Trade and multiple worlds in the same system

[dmccoy1693]

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

Why is this unrealistic? Is there any evidence of other planets as diverse as earth being common? Gas giants, sure. Worlds of rock or Ni or Fe, sure. Worlds with water only in the form, sure. But planets that exist in the livable zone, have an atmosphere capable of supporting life, water in sufficient quantities for most of the planet to be livable, AND have a great enough mineral diversity and deposits to profitably mine and support every industry known to man strikes me as unusual.

Not every system is created equal.

 

[EDG]

But planets that exist in the livable zone, have an atmosphere capable of supporting life, water in sufficient quantities for most of the planet to be livable, AND have a great enough mineral diversity and deposits to profitably mine and support every industry known to man strikes me as unusual.

Not every system is created equal.

True, and I agree... but you can make them equal in many ways.

Like I said, build a bunch of agro stations or even massive greenhouses and you've got all the crops you need (and if there's no native life then great - no need to worry about pesky alien bugs eating your crops too).

And a system lacking inner planets and/or a belt might not have such a bounty of mineral resources, but there's still an entire mainworld's worth to mine (and with shorter travel time too). Even better if it's non-habitable, because then you don't need to worry about pollution and can strip-mine away!

There are plenty of resources available within a system. You've got abundant hydrogen and helium-3 in the gas giants, you've got ores and minerals in the asteroid belts and inner planets (and mainworld), you've got organics on the habitable planets or on the dedicated space stations - heck, you can even make petroleum products by breaking down organics in special factories. While you may not have a habitable world in every system, you are going to have a lot of those other things because those are common in the universe.

 

[GypsyComet]

But planets that exist in the livable zone, have an atmosphere capable of supporting life, water in sufficient quantities for most of the planet to be livable, AND have a great enough mineral diversity and deposits to profitably mine and support every industry known to man strikes me as unusual.

Not every system is created equal.

True, and I agree... but you can make them equal in many ways.

Like I said, build a bunch of agro stations or even massive greenhouses and you've got all the crops you need (and if there's no native life then great - no need to worry about pesky alien bugs eating your crops too).

And a system lacking inner planets and/or a belt might not have such a bounty of mineral resources, but there's still an entire mainworld's worth to mine (and with shorter travel time too). Even better if it's non-habitable, because then you don't need to worry about pollution and can strip-mine away!

There are plenty of resources available within a system. You've got abundant hydrogen and helium-3 in the gas giants, you've got ores and minerals in the asteroid belts and inner planets (and mainworld), you've got organics on the habitable planets or on the dedicated space stations - heck, you can even make petroleum products by breaking down organics in special factories. While you may not have a habitable world in every system, you are going to have a lot of those other things because those are common in the universe.

But this is Traveller, and it has its own flavor of star system generation. Very few systems are as large and diverse as Sol's, and the majority stars (MV) have trouble getting something in their first available orbit hot enough to melt water, much less provide enough power/light/heat to grow crops. Other systems may not have any significant bodies in the outer zone, meaning natural volatiles of any sort (including water) are going to be vanishingly rare.

You also seem to be operating under an "old main world, new colony/trade" assumption, which cannot be applied to all (or even very many) Traveller settings. Under this assumption, that lovely main world was colonized some centuries ago, grew to a couple billion souls on its own and *only then* poked around in other systems. Of course such a system will be self-sufficient. It wouldn't have survived otherwise. Such a world will also have answered all the infrastructure needs it has within the system, so outside competitors will be at a severe disadvantage.

Traveller doesn't necessarily make the same assumption. Colonial efforts may well have hit an entire subsector at the same time, garden worlds, industrial facilities, marginals, and less. Infrastructures could easily be developing in parallel, communicating and sharing resources constantly and from the very beginning. Economics and a large dose of human nature will eventually determine which world comes to dominate the area, but you won't see those whole and self-contained infrastructures pop up on every world, because they don't have to and it may not be economical to do so when the shipping is already in place anyway.

