Why did it take so long to deal with Silesia?

J6P wrote:

SWM wrote:Actually, it does mention in-system shipping. Read it again. It is comparing "interplanetary and interstellar" shipping to "surface or atmospheric" shipping. Interplanetary means in-system. The conclusion is that interplanetary is comparable to interstellar and both are cheaper than moving things around on a planet. Exactly as RFC posted.

Note that the text doesn't discuss costs of moving things from planet to orbit or back, though. But that is also described elsewhere as fairly cheap, due to contragrav.

Cost of moving via counter grav to orbit must be expensive, otherwise there is no way in this universe, or the HV universe, for planetary shipping to be MORE expensive than interstellar shipping which by DEFINITION, must transport bulk food/planetary goods UP OFF a planet to a ship and then to its destination. Bulk ores, harvested from asteroids are an entirely different matter as they eliminate this step.

If by definition counter grav into orbit is CHEAP, then by same definition, planetary shipping will be cheaper than interstellar as there will be no transfer or time consumed paying 3rd parties. Use counter grav to go straight up out of the atmosphere and move to your destination and reenter.

It is impossible to have interstellar shipping cheaper than planetary food shipping when it is the exact same process, but with more steps/manhours equipment involved.

You're determined to push this point, aren't you?

There's such a thing as economies of scale. You are familiar with the term, I trust? It is far cheaper, per ton of cargo, to ship it by rail than it is to ship it by truck. It is also far more flexible to distribute cargo by truck than it is to build a railroad siding to every warehouse door in every town in every state of the US. Therefore, trucks are used for that stage of the process while trains (or ships, depending on what has to be crossed) are used to transport between distribution nodes.

Interplanetary and interstellar freighters are huge. They routinely transport cargo in quantities no conceivable point-to-point delivery on a single planet are going to require. Therefore, they can practice the same economies of scale railroads can practice vis-à-vis trucking lines. It therefor costs less to transport the same tonnages because the parameters are totally different.

I have never said one damned word about boosting million-ton orbital transports and then dropping them back to the planetary surface again, because that's not how planetary cargoes are transported. You are either willfully misunderstanding to create straw men or else totally missing the difference between the transportation environments.

You clearly have your own view about how things "ought" to be done. Please do me the courtesy of assuming that I know the operating parameters within the Honorverse. They may be stupid, but they are my own, and they are the way the books work now, have worked, and will work hereafter.

J6P wrote:Cost of moving via counter grav to orbit must be expensive, otherwise there is no way in this universe, or the HV universe, for planetary shipping to be MORE expensive than interstellar shipping which by DEFINITION, must transport bulk food/planetary goods UP OFF a planet to a ship and then to its destination. Bulk ores, harvested from asteroids are an entirely different matter as they eliminate this step.

If by definition counter grav into orbit is CHEAP, then by same definition, planetary shipping will be cheaper than interstellar as there will be no transfer or time consumed paying 3rd parties. Use counter grav to go straight up out of the atmosphere and move to your destination and reenter.

It is impossible to have interstellar shipping cheaper than planetary food shipping when it is the exact same process, but with more steps/manhours equipment involved.

I think that passage in MtH (and what RFC has been saying; though it's possibly I misunderstood) is that the interstellar freighter portion of a interstellar cargo shipment is cheaper than the planetside portion.

If the cost of intersteller transport was only calculated as spaceport to spaceport then it could easily be cheaper than the planetary shipping on either end; which would normally be required to consolidate the cargo at the origin spaceport and then distributed it out from the destination spaceport.

So if, for example, you tracked the total cost of delivering a steak of Montana beef from Montana to a table at a restaurant in Landing the shipment from the slaughterhouse on Montana to the port is more than the tranport cost from that port to the port on Manticore. And then the cost to move that steak from the port to the resteraunt kitchen is again more than the freighter cost.

If my understanding is right then it follows that the total cost of moving that steak from Montana to Manticore (if you include the ground distribution on both ends) is more than moving it from one point on Montana to another; but not by much. Heck that scenario is true on earth now. Moving cargo to and from the seaports is usually more than the cost to stick it on a ship and sail it halfway round the world.

J6P wrote:

SWM wrote:Actually, it does mention in-system shipping. Read it again. It is comparing "interplanetary and interstellar" shipping to "surface or atmospheric" shipping. Interplanetary means in-system. The conclusion is that interplanetary is comparable to interstellar and both are cheaper than moving things around on a planet. Exactly as RFC posted.

Note that the text doesn't discuss costs of moving things from planet to orbit or back, though. But that is also described elsewhere as fairly cheap, due to contragrav.

Cost of moving via counter grav to orbit must be expensive, otherwise there is no way in this universe, or the HV universe, for planetary shipping to be MORE expensive than interstellar shipping which by DEFINITION, must transport bulk food/planetary goods UP OFF a planet to a ship and then to its destination. Bulk ores, harvested from asteroids are an entirely different matter as they eliminate this step.

