Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?

[hal]

Originally Posted by RyanW

It looks like you're using the Dark Horse from SS2. If so, using that as your basis of comparison is akin to basing a calculation of international trade on the cost to operate drug cartel go-fast boats.

To maximize revenues, you want your equipment operating as continuously as possible. Have interface craft hauling cargo to and from the edge of the hyperspace exclusion zone, where the big ships just drop out of hyperspace, drop off their cargo containers, pick up the next batch, and leave. Why waste so much effort hauling hyperdrives up and down gravity wells?

Whether or not interstellar craft go up or down the gravity well is largely immaterial to the question of interstellar trade. In the end, the question becomes one of:

What is the cost to ship products/materials from one location (supplier) to its destination (market)? Does it matter whether one ship carries the product to its destination or it takes three ships involved in the transportation? Not really. The cost of transportation is paid regardless of how it is accomplished.

Ultimately - the market for high industrial world goods has to be paid for at worlds lacking the capacity to manufacture said goods. If raw materials is the only currency the market world has to exchange for the manufactured goods, then the ability to buy manufactured goods will be limited by the value placed upon the raw materials. If it takes 10 tons of materials to match the value of 1 ton of manufactured goods, then that's how the trade will end up. 10 tons shipped from Earth (for example) and return with 100 tons from the market world.

Market worlds will need some high value goods that can't easily be gotten at the industrial market to have a chance at developing a viable trade route. Perhaps luxury consumption goods? Perhaps unique plant or meat protiens? Maybe unique minerals? Maybe even something as simple as access to habitable land (rights to land sold for foreign currency).

In the end, it boils down to crunching numbers. So....

Crunch the numbers!

;)

If it costs $100 to manufacture something, and that something is marked up 4% for reasons of profit and market forces (competition mostly), then any transportation costs added to the basic cost per unit that doubles the price at a market world may very well work if the market world's ability to make the item is nonexistent.

Coffee acquires a unique flavor depending on where on earth it grows. Maybe on alien worlds, certain earth plants acquire exotic flavors. Maybe certain plants thrive even better on alien worlds because evolved insects or other vermin aren't present in alien worlds. Maybe plants thrive better under differing atmospheric compositions? What if other worlds have different mechanisms for fermentation distinctly different than yeast?

What might society pay for alien foodstuffs that taste good, does no damage to the human body, but adds zero calories because the human intestinal flora can't digest the food?

[AlexanderHowl]

Concerning interest rates, interest rates are partially determined by relative risk to the lender. If society is so stable that someone could check out for 200 years and come back to a pile of money, then interest rates could approach what would be considered the minimal acceptable level of return (and you have factors such as government manipulation). When you look at interest rates in the USA over the last ten years, there were times when interest rates went below 0%.

A simple formula for normal interest rates for savings could be (200%×Predicted Risk of Failure within 1 Year). If you have a society where the Predicted Risk of Failure within 1 Year for savings is .25%, then your relativistic traveler would only receive an interest of 0.5%, so they would have to leave for 1440 years to increase their savings by 1024×, and the chance that their savings would still exist when they got back would be 2.72%. In addition, you have the mindstaggering cost of relativistic travel (using cryo sleep is probably easier and safer, and you get to invest more of your money in stuff rather than in transportation).

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by David Johansen

The thing about it is that you've essentially gone forward in time and skipped a lot of stuff.

If you didn't hit anything in interstellar space large enough to get through your armour. And your ship didn't develop a fault. And so on. Relativistic travel is going to be less safe than sitting on Earth, reallistically.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by hal

Whether or not interstellar craft go up or down the gravity well is largely immaterial to the question of interstellar trade. In the end, the question becomes one of:

What is the cost to ship products/materials from one location (supplier) to its destination (market)? Does it matter whether one ship carries the product to its destination or it takes three ships involved in the transportation? Not really. The cost of transportation is paid regardless of how it is accomplished.

Yes, it all "simply" (ha!) comes down to cost. But I would really like you to produce accurate shipping costs without allowing for interface transport or transshipment costs. These things matter. (Assuming that production is occurring in a gravity well for the former, at least.) Historically, transshipment is something that profit-motivated entities have avoided like the plague because it cuts so severely into the bottom like. One tries to avoid it if at all possible. You can't just abstract this all into irrelevance, because how the setting deals with them is very important to deciding if trade in anything but colonists and luxuries is to be possible.

I reiterate:

1. You need FTL. STL trade is a non-starter, at least in any form that we're talking about for a group of PCs, unless you just want to use the ship as a setting for some other sort of plot.

2. The FTL needs to be cheap enough. Luckily most are, in Spaceships, requiring only power.

3. If you have to move in normal space a bit to do FTL then the ability to move in normal space needs to be cheap enough, too, or the movement minimal. Reactionless drives are the traditional solution (or subwarp drives) but some of the incredibly efficient higher-technology reaction drives would suffice. Because propellant costs. Or make frontier refueling common.

4. If you want planets to play a role by having markets and production down the well, then interface costs need to be cheap enough. Antigravity and/or reactionless drives are again the traditional solution, and tend to allow things like having the tramp trader actually land on a world itself, but things like laser launches, beanstalks and their ilk, and some others are also viable.