 

[Shiloh]

Like I said, build a bunch of agro stations or even massive greenhouses and you've got all the crops you need...

Even with Traveller tech it's not always feasible to enclose enough arable land to feed a planet: you can often ship the food in cheaper from a "garden" planet.

...mineral resources, but there's still an entire mainworld's worth to mine (and with shorter travel time too). Even better if it's non-habitable, because then you don't need to worry about pollution and can strip-mine away!

So if you're a garden world, growing food for the subsector, you don't want to strip mine the place, and you don't need ore, you need combines. Which come from an old main world that's largely mined out but still has the hi-tech factories to make it worth feeding with raw materials from... the asteroid belt one jump away (whether that's orbiting the same primary or not).

You've got abundant hydrogen and helium-3 in the gas giants...

Which are weeks away by maneuver drive. But really wasteful to bring in by jump...

ores and minerals in the asteroid belts...

Still haven't had the chance to see how long it takes a "slowboat" to get there.

...inner planets...

Extracting material from places like Venus and Mercury is going to be *expensive*. Vacuum mining is dangerous, but trying to work on a planet as insidious as Venus or hot as Mercury would pose serious challenges that would increase the expense of recovery significantly.

Mind you, shipping iron ore (or pretty much any "ore") is the most likely thing to be uneconomical in any given situation, and metal refining is highly likely to take place near its extraction point, since it mostly requires heat that's readily available anywhere you have a fusion plant. Some extraction processes though will need large bulk quantities of additional reagents: coke, for example, which might not be economically available at the extraction site.

Yes, an old, well-developed system that had to rely on itself will have invested in the in-system infrastructure to access all its multifarious resources, and yes, building that infrastructure is cheaper than (or even a prerequisite for) fighting a war over existing infrastructure someplace else, but the Imperium pretty much exists to provide an environment where interstellar trade is entirely possible and economically viable, and many systems don't have the incentive to build their own off-planet assets.

So there's room for both in places (like SM) that have had the tide of interstellar civilisation wash through more than once. Worlds that retained a tech level through the Long Night might have routes to full exploitation of their own resources, but worlds that sank below the industrial level and have been recolonised by the 3I would have grown up with cheap imports.

 

[GamerDude]

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).

Do ALL systems have asteroid belts?

'Generally concentrated in small amounts in asteroids" so IF a system has an asteroid belt, there might be some but to get any significant amount you have to first find hundreds of asteroids that have the mineral, then mine them, and have a system of storing/transporting these small amounts.

That's a far cry from "every system has all the resources it needs".

 

[EDG]

Do ALL systems have asteroid belts?

No, which is why I haven't said that every single system has all the resources it needs - I've said that MOST systems would have those.

'Generally concentrated in small amounts in asteroids" so IF a system has an asteroid belt, there might be some but to get any significant amount you have to first find hundreds of asteroids that have the mineral, then mine them, and have a system of storing/transporting these small amounts.

That's a far cry from "every system has all the resources it needs".

Even if it doesn't have a belt, there are still other planets (and the mainworld itself) to mine it from. Granted, it'd be present in the crust in tiny amounts (apparently only 3 tons per year are produced on Earth) because most of it's settled to the planet's core - but it's there. Asteroids have more iridium in them though.

But it strikes me that if Iridium is that important for shipbuilding (I dunno what the module says exactly), then the smart thing to do would be to build a ship construction yard in a system with an asteroid belt, and not in one that doesn't have one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium

 

[EDG]

Even with Traveller tech it's not always feasible to enclose enough arable land to feed a planet: you can often ship the food in cheaper from a "garden" planet.

It's very possible to build stations with enough arable land at high Traveller TLs to feed a planet. There's no reason why it shouldn't be. At TL 15 You can easily build a big space station, or even a Halo/Culture-style Orbital ring with massive surface area, and away you go.