If by definition counter grav into orbit is CHEAP, then by same definition, planetary shipping will be cheaper than interstellar as there will be no transfer or time consumed paying 3rd parties. Use counter grav to go straight up out of the atmosphere and move to your destination and reenter.

It is impossible to have interstellar shipping cheaper than planetary food shipping when it is the exact same process, but with more steps/manhours equipment involved.

You didn't read the text, did you? It specifically said that interstellar shipping (that is, the simple cost of getting a load from this star to that star, and probably not counting the cost of going to and from the surface) is cheaper than the cost of shipping the same thing across a planet through the atmosphere or on the surface. It was not comparing to shipping to orbit and back down somewhere else; it was comparing specifically to shipping without leaving the surface or atmosphere.

That text was not saying that shipping across a planet had to be done without leaving the surface or atmosphere, either; it was just using that as something we are familiar with to compare to the cost of interstellar shipping.

runsforcelery wrote:Interplanetary and interstellar freighters are huge. They routinely transport cargo in quantities no conceivable point-to-point delivery on a single planet are going to require. Therefore, they can practice the same economies of scale railroads can practice vis-à-vis trucking lines. It therefor costs less to transport the same tonnages because the parameters are totally different.

Did I mention anything about local distribution? No. There is local distribution on every planet and has no bearing on the cost as the cost of distribution is intrinsically fixed. Besides, local distribution costs in Honorverse would be very low as it would appear, from my reading of your books, most planets have Giant centralized cities, making Tokyo/Shanghai look down right vacuous.

Grain/Meat, goes from giant storage site(where it is grown/butchered) to slightly less giant storage site positioned Inside, or on the outside of a city. Around these storage sites are most of your local food processors taking said BULK grain/meat and creating finished goods that THEN and only THEN get distributed locally for hundreds of miles “locally” at times.

How many Mtons of grain do you think is moved from the fields of E. Washington to Port of Longview? 160Million bushels of wheat, corn, and soybeans annually or roughly 5 Mtons. One bushel is 60lbs. 37 Bushels to the ton roughly. Note this is the amount exported, not amount grown which is several times this amount. The states of Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota make the Pacific Northwest look like minnows. I only used my local knowledge as a reference to save time. If you wish to look up the other info feel free.

Where/how does this grain move? In PNW case, Truck to major storage usually owned by the largest local grower or a COOP with their giant storage facility who then sell it, to barge or to rail, to ship carrying in excess of 100,000 tons, to the Orient where it then sits in giant city storage sites with multi millions of bushels of storage. Note, I was being very generous only stating 100,000 tons of grain per bulk carrier. If they could build larger ships they would, and they are trying as they keep getting larger. Currently limited by the quality of the steel. If they could ship a couple Mtons of grain at once, they would. It would be cheaper.

How many Mtons of grain goes from Kansas to NewYork and its city storage facility? Well, 1.5lb of grain per person per day is a short estimate. NY has 14Million. So, roughly 20Million lbs a day, or 20,000tons/day. Yearly, NY by itself needs crudely 7M tons/year. If they could use a more efficient mode of transportation than train or barge/ship(100,000tons) they would.

How large is Mendal/Grendal on Beowulf? Much larger than New York is my read on your books. Cities like these seem commonplace in the HV. Are there smaller cities? Sure, but the way I read your books is that the vast majority of populations are in mega cities like NY, LA, Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc. Just like today, I assume they will have a centralized grain storage site with the food processors right next to it as this is the most efficient method for distribution of food.

runsforcelery wrote:I have never said one damned word about boosting million-ton orbital transports and then dropping them back to the planetary surface again, because that's not how planetary cargoes are transported. You are either willfully misunderstanding to create straw men or else totally missing the difference between the transportation environments.

You just got done stating, counter grav of Mega tons of grain from a farm planet to LEO orbit where it is then transferred to ~8M ton freighters is common place and cheap to do. Right?

You also just got done saying, via More than Honor quote, that moving Mtons of grain down on the planet to a local food processing distribution network is more expensive than moving said grain, up to a 8Mton ship(25% of which is ship mass in my guestimate, or are they actually transporting this tonnage?), transport it, 100LY, and then dropping it down onto yet a different planet at Mtons at a time. Pathetic little 1000 ton loads are not going to get the job done efficiently. Unless you are going to have thousands of shuttle flights every day of every year distributing, "just enough" for everyone's daily meal. Its as sure shooting that the grain storage sites will be on planet and not in space. One stray comet, and oops, you guys are now starving till the next crop...

