[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon - Page 8

scc · 08-04-2022, 06:51 PM

So I'm working on stuff for a setting that has Earth going through terraforming Venus, The Moon, and Mars. It's this terraforming bit that kind of interests me for the moment. To terraform the Moon I need to 2.4e15 tons of nitrogen from Venus to the Moon, moving about that much to Mars is probably also a good idea as well.

Now this number is big, so that means there will be a lot of freighters moving this nitrogen, even the absurd number I give of 1 million will require something like 3 million years of ships moving gas so it's probably actually low. Now given that Hohmann transfer orbits are a thing that means that the ideal conditions for a race.

The amount of prize money isn't great, but it's on top of a contract that's specifically designed to pay your bills and it probably puts you at the top of the list for anyone other then the government (government contracts are assigned at random) looking to ship stuff to Venus.

So the government has structured things so that only family operated ships, or those that appear to be so, eligible for nitrogen shipping contracts and neither the shipping nor the race is a good way to make money fast, but it means you'll have you're foot in the door when actual competitive shipping begins. And other destinations are on offer, just not every often.

08-04-2022, 06:51 PM	#1
scc Join Date: Mar 2013	[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon So I'm working on stuff for a setting that has Earth going through terraforming Venus, The Moon, and Mars. It's this terraforming bit that kind of interests me for the moment. To terraform the Moon I need to 2.4e15 tons of nitrogen from Venus to the Moon, moving about that much to Mars is probably also a good idea as well. Now this number is big, so that means there will be a lot of freighters moving this nitrogen, even the absurd number I give of 1 million will require something like 3 million years of ships moving gas so it's probably actually low. Now given that Hohmann transfer orbits are a thing that means that the ideal conditions for a race. The amount of prize money isn't great, but it's on top of a contract that's specifically designed to pay your bills and it probably puts you at the top of the list for anyone other then the government (government contracts are assigned at random) looking to ship stuff to Venus. So the government has structured things so that only family operated ships, or those that appear to be so, eligible for nitrogen shipping contracts and neither the shipping nor the race is a good way to make money fast, but it means you'll have you're foot in the door when actual competitive shipping begins. And other destinations are on offer, just not every often.