5. Generally, the maintenance costs for the ship are what you can successfully abstract- they tend to be low for small, inexpensive ships and high for big, costly ships, but the big, costly ships carry so much cargo that the maintenance costs get spread among a lot of cargo tonnage and they actually end up cheaper to operate per ton-mile than the smaller ships. Thus, the smaller PC-friendly ships cannot compete on the milk runs. They have to service out-of-the-way places that are far from the main trade routes, or that need repeated small shipments rather than intermittent large ones. Put another way, if your little tramp ship tries to compete with SpaceMaersk, it'll get crushed.

It also helps if you have a model in which high-population worlds that can manufacture anything are trading with low-population worlds that cannot. Having a steep TL gradient is the traditional way to do that (e.g. Traveller).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by hal

Market worlds will need some high value goods that can't easily be gotten at the industrial market to have a chance at developing a viable trade route. Perhaps luxury consumption goods? Perhaps unique plant or meat protiens? Maybe unique minerals? Maybe even something as simple as access to habitable land (rights to land sold for foreign currency).

Heinlein kind of spelled this out in Tunnel in the Sky. It's explained there that Earth sends colonists out to habitable planets, with a reasonable amount of equipment (paid for by high fees to join colonizing parties), and then pretty much dumps them. The only products that Earth is likely to want to import are food and fissionable materials; until a colony produces one or the other, it's on its own. Note that Heinlein assumes a future Earth whose population has reached the Malthusian limit and is chronically a bit short of food.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Andreas

Then that insurance adjustor was very wrong. Even if you ignore the fact that some people are consistently more careful than others, and even if you live in a community dangerous enough that there is a 0.5% risk of dying to crime, accidents or suicide each year, then roughly 37% of people would survive past 200 years. Almost 0.7% would survive past 1000 years.

This is also ignoring factors such as hospitals becoming better at treating injuries and cars becoming safer etc.

Checking the 2002 data in Wikipedia, I see that there are 57 deaths per 100,000 from accidents, and 29 deaths per 100,000 from intentional death (suicide and violence). If you assume those are the only causes of death, you get a life expectancy of just over 1200 years.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by hal

What is the cost to ship products/materials from one location (supplier) to its destination (market)? Does it matter whether one ship carries the product to its destination or it takes three ships involved in the transportation? Not really. The cost of transportation is paid regardless of how it is accomplished.

But the cost of transportation is path dependent. If I do all my shipping with fast armored couriers that are streamlined for atmospheric re-entry and have three different engines to handle warp transit, local vacuum travel, and atmospheric flight, and thus cost 3 fortunes and half to move small volumes of cargo very slowly, and someone else does their shipping by using cheap dedicated warp jumpers dropping off cargo modules for local shuttles to transfer to a space elevator, which costs a fortune to move large volumes very quickly, it's ridiculous to say that the transportation costs are going to be same.

In the worst case, trade stops, because there is no amount of raw materials that a resource world can send to a production world that justify the cost of building the ships.

And from a game design perspective, if you're playing a game about merchant traders, you can't handwave this stuff. Players get annoyed if they buy a trade ship and engage in good faith transactions and discover that there is literally no way for them to make a profit because the GM didn't do the math right.

(ninja'd by acrosome)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Checking the 2002 data in Wikipedia, I see that there are 57 deaths per 100,000 from accidents, and 29 deaths per 100,000 from intentional death (suicide and violence). If you assume those are the only causes of death, you get a life expectancy of just over 1200 years.

It's probably even more than that for the futuristic society in question.

Accidents in our society include things with health-related causes such as bad eyesight or physical decline from aging.

Then suicide isn't really random. It will probably decline over time as those most likely to commit it remove themselves from your pool. The rate could be lower in the first place if this quasi-utopian society does not impose many sorts of the stresses we see.

Then those who cause violence will probably be removed from the pool one way or another.

I can't say how low the mortality rate should be but it should be significantly lower than ours.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Checking the 2002 data in Wikipedia, I see that there are 57 deaths per 100,000 from accidents, and 29 deaths per 100,000 from intentional death (suicide and violence). If you assume those are the only causes of death, you get a life expectancy of just over 1200 years.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's probably even more than that for the futuristic society in question.

Accidents in our society include things with health-related causes such as bad eyesight or physical decline from aging.

Then suicide isn't really random. It will probably decline over time as those most likely to commit it remove themselves from your pool. The rate could be lower in the first place if this quasi-utopian society does not impose many sorts of the stresses we see.

Then those who cause violence will probably be removed from the pool one way or another.

I can't say how low the mortality rate should be but it should be significantly lower than ours.

Not to mention that many of the accidents are due to inexperienced young people doing impulsive stuff. As you get older and wiser and more seasoned and experienced (but remain in excellent health) you can expect to be at less risk for accident.

Luke

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by RyanW

To maximize revenues, you want your equipment operating as continuously as possible. Have interface craft hauling cargo to and from the edge of the hyperspace exclusion zone, where the big ships just drop out of hyperspace, drop off their cargo containers, pick up the next batch, and leave. Why waste so much effort hauling hyperdrives up and down gravity wells?

Because there are a number of benefits to loading the cargo into a ship only once, on the ground, and with the powerful reactionless drives on the TL11^ vessels, hauling the hyperdrive up and down the gravity well isn't really so much effort.

Granted you can gain some efficiencies taking the Ricardo-class (p9) route...