A simple calculation as to how many Mtons of grain a city like New York needs will show it needs Mtons of grain per year. I did this previously. Efficiency dictates instead of shipping 100,000 tons of grain at a time(assuming your city is on the water, most are not, as is done today, the more efficient method would be to ship Mtons of grain at a time. Or exactly what you are ALREADY proposing to do on an interstellar basis!

I just got done in my previous post showing via simple local knowledge of how much grain is grown at a medium sized growing site, Washington, how if these growing sites could transport 5M tons of grain at a time they would as major cities NEED this much grain on a yearly basis. If you wish to state that these cities would rather only receive grain quarterly, I could go with this. Even then NY, on a quarterly basis will need over 1.5M tons of grain by itself.

Either Moving Mtons of grain to LEO orbit is cheap or it is not. If it is cheap, then moving an Mton of grain to LEO and then dropping it down to a city for its quarterly grain shipment is just as efficient and cheap as moving said Mton of grain to a Hyper capable ship.

I read your entire post and I still have no idea what your point is. Please explain.

J6P wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:Interplanetary and interstellar freighters are huge. They routinely transport cargo in quantities no conceivable point-to-point delivery on a single planet are going to require. Therefore, they can practice the same economies of scale railroads can practice vis-à-vis trucking lines. It therefor costs less to transport the same tonnages because the parameters are totally different.

Did I mention anything about local distribution? No. There is local distribution on every planet and has no bearing on the cost as the cost of distribution is intrinsically fixed. Besides, local distribution costs in Honorverse would be very low as it would appear, from my reading of your books, most planets have Giant centralized cities, making Tokyo/Shanghai look down right vacuous.

Grain/Meat, goes from giant storage site(where it is grown/butchered) to slightly less giant storage site positioned Inside, or on the outside of a city. Around these storage sites are most of your local food processors taking said BULK grain/meat and creating finished goods that THEN and only THEN get distributed locally for hundreds of miles “locally” at times.

How many Mtons of grain do you think is moved from the fields of E. Washington to Port of Longview? 160Million bushels of wheat, corn, and soybeans annually or roughly 5 Mtons. One bushel is 60lbs. 37 Bushels to the ton roughly. Note this is the amount exported, not amount grown which is several times this amount. The states of Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota make the Pacific Northwest look like minnows. I only used my local knowledge as a reference to save time. If you wish to look up the other info feel free.

Where/how does this grain move? In PNW case, Truck to major storage usually owned by the largest local grower or a COOP with their giant storage facility who then sell it, to barge or to rail, to ship carrying in excess of 100,000 tons, to the Orient where it then sits in giant city storage sites with multi millions of bushels of storage. Note, I was being very generous only stating 100,000 tons of grain per bulk carrier. If they could build larger ships they would, and they are trying as they keep getting larger. Currently limited by the quality of the steel. If they could ship a couple Mtons of grain at once, they would. It would be cheaper.

How many Mtons of grain goes from Kansas to NewYork and its city storage facility? Well, 1.5lb of grain per person per day is a short estimate. NY has 14Million. So, roughly 20Million lbs a day, or 20,000tons/day. Yearly, NY by itself needs crudely 7M tons/year. If they could use a more efficient mode of transportation than train or barge/ship(100,000tons) they would.

How large is Mendal/Grendal on Beowulf? Much larger than New York is my read on your books. Cities like these seem commonplace in the HV. Are there smaller cities? Sure, but the way I read your books is that the vast majority of populations are in mega cities like NY, LA, Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc. Just like today, I assume they will have a centralized grain storage site with the food processors right next to it as this is the most efficient method for distribution of food.

runsforcelery wrote:I have never said one damned word about boosting million-ton orbital transports and then dropping them back to the planetary surface again, because that's not how planetary cargoes are transported. You are either willfully misunderstanding to create straw men or else totally missing the difference between the transportation environments.

You just got done stating, counter grav of Mega tons of grain from a farm planet to LEO orbit where it is then transferred to ~8M ton freighters is common place and cheap to do. Right?

You also just got done saying, via More than Honor quote, that moving Mtons of grain down on the planet to a local food processing distribution network is more expensive than moving said grain, up to a 8Mton ship(25% of which is ship mass in my guestimate, or are they actually transporting this tonnage?), transport it, 100LY, and then dropping it down onto yet a different planet at Mtons at a time. Pathetic little 1000 ton loads are not going to get the job done efficiently. Unless you are going to have thousands of shuttle flights every day of every year distributing, "just enough" for everyone's daily meal. Its as sure shooting that the grain storage sites will be on planet and not in space. One stray comet, and oops, you guys are now starving till the next crop...

A simple calculation as to how many Mtons of grain a city like New York needs will show it needs Mtons of grain per year. I did this previously. Efficiency dictates instead of shipping 100,000 tons of grain at a time(assuming your city is on the water, most are not, as is done today, the more efficient method would be to ship Mtons of grain at a time. Or exactly what you are ALREADY proposing to do on an interstellar basis!

