Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:That is why I suggested it would be like shooting geese with a shotgun. You are bound to hit something. And also why I thought that they are herded into a certain sector of space like cabs and ubers at an airport. It is also why I changed my mind about generally allowing so many DBs to congest in-system traffic by coming in too deeply to deliver and receive data. Think about it. Stock reports change daily! DBs simply don't have the luxury of dilly-dallying around. Time is essentially money to these ships.

I'd actually argue again that the fact that stock reports change daily (or hourly) is a reason why they're not critical to send out on a daily stream of DBs -- because it takes them a minimum of a few days to reach their destination, and more usually weeks to months. What's the good of getting a daily update on someone's stock market when you're getting it 3 weeks later and it'll take another 3 weeks for your order to get back and be executed?

The time delay means that, in my opinion, you either need to entrust some local agent on that planet to do stock trading on your behalf - or you need to follow such a long term buy and hold strategy that daily updates are irrelevant to you.

Heck, about the shortest possible interstellar update time would be Manticore to Beowulf - and if a courier was waiting to jump the instant an update was received, and another waiting to bring the order back immediately and you used hermes buoy FTL comms between the planets and the junction it'd still take about half an hour for an update to get to Beowulf and an order based on it to come back and be executed. That's way better than weeks -- but still loses out badly to traders working from Landing where the round trip might be milliseconds.

You have a point Jonathan. But, again, we are missing HV business classes from the author. I suspect the stock market in the HV is set up to coincide with the current efficiency of travel. Perhaps the market is not open every day. There is also our current limitation of after hours trading. At any rate, that fact can work for an unscrupulous entity even better if said entity has even more time to plan buys for when the market does open.

But to be fair, the entire discussion has been about the MA taking advantage of their faster travel. But the MA would still need to get their hands on the sensitive and classified stock market report that would surely be sprinted to certified DB boats first; which means that the MA would also need to have a certified boat in the waters as well or rely on the report on Manticore and sprinting that report to its non-certified DB and overtaking certified boats which would have a head start.

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:There might be temporary emergencies (say an unexpected setback in adapting plants to a new planet - or some other agricultural disaster) that require import of food to prevent starvation. But that should very much be the exception.

If you're still at the stage of colonisation where plants are being adapted, it might be cheaper to ship people out instead of shipping people in.

It's poor colony planning if you have a population living on your planet before you've done the necessary adaptations. It shouldn't have been necessary on hibernation ships before FTL travel and it definitely isn't necessary now. You shouldn't wake people up from hibernation until you're sure they can live on the planet and the necessary food-production means and other industry required for living are established. You don't ship people from their worlds of origin now until you've got the bootstrap colony working.

Moreover, you don't do this:

A planet (or two) is a lot of area to stick your agriculture

This is what the HV has told us how colonies work, but that's not how they should work. There's no reason to have agriculture on the planet, at the whims of weather, local critters, alien micro-organisms and soil, or vandals. This colony arrived from space, so they were already outside the gravity well. The colonisation should start with building orbital farms, using controlled soil and Terran nutrients, where solar energy is plentiful and 24/7 (or however long your days are). Shipping food down to the planet is easy and cheap because it's down the gravity well.

And you definitely set up excess production before allowing more people to live on your planet.

Jonathan_S wrote:You wouldn't put people down (beyond the bare minimum crew setting things up) until you thought you had stable food.

But I was thinking of something like the Manticoran plague years except something that had adapted to attack the imported planets rather than the humans. So things looked good for decades and then suddenly went wrong and you need some emergency support as you resolve the emergency.

Growing food in space is far less cost effective than growing it on the ground (and it's more exposed to risks from solar flares, meteor storms, hostile ships, etc.) So I'm not surprised that few Honorverse planets seem to set up planetary scale farming in space. But even if they did that just means the emergencies that might make them temporarily dependent on imported food differ -- they don't eliminate the risk of major losses to established food production.

Interesting discussion!

I would think it was initially planned for foodstuffs to be grown on planet. Isn't that the entire point of finding suitable planets before the initial voyage? Especially back when man first started seeding the galaxy. In those early days of expanding across the galaxy, would it have been been conceivable to depend on an infrastructure in space with those generation ships before the technology groundside can support the infrastructure in space?

One has to first build the infrastructure groundside that will support the infrastructure in space. This reminds me of Babylon 5. Those early generation ships were limited as a whole. The backstory of Refuge comes to mind.

penny wrote:I would think it was initially planned for foodstuffs to be grown on planet. Isn't that the entire point of finding suitable planets before the initial voyage? Especially back when man first started seeding the galaxy. In those early days of expanding across the galaxy, would it have been been conceivable to depend on an infrastructure in space with those generation ships before the technology groundside can support the infrastructure in space?

One has to first build the infrastructure groundside that will support the infrastructure in space. This reminds me of Babylon 5. Those early generation ships were limited as a whole. The backstory of Refuge comes to mind.

And even if you'd planned on keeping the industrial infrastructure to build, access, and maintain large scale space farms there are enough sci-fi stories about colonies backsliding that I doubt the early colony expeditions would have been comfortable relying on orbital farms to prevent mass starvation. Even if the orbital farm approach was provable less risky it would probably be perceived as riskier thanks to the stories about backsliding colonies. And planners have to account for perceived as well as actual risks.
(Plus, if they can use just a fraction of the industrial production required for orbital farms to instead operate dirtside ones then that saved production can be turned to other additional uses; whether that's infrastructure building or just quality of life improvements)

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I would think it was initially planned for foodstuffs to be grown on planet. Isn't that the entire point of finding suitable planets before the initial voyage? Especially back when man first started seeding the galaxy. In those early days of expanding across the galaxy, would it have been been conceivable to depend on an infrastructure in space with those generation ships before the technology groundside can support the infrastructure in space?