So if you're a garden world, growing food for the subsector, you don't want to strip mine the place, and you don't need ore, you need combines. Which come from an old main world that's largely mined out but still has the hi-tech factories to make it worth feeding with raw materials from... the asteroid belt one jump away (whether that's orbiting the same primary or not).

Or, y'know, you could just build a factories on the mainworld itself that builds them and not screw around with interstellar or interplanetary imports at all. Garden worlds do have industry, you know.

Which are weeks away by maneuver drive. But really wasteful to bring in by jump...

OK, so you use the oceans and icepacks on the mainworld instead. Or strip-mine the planet's moon to get the He-3 from its regolith.

Extracting material from places like Venus and Mercury is going to be *expensive*. Vacuum mining is dangerous, but trying to work on a planet as insidious as Venus or hot as Mercury would pose serious challenges that would increase the expense of recovery significantly.

True, but hardly a valid argument given how the Traveller universe has billions of people cheerfully living on starbaked rockballs and in Insidious environments...

 

[dmccoy1693]

There's no reason why it shouldn't be.

On the contrary, there are LOTS of reasons in traveller, besides resource avialability, why there isn't a complete self-sustaining system. Examples:
*Captured World. The world that governs the world may say that that planet is to only be used for mining its resources and to be shipped back to the main world.
*Techno-phobes. The population may have gone to the world intending to get away from tech (regardless of reasons).
*Corporation simply isn't interested in building a station large enough to be a fully self contained eco-system and believes importing essentials has less liabilities (regardless of cost).

 

[EDG]

On the contrary, there are LOTS of reasons in traveller, besides resource avialability, why there isn't a complete self-sustaining system. Examples:
*Captured World. The world that governs the world may say that that planet is to only be used for mining its resources and to be shipped back to the main world.
*Techno-phobes. The population may have gone to the world intending to get away from tech (regardless of reasons).
*Corporation simply isn't interested in building a station large enough to be a fully self contained eco-system and believes importing essentials has less liabilities (regardless of cost).

Yes, but that's not what we were discussing. All things being equal under normal circumstances, if you have a high TL, high pop world then it should be building everything it needs to survive on its own in its own system. It's capable of doing so and it has the resources and technology to do so, so why shouldn't it?

Sure, there's going to be weird cases where it's not going to happen, but I think that realistically they're going to be outliers. I'm not really interesting in using Traveller's forced, contrived, arbitrary and often incorrect assumptions about how things should work just for the sake of fitting it into the game - I'm interested in making systems and worlds that work and make sense without all that crap.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Yes, but that's not what we were discussing. All things being equal under normal circumstances, if you have a high TL, high pop world then it should be building everything it needs to survive on its own in its own system. It's capable of doing so and it has the resources and technology to do so, so why shouldn't it?

I don't know. Why doesn't modern day earth get off of arabian oil? Why has america shipped so much of its manufacturing to china? We have the tech and the resources to do it ourselves and it'll raise the living standard of all those domestickly. So why don't we? Economics. It costs less to pay someone in a less developed country to do the same work and pay for shipping then it does to pay the high cost of domestic workers plus health care plus taxes on those employees plus the cost of starting up those industries.

Same is true with traveller.

 

[EDG]

Given that I still haven't seen any numbers for how economical it actually is to import from offworld vs how economical it is to get stuff on the mainworld or from in-system, we're probably arguing in circles.

Personally, I can't believe that shipping stuff from a totally different system is cheaper than shipping stuff in from elsewhere on the same world. Maybe that's because space travel is so expensive now in the real world, but I can't imagine it'd be so much cheaper in a future setting that it'd beat surface transport on the same planet.

And like I said, with starships you at least have a 10-14 day turnaround just to get from departure starport to arrival starport in a single jump, and then you need to factor in transport and distribution on the destination planet on top of that - and then there's taxes, salaries, transport costs, etc etc. If you just transport things from A to B on the same planet then that alone cuts out that extra 10-14 day wait with all the other things that entails.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Given that I still haven't seen any numbers for how economical it actually is to import from offworld vs how economical it is to get stuff on the mainworld or from in-system, we're probably arguing in circles.

