[hal]

Hello Folks,

What follows is something that I posted in another forum for Traveller, and i thought it was worth mentioning here for those who might want to think about it...

Hello folks,
This is being split off from another thread, as an exploration of what is involved in shipping goods across interstellar distances...


Let's say for the sake of giggles, that you want to ship 100 M1 Garand Rifles. Why M1 Garand? A quick Google of shipping crate stats yielded "They are 18" wide, 49 1/2" long and 13 1/2" deep" for a crate that carried 10 rifles. So, 10 rifles at roughly 7.3 cubic feet per 10 rifles, with one dTon at roughly 500 cubic feet volume, would yield (say, at 90% storage efficiency) some 60 crates per dton. That is 600 rifles. Now, at 1,000 credits per jump - at say, 10 parsecs total distance at 1 parsec per jump, we're looking at a total increase in cost of 10,000 credits.

Dividing 10,000 by 600, and the shipping cost increase on those rifles becomes 16.67 credits per rifle overall. That's using the old Classic Traveller rules of shipping costs per parsec per jump. The CT rules were such that you got 1,000 credits per JUMP - not parsec. That meant then, that a shipping destination that was reachable in 5 jumps, would tack on only 5,000 credits per dton, effectively halving the increased cost per unit item being shipped.

MgT figures the pricing differently, as does GURPS etc. But in the long run, the methodology works the same - figure out how many units are being shipped per dton, divide the entire cost of shipping the dton's worth of goods by units within the dton, and that's the increase in cost.

Would you pay double the cost of a laser Rifle if your world can't manufacture it? Let's say for giggles, that 1 dton of volume can hold HALF the number of Garand rifles for Laser Rifles. That's 300 units per Dton right? Remember, I assumed a 10% loss of volume due to stacking issues, and having to be able to access the crates with handling equipment (forklifts, hands grabbing the ends of boxes via the handles etc). But even so - how much of a shipping cost would it take to make the cost of a laser rifle worth 8,000 credits, double?

Reversing the process I used above to derive the shipping cost per unit...

8000 x 300 = 2.4 Mcr.

Think about that. We'd have to add on 2.4 MCr's worth of shipping cost per dton before the cost of a laser rifle would effectively double - assuming that a laser rifle takes up twice the volume that an M1 Garand requires.


The response that I got was this:


Laser rifles require a backpack, so are nowhere as compact as rifles.

So, my response to the response follows below:

When that was originally posted, I largely left the topic alone simply because discussing any further the issues inherent in shipping goods within a dton of volume didn't really advance the thread it was first brought up with (other than to point out that shipping goods between worlds can be worth the while even if you end up having to ship them a long way).

So, the statement that shipping lasers that are bulkier than M1 Garands was made and I largely wondered just how true that was. The M1 Garand had a weight of roughly 10 lbs (plus the weight of the magazine took it a touch higher). In Kilograms - that is almost 5 kilograms in weight. MgT first edition tells us that a rifle weighs roughly 5 kg (see pg 99). Page 100 lists the weight of a laser rifle as being 8 kg at TL 9, or 5 kg at TL 11.

Unfortunately, I was not able to locate the weight of the battery pack in MgT's rule book, so I went hunting for it in the classic traveller books. Book 2 of the classic traveller rule book 2 pg 40 gives us an entry on laser rifles listing their weight as being 10 kg including the battery pack. It then goes on to state that the laser itself weighs 6 kg with the battery pack weighing 4 kg. Oddly enough, CT lists the price of the battery pack as being 1500 credits, just as the Mongoose Traveller lists the price as being 1500.

So, let's call that a baseline shall we?

As pointed out earlier, the M1 Garand packing case in real life is 18" wide by 49" long by 13.5" deep and could carry 10 rifles. Presumably, that works out to five rifles per row, two rows per case, for 10 rifles.

Presumably, the length of an M1 Garand is shorter than the 49" in length, else it wouldn't fit within that case. Google took me to a page that lists the length of the M1 Garand as 43.5". Unfortunately, Mongoose Traveller's rule book doesn't give specs on length of weapon, but Classic Traveller does, and lists the weapon length as being 1000mm in length. Converting that to inches, and we get 39.37". So, were we to presume that the rifles are capable of being separated from the battery packs - the stats on a laser rifle in CT is such that the weapon is 40" in length (why quibble over the .67 inches?) and weighs roughly 6 Kg. Comparing this against the M1 Garand is such that for the same volume of packaging for the M1 Garand, the Laser rifle is pretty darned close to the physical dimensions as the M1 Garand. It might be wider perhaps, or it might not. It is certainly SHORTER than the M1 rifle. But even if you doubled the width of the rifle - 18" wide for five rifles results in roughly 3.6" width per Garand rifle. Can anyone presume that the laser rifle is going to require TWICE the width that the M1 Garand takes?

If the Laser rifle is all THAT fragile, it would not survive battle field conditions such as being dropped as the soldier goes prone on the battle field. It could not be used as a quarterstaff like weapon in close combat when used in a cross check. So, let's call it reasonably comparable to the standard rifle in terms of durability.