11-19-2017, 07:53 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Buffalo, New York
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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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? |
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11-19-2017, 08:19 AM | #32 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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). |
11-19-2017, 09:04 AM | #33 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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.
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11-19-2017, 09:16 AM | #34 | |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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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).
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 11-20-2017 at 08:24 AM. |
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11-19-2017, 09:19 AM | #35 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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11-19-2017, 09:26 AM | #36 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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11-19-2017, 09:29 AM | #37 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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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)
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11-19-2017, 09:41 AM | #38 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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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.
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Fred Brackin |
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11-19-2017, 10:51 AM | #39 | ||
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: The plutonium rich regions of Washington State
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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Luke |
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11-19-2017, 11:33 AM | #40 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Does Interstellar Trade Make Sense For Realistic Science Fiction?
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Granted you can gain some efficiencies taking the Ricardo-class (p9) route...
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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