Personally, I can't believe that shipping stuff from a totally different system is cheaper than shipping stuff in from elsewhere on the same world. Maybe that's because space travel is so expensive now in the real world, but I can't imagine it'd be so much cheaper in a future setting that it'd beat surface transport on the same planet.

Mongoose prints in the US because its that much cheaper to pay americans to print and import it instead of brits to do so locally . Paizo prints in China because that's that much cheaper to pay chinese to print and import it intead of paying americans (or even canadians) to do the printing. Paizo has said that if they had to print in america, they would not be able to do so profitably.

That's the closest thing to actual numbers I can give.

 

[EDG]

That's the closest thing to actual numbers I can give.

None of which have anything to do with the matter at hand. We need hard numbers for how expensive it is (or more likely, should be given realistic assumptions) to ship things across systems in Traveller.

If there's one thing I've learned about Traveller, it's that the real world is absolutely nothing like Traveller in terms of economics (Far Trader notwithstanding, but even that is cramming the square pegs of realism into the round holes of Traveller's crazy economics). Traveller's in its own la-la land when it comes to that, so real world comparisons don't mean anything really.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Unless you can produce a pay scale for workers on a rich world vs the pay scale of someone on a poor world (in MGT), I'd say my interpretation of Traveller economics is no less right then yours is.

 

[EDG]

Unless you can produce a pay scale for workers on a rich world vs the pay scale of someone on a poor world (in MGT), I'd say my interpretation of Traveller economics is no less right then yours is.

Well, pay levels vary on a national scale on Earth because currencies have different values (and also because western economies are highly exploitative of poorer nations, but that's a whole different can of worms) and people have different standards of living.

But even with a single world government and a single currency people won't necessarily be paid the same, unless there's some constitutional statute that says "everyone should be paid the same wage for the same job regardless of any other factors". If that's not in effect though then different areas will still have different standards and costs of living on the same planet, you'll have richer parts and poorer parts... and with that you'll have areas where you can pay people less to work too.

There's the Imperial Credit, but given the travel times and distances involved ships MUST be broadcasting the last known values of the Cr at their departure systems when they arrive in a new system (so it's being updated every time a new ship arrives) so that each world knows how much a Credit is worth (and thus whether anyone paid elsewhere is being paid more or less than someone in the current system). Otherwise I can't see how anyone would be able to keep track of it.

Regardless of that, you still have the transport costs to consider, and if those are high then it may not offset the savings from cheap labour anywhere else.

Either way, if there's a "right answer" to this then it surely can only be found by fully considering all the factors and variables involved, not by making assumptions and skimming over them.

 

[Shiloh]

Even with Traveller tech it's not always feasible to enclose enough arable land to feed a planet: you can often ship the food in cheaper from a "garden" planet.

It's very possible to build stations with enough arable land at high Traveller TLs to feed a planet. There's no reason why it shouldn't be. At TL 15 You can easily build a big space station, or even a Halo/Culture-style Orbital ring with massive surface area, and away you go.

[/quote]

May I draw your attention to the words "not always" and "often"? TL15 systems are not frequently found, and the endeavour becomes increasingly fraught the lower down the scale you go.

So if you're a garden world, growing food for the subsector, you don't want to strip mine the place, and you don't need ore, you need combines. Which come from an old main world that's largely mined out but still has the hi-tech factories to make it worth feeding with raw materials from... the asteroid belt one jump away (whether that's orbiting the same primary or not).

Or, y'know, you could just build a factories on the mainworld itself that builds them and not screw around with interstellar or interplanetary imports at all. Garden worlds do have industry, you know.

