buy in bulk and have it shipped over rarely?

 

[EDG]

But as Vile pointed out, most systems have every resource they need. Why ship bulk ore from another system (with all those unknowns about civil unrest, or even the uncertainty of a ship misjump and total cargo loss) when you've got plenty of iron asteroids in your own system that you can get to in a couple of days using much safer sublight travel?

Effectively, each asteroid (or agro space station within a system) is a separate source of material, so if one dries out then you can easily find another one to tap. Or go mine a moon or inner planet, or even the mainworld itself. In most cases, you don't need to go anywhere else, and if the reliability of the source is the issue then you can easily just build your own processors or factories in your own system where you can retain control over it more immediately.

It's phenomenally stupid to have a war over resources in the 3I, because everyone's got all the resources that they need. Even the basic processing of those raw materials is widespread enough to be not worth fighting for. The real commodities are going to be things that really are unique to systems - cultural treasures (art, books, relics, information, etc) or really unique organic products that can't be (or aren't allowed to be) grown anywhere else, or technologies (from TL15 goods being imported to lower tech worlds, to spaceships that are only produced in a specific shipyard etc).

 

[GamerDude]

But as Vile pointed out, most systems have every resource they need.

There is one resource that is not in every system... To quote the CT Module 'Divine Intervention': "Recently, however, it became known through certain unorthodox channels that the Pavabidians had discovered massive deposits of iridium (with some platinum) on their world. Iridium is relatively rare in the Spinward Marches, and its industrial uses make it extremely valuable."

The background in the module goes on to how important this Iridium is, including in starship construction.

So there is something that needs to be moved in bulk, either as raw ore or as refined ingots. It's important and not easily found.

I know this is one example, but it goes to show that painting with such broad strokes isn't always the best way to discuss a topic.

 

[EDG]

Iridium is rare on planets, but it's generally concentrated in small amounts in asteroids (that's how we know that an asteroid impact contributed to the death of the dinosaurs, because the geological layer corresponding to the event is unusually rich in iridium).

CT isn't well researched when it comes to minerals and ores. Lanthanum for example is a rare earth element, and its chemistry means that it would never be found as raw ore - it's always found in tiny amounts with other metals. So talking about planets with "huge deposits of lanthanum" - as has been done in CT several times - is unrealistic.

 

[dmccoy1693]

But as Vile pointed out, most systems have every resource they need.

As I said before, I don't paint my universe with that same brush. I see worlds like that as very few and very far inbetween.

 

[EDG]

But as Vile pointed out, most systems have every resource they need.

As I said before, I don't paint my universe with that same brush. I see worlds like that as very few and very far inbetween.

Do you at least admit that this is a very unrealistic assumption though?