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Back in the day, I remember bumping into a major inconsistency with respect towards the price of Grain in Classic Traveller, and the knowledge of how many bushels one can carry within a displacement ton from of all places - STAR TREK role playing game.

Years later, one can go to an online converter, enter in 1 bushel = how many cubic feet, and the answer becomes:

dry bushel = 1.24445601851852 foot^3

Assuming 500 cubic feet per dTon, that means that a single dTon of volume can carry 401.7819775 dry bushels.

so call it your "units" per dTon.

So, let's look at GURPS INTERSTELLAR WARS for a moment. Grain, Flour, Baked Goods sells for $5,000 per dTon. If we divide the value per dTon by 400, that brings us a price in the vicinity of $12.50 per bushel. I don't know about you, but flour in my neighborhood isn't being sold today at anything like those prices.

Looking it up on the web, I get this...

"Amount: 1 bushel dry (bsh, bu) of all purpose flour (APF) volume
Equals: 41.05 pounds (lb) in all purpose flour (APF) mass"

So - we now have knowledge of how many bushels (401) per dTon the Traveller Universe would really be able to ship of all purpose flour, and we now know that all purpose flour used in baking comes in at 41.05 lbs per bushel.

At 12.50 Solars (I think that was the currency used in GURPS Interstellar Wars), the price per lb of flour as a speculative good, was being sold at
.304506699 Solars.

Think about that for a moment. At Amazon.com, if you looked up All Purpose Flour, the prices per pound range as low as .66 per pound to as high as 5.90 a pound. That is still 2x higher than what it is priced at in Interstellar Wars (assuming a Solar equals a Dollar - which can be argued it isn't).

Now, let's assume that we are using shipping containers to contain the flour. Let's say we lose 10% by volume, space due to the containers. That gives us a useful volume of only 360.9 cubic feet for the $5,000 - making the unit value per lb change from .3045 to .3375.

So, how far could a shipment go before the cost per parsec change the value by 100%?

If we carry 360.9 bushels of all purpose flour per dTon, and a bushel is equal to 41.05 lbs, that means we're shipping 360.9 x 41.05 lbs per dTon. That works out to 14,814.945 lbs per parsec.

A single jump would cost (and I'm going to stick with GURPS INTERSTELLAR WARS to keep costs relative to each other...)

700 solars per parsec travelled. So, dividing 700 by 14,814, the added cost per lb of all purpose flour (at 5000 solars per dTon, becomes .05 solars per parsec (rounding to 2 digits).

.34 / .05 - results in a distance of 6.8 parsecs travel before the price per pound of all purpose flour doubles.

So, yes, commodities would be limited to a relatively shorter range before its prices double. The question now would be - "Is that a good or bad thing?"

For a world where food production is poor, any food is better than no food, then doubling or trebling its value probably would be worth it. If one doubles the cost of food, then either the wage earned has to be increased to handle the increased food costs, or the other prices for non-food expenses suffer or have to be relatively cheaper.

Things get even more interesting if you consider the trade rules/concepts developed for the Gravity Trade model. An agricultural world exporting grains, would have to export 24 dTons of grain to equal 1 dTon of imports for pharmaceuticals or ammunition for firearms. It would have to export 600 dtons of grains to equal 1.5 dTons of Industrial crystals (assuming standard 100% value of goods being sold to each other).

So, yes, I'd expect that resources with a low value per dTon suffer from ranges drastically as compared against high tech or high value "manufactured" goods. I would also suspect that if World A produces 100,000 dtons of manufactured goods, with a 24:1 ratio of goods required to exchange resources for finished goods, it would take 24 worlds producing 100,000 dtons of goods to equal the trade of that one world. That's 2.4 Million dTons of exports to that world, just to be able to enjoy 100,000 dtons split between 24 worlds - of that one industrial world.

Kind of a sobering thought no?