You could, but how many combines does it take to make a factory break even? Given that you're going to be exporting megatonnes of food, getting machinery back in the otherwise empty freighters is going to be transport space going for a song. It takes longer than a week for cars to be shipped from Japan to America, but they still do it, even though there are assembly plants in the States too.

Which are weeks away by maneuver drive. But really wasteful to bring in by jump...

OK, so you use the oceans and icepacks on the mainworld instead. Or strip-mine the planet's moon to get the He-3 from its regolith.

Desert/low hydrosphere planets. Tiny or non-existent moons. Though I think that given the amount of H needed for moving more H (what's He-3 got to do with anything... in fact what is He-3?), that's probably something that isn't shipped in bulk from system to system, or even from GG to hab zone. Other gases? Why not. Even Methane, which might be an economical H-transport is potentially cheaper to skim off a GG than to set up rigs.

Extracting material from places like Venus and Mercury is going to be *expensive*. Vacuum mining is dangerous, but trying to work on a planet as insidious as Venus or hot as Mercury would pose serious challenges that would increase the expense of recovery significantly.

True, but hardly a valid argument given how the Traveller universe has billions of people cheerfully living on starbaked rockballs and in Insidious environments...

If you're going to use the established canon as reasons for things existing, then you have to accept that interstellar trade works, because it is established canon, and start finding reasons why it works rather than why it doesn't. Because living and working on Venus is just as stupid a concept as shipping megatonnes between the stars.

 

[EDG]

May I draw your attention to the words "not always" and "often"? TL15 systems are not frequently found, and the endeavour becomes increasingly fraught the lower down the scale you go.

It'd be possible to build an O'Neill station and fill it with fields of crops at TL A. So you have the A-F TLs to be able to do that in.

You could, but how many combines does it take to make a factory break even? Given that you're going to be exporting megatonnes of food, getting machinery back in the otherwise empty freighters is going to be transport space going for a song. It takes longer than a week for cars to be shipped from Japan to America, but they still do it, even though there are assembly plants in the States too.

Possibly, but having the factories on the planet itself means (for one thing) that if the combines break down you can fix them onsite, and not wait for ages for replacement parts to come from off world.

Desert/low hydrosphere planets. Tiny or non-existent moons.

A system with no hydrogen at all is pretty damn rare (if not nonexistent). And even if there's just a little of it somehow (just a bunch of comet nuclei or some small icy moons), that's still a lot of hydrogen to mine.

Though I think that given the amount of H needed for moving more H (what's He-3 got to do with anything... in fact what is He-3?)

Helium-3. Vital input for fusion reactors (along with Deuterium). And the form of the hydrogen doesn't matter here - whether it's methane or ammonia or water or pure H, it's a source of hydrogen, and if any of those are there then that's all that matters.

If you're going to use the established canon as reasons for things existing, then you have to accept that interstellar trade works, because it is established canon, and start finding reasons why it works rather than why it doesn't. Because living and working on Venus is just as stupid a concept as shipping megatonnes between the stars.

No, I don't. Established canon is broken - that's been a well established fact for years. As I said earlier, I'm interested in a system that actually works and has a basis in economics, not something shoehorned into an arbitrary system built on false assumptions and armwaving.

 

[Shiloh]

May I draw your attention to the words "not always" and "often"? TL15 systems are not frequently found, and the endeavour becomes increasingly fraught the lower down the scale you go.

It'd be possible to build an O'Neill station and fill it with fields of crops at TL A. So you have the A-F TLs to be able to do that in.

Possible, but expensive; the station would cost as much to run as a spaceship much larger than the one you'd need to bring you food grown elsewhere. Though an interesting point for when that setup has been created: where does the growth medium come from? Logically, it'd be scows of sewage (possibly treated, possibly not) coming back from wherever the food was shipped to...

You could, but how many combines does it take to make a factory break even? Given that you're going to be exporting megatonnes of food, getting machinery back in the otherwise empty freighters is going to be transport space going for a song. It takes longer than a week for cars to be shipped from Japan to America, but they still do it, even though there are assembly plants in the States too.