I just got done in my previous post showing via simple local knowledge of how much grain is grown at a medium sized growing site, Washington, how if these growing sites could transport 5M tons of grain at a time they would as major cities NEED this much grain on a yearly basis. If you wish to state that these cities would rather only receive grain quarterly, I could go with this. Even then NY, on a quarterly basis will need over 1.5M tons of grain by itself.

Either Moving Mtons of grain to LEO orbit is cheap or it is not. If it is cheap, then moving an Mton of grain to LEO and then dropping it down to a city for its quarterly grain shipment is just as efficient and cheap as moving said Mton of grain to a Hyper capable ship.

This subject sent me off down a rabbit trail:

Read on if you wish. It has a little to do with the subject, but only tangentially.

Food strategic storage:

In 2011, Thailand/SE Asia had giant floods. They immediately stopped all exports of rice.

Why?

Because they feared the floods ruined their crops and they were already counting on that crop to obtain greater than 2 years food storage for their own country.

My friend who worked at Costco, told me, Thailand was down to a 1.4 year food storage number if the entire crop was ruined. The entire crop was not ruined, rather a good percentage was. With what was left over, I believe the number I heard was the crop boosted them to a 2.2 or so rice storage allowing them to export the 0.2. My numbers are probably wrong. I am sure they are. Memory is too fuzy. The principle remains. 2 years food storage for the entire population + enough for planting 2 years in a row is accepted as good practice. What is it? Over half of recent years have seen more consumption than grain I do believe the US department of agriculture was going to address this problem in the USA recently as the number has dropped to historically LOW numbers.

Lets look as the USDA numbers.
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/grst0314.txt

Corn: 7Billion Bu, 3.45B bu dissapearnce(planting is what I think they mean?) ~2:1
Soybeans: 992Million Bu, 1.16B Bu ~1:1
Wheat: 1.06B Bu, 419B bu ~2.5:1
ETC.

Seems USA is doing just fine with about 2:1

Actually B Bu grown:
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/crop1113.pdf

Corn Grown in 2013: 14B Bu
Soybean 2013 3.26B bu
+ too lazy to look up wheat, barley, rice etc.

That is a Gigantic amount of tonnage of grain grown.
370M tons of Corn and 86M tons of Soybeans etc.

Anyways, a little perspective.

Somewhere on USDA there are totals for bushels grown world wide. Didn't look.

In either case, a LOT of HV 8M ton bulk freighters from the USA alone even when we have 100M acres of fertile land(compared to the rest of the world but it is in the CRP anyways) lying fallow.

Enjoy the perusal guys.

J6P wrote:
How many Mtons of grain do you think is moved from the fields of E. Washington to Port of Longview? 160Million bushels of wheat, corn, and soybeans annually or roughly 5 Mtons. One bushel is 60lbs. 37 Bushels to the ton roughly. Note this is the amount exported, not amount grown which is several times this amount. The states of Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota make the Pacific Northwest look like minnows. I only used my local knowledge as a reference to save time. If you wish to look up the other info feel free.

Slight nitpick here. Eight states (Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota) are always going to outproduce three states (the Pacific Northwest. ie Washington, Oregon and Idaho) if they all grow the same thing. So saying that the production of those eight states will make the production of the three states look like minnows is a 'Duh' kind of thing.

TWIT NIT:
A single one of those states make Washington look like a minnow.

Going to weigh in, and I hope I don't regret this :
I think the point being described by RFC is that the cost to ship goods across interstellar distances is less per ton then to ship the same amount of goods across a solar system. Due to the size of the bulk carriers, thay can transport X tons of cargo dozens of light years for a cheaper per ton cost than to ship the same X tons around a system in smaller vessels.

J6P just demonstrated via a very simple calculation, your presumption for smaller vessels, is not true. Not even close to true. I happen to agree with his very Back of the Envelope calculation. I personally think it is worse than what he presented due to how HV population distribution into dense mega cities creates even larger localized stores.

If you would take a closer look at the 2 links I provided, you will see that Mtons of grain need to be transported to major distribution points(population centers) from the grow areas. We are talking Billions of tons. Not simply Millions of tons.

PS. There is no reason from what I can see, engineering limit, for the size of a counter grav bulk carrier to be small. No reason bulk carriers able to move around in the atmosphere would not be Mtons large.

PPS. If we were building railroads today from scratch without the historical legacy of the cart industry and lack of power equipment able to move RR ballast easily, railroads would all be over 3 meters wide today. Probably over 5. If we had stronger steels able to be welded cheaply, all Ship bulk carriers would instantly triple or quadruple in size if not more. A ships size today is only limited by the materials available to us. They would be Mtons large if we could build them. An Mton of cargo is not that much when one starts looking at the gigantic tonnages being moved to centralized distribution centers.