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Originally Posted by Bengt
According to the article transport costs do matter.
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Yes. they have an effect. And if the transport costs are high and the differences in price ratios small they can make trade uneconomic. But surely you can see that the effect is not necessarily so large that trade in agricultural products is impossible. Trade costs in the real world are non-zero, yet we have and have long had worldwide trade in food and other agricultural products.
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This didn't seem very efficient to me. But I guess if this planet is in the equivalent of North Africa (in relation to Europe) it could still be believable.
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Navabharata is actually closer to several of the worlds of the Suite than they are to each other.
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While if it's the settings equivalent of Australia SoD would be harder. Assuming FTL costs scale somewhat linearly with distance.
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In the 1890s Australia sustained the highest per-capita incomes of any country in the world, by exporting minerals and agricultural products in steamers. Wool, butter, cheese, beef, sheep meat, wheat, and timber, plus gold, silver, copper, lead and I think coal. Steamers carried million of tons of the stuff to England, which took six weeks. Navabharata to Tau Ceti is only six days.
The American South before the US Civil War supported a wealthy and highly-educated aristocracy on the labour of a much poorer unfree underclass by exporting cotton to England for manufacture and re-export around the world, in ships that were both slower and more expensive than 1890s steamers. Economically and even socially, Navabharata is a lot like the American Old South. There are probably even a lot of gods on Navabharata who believe in "
king kevlar".
Navabharata's place in the interstellar economy is a close parallel to a large number of historical examples in the world economy. If you're having trouble suspending disbelief in it I'm afraid that the problem is with your lack of knowledge of history and understanding of economics, not with my set-up of Navabharata. This is how trade actually works.
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Speaking of Australia, you could have a planet whose "export" is prison space. :)
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Yes, though pre-Revolutionary America is probably a closer analogy, because the Empire wouldn't let a colony exercise government authority on another planet in the manner of the prison colonies in Australia.
I can see several ways of doing it.
First, if a colony had an open immigration policy other colonies might find it cheaper to ship their criminals there as exiles than lock them up. Imperial Spaceways would probably insist on such passengers travelling in hibersleep, because it wouldn't be keen on the security problems of having unwilling passengers, and its staff would jack up at being asked to serve as prison guards.
Second, in a manner similar to the deportation of English criminals and Cornish and Irish rebels to the Americas between 1600 and 1775: a colony could impose an indenture on a convict as a criminal penalty, and assign the indenture to an agent on another colony where the law supported such transactions. The agent would sell the indenture when the convict arrived in hibersleep, and use the proceeds to defray the cost of passage. That the Empire would be perfectly fine with providing transportation in such a case is another example of it not being as moral as martinl would like.
Third, a colony could supply, or countenance firms in its jurisdiction supplying, the services of a private prison, like many in the USA today. In this case, a colony where keeping prisoners was expensive might find it economical to ship them off-world to a place where accommodations, food, guards etc. are cheaper. On a long sentence the savings on prison costs might cover the transportation costs.
After the Compromise of '84 I can see a consortium backed by the LRA buying the cheapest possible planet in the Beyond from Eichberger Realty and setting it up as a prison planet. Colonies all across the Empire would pay it to accept migrants such as it could not otherwise attract. And the "prisoners" could be used as a workforce and population for a new world, in which the entrepreneurs of the scheme could set up a political system such as could not attract voluntary immigrants. And after fifty years they get a seat in the Senate!
It's not Navabharata, though.