Possibly, but having the factories on the planet itself means (for one thing) that if the combines break down you can fix them onsite, and not wait for ages for replacement parts to come from off world.

Or you could have a warehouse with spares in it for a lot less than buying the machine tools and workforce and licences to make 'em. It's all in the balance between capital expenditure and revenue. If you're receiving regular visits to *export* your product, getting a supply of spares when they roll up otherwise empty is trivial. People wait for spare parts from foreign places on Terra-now.

Desert/low hydrosphere planets. Tiny or non-existent moons.

A system with no hydrogen at all is pretty damn rare (if not nonexistent). And even if there's just a little of it somehow (just a bunch of comet nuclei or some small icy moons), that's still a lot of hydrogen to mine.

We weren't talking about whole systems because we'd agreed that bringing it in from the edges is the same as bringing it in from (possibly the edge of) another system: inefficient in hydrogen.

Though I think that given the amount of H needed for moving more H (what's He-3 got to do with anything... in fact what is He-3?)

Helium-3. Vital input for fusion reactors (along with Deuterium). And the form of the hydrogen doesn't matter here - whether it's methane or ammonia or water or pure H, it's a source of hydrogen, and if any of those are there then that's all that matters.

Ah. Light He. Gotcha. Only it's not. "Vital input for fusion", I mean. Not in the RAW: hydrogen fusion is the only game in town.

If you're going to use the established canon as reasons for things existing, then you have to accept that interstellar trade works, because it is established canon, and start finding reasons why it works rather than why it doesn't. Because living and working on Venus is just as stupid a concept as shipping megatonnes between the stars.

No, I don't. Established canon is broken - that's been a well established fact for years. As I said earlier, I'm interested in a system that actually works and has a basis in economics, not something shoehorned into an arbitrary system built on false assumptions and armwaving.

But you did. That's why I quoted you. You accept the "false assumptions and armwaving" about how easy it is to operate in harsh environments, but reject the "false assumptions and armwaving" about how the economy "works". Why am I not allowed to reject the bit that I don't think is reasonable, and you are?

 

[EDG]

Ah. Light He. Gotcha. Only it's not. "Vital input for fusion", I mean. Not in the RAW: hydrogen fusion is the only game in town.

Not from my understanding of nuclear fusion. De-He3 fusion requires more energy to start but is a more efficient reaction that generates more power - it's used in a second generation fusion reactors (Tritium is used in 1st gen reactors but is less efficient). So it stands to reason that advanced reactors would use Helium-3.
See the Fusion Reactions section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3

But you did. That's why I quoted you. You accept the "false assumptions and armwaving" about how easy it is to operate in harsh environments, but reject the "false assumptions and armwaving" about how the economy "works". Why am I not allowed to reject the bit that I don't think is reasonable, and you are?

I never said that living on hellholes was reasonable though. You said that working in such an environment would pose serious challenges etc, all I did was point out that Traveller seems to assume that those are surmountable to the point of allowing billions to live on such worlds. Personally I think that's a load of codswallop and nobody in their right (or wrong) minds would EVER live on a planet like that (at least, no more than a small outpost, probably rotated out from an orbital facility). So I think that assumption is as unreasonable as any made about the economics, and one thing I really don't like about any setting is if it declares that something is possible (if not common) without explaining why or how it got to be that way or how it works.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Personally I think that's a load of codswallop and nobody in their right (or wrong) minds would EVER live on a planet like that

Lots of people live in New Jersey (myself included). :wink:
Lots of people live in war zones.
Lots of people live in overcrowded cities with no clean water.
Lots of people willingly moved from a civilized location to a complete unknown wilderness of nothing with no promise that they'll have enough food or shelter to survive the winter. (aka America).

Why? Jobs.

People will always live in hard areas as long as they have a job. People always have and always will. Put a job there and someone will come to it.