One has to first build the infrastructure groundside that will support the infrastructure in space. This reminds me of Babylon 5. Those early generation ships were limited as a whole. The backstory of Refuge comes to mind.

And even if you'd planned on keeping the industrial infrastructure to build, access, and maintain large scale space farms there are enough sci-fi stories about colonies backsliding that I doubt the early colony expeditions would have been comfortable relying on orbital farms to prevent mass starvation. Even if the orbital farm approach was provable less risky it would probably be perceived as riskier thanks to the stories about backsliding colonies. And planners have to account for perceived as well as actual risks.
(Plus, if they can use just a fraction of the industrial production required for orbital farms to instead operate dirtside ones then that saved production can be turned to other additional uses; whether that's infrastructure building or just quality of life improvements)

I would think that orbital farms would have been riskier. If there is an orbital disaster it would tend to be total. The foodstuffs and the orbital infrastructure would be gone. With no way to replenish either. That would be like putting all of your eggs and chickens in one basket.

Besides, the planet chosen is supposed to be ideal. So no need to be timid. You need to find out what kind of planet it is you now call home. So, take the plunge.

penny wrote:You have a point Jonathan. But, again, we are missing HV business classes from the author. I suspect the stock market in the HV is set up to coincide with the current efficiency of travel. Perhaps the market is not open every day. There is also our current limitation of after hours trading. At any rate, that fact can work for an unscrupulous entity even better if said entity has even more time to plan buys for when the market does open.

It may be that the markets in the HV are also based around the same principles we had them on the Age of Sail, or even earlier. For example, the first publicly-traded company, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) only had their shareholder meetings every 10 years. That's also how frequently they audited their books.

Trivia: the VOC was also the most valuable company the world has ever seen, so far. Adjusted, their market value today would still be bigger than Apple's.

And yet I don't think so. I don't know exactly what markets will be like in the future. Do we have to make trades equally accessible to everyone in every part of the Galaxy, however long their message transit times are? What kind of laws will exist to ensure transparency at the Galactic level? And yet I don't see day-to-day stock trading ever going away.

But to be fair, the entire discussion has been about the MA taking advantage of their faster travel. But the MA would still need to get their hands on the sensitive and classified stock market report that would surely be sprinted to certified DB boats first; which means that the MA would also need to have a certified boat in the waters as well or rely on the report on Manticore and sprinting that report to its non-certified DB and overtaking certified boats which would have a head start.

True, I can see them having a few streak DBs positioned in the most common financial routes, so they can beat the official message and make money. Do note one of these routes is Sol-Sigma Draconis... which would have rankled the MAlign leaders to no end.

But that advantage can't be exploited too much, lest market regulators see a pattern of what could otherwise only be explained by insider trading. Moreover, it probably hasn't been in use for very long, because the streak drive itself is a recent-ish invention. They may have made a killing in the market for the last 50 or so T-years, but they must have had a source of funding aside from Manpower for the previous 500.

Jonathan_S wrote:But I was thinking of something like the Manticoran plague years except something that had adapted to attack the imported planets rather than the humans. So things looked good for decades and then suddenly went wrong and you need some emergency support as you resolve the emergency.

Growing food in space is far less cost effective than growing it on the ground (and it's more exposed to risks from solar flares, meteor storms, hostile ships, etc.) So I'm not surprised that few Honorverse planets seem to set up planetary scale farming in space. But even if they did that just means the emergencies that might make them temporarily dependent on imported food differ -- they don't eliminate the risk of major losses to established food production.

That's a plague attacking the people, not the food production. It's far easier to quarantine orbital farms than it is to quarantine people. We have direct, incontrovertible, and recent evidence of people's stubbornness to going into lockdown. But if you look at past food production plagues, like mad cow disease and others, they have been managed and contained. At huge cost, no doubt, but they have and they have never threatened our supply.

I'm arguing that the risks in space are different than the ones on the ground, but also that they are far more manageable in space than on the ground, especially for a young colony. I'll address the suitability of the planet in reply to penny below, but the more suitable for agriculture the planet is, the more likely that compatibility of organisms exist to cause problems, as seen in the very Plague Years you're referring to. Therefore, if you have a mildly incompatible planet, you need orbital farms in advance of terra-forming; if you have a wildly compatible planet, you need orbital farms because of the risk on the ground.

I argue that the risks are manageable too for a spacefaring civilisation. They have the technology to protect against solar flares and meteor showers (in the HV they definitely do). Solar storms are energetic events, but in some ways it's easier to protect against them than to change weather on an open farm. Against hostile ships, I don't see a difference: if the hostile is willing to commit an atrocity by attacking an orbital farm, why wouldn't they drop rocks on your ground farms too?

One important difference is that of spatial diversity: you can spread your orbital farms over a huge volume of space and each one is a self-contained "world." Plagues don't jump from one another and an explosion due to technological problems won't affect more than a handful of them. Plus, failed crops due to technological problems won't affect them all at once.

Please note in this scenario I am not thinking of one or two very large orbital stations doing food production. I am thinking of hundreds of small ones.

Finally, I will admit this is not the HV. This is not how RFC has written it and described it to us. I know I am describing a scenario that the HV for some reason would have not opted into, implying there's a condition or circumstance that hasn't been explained.

penny wrote:I would think it was initially planned for foodstuffs to be grown on planet. Isn't that the entire point of finding suitable planets before the initial voyage? Especially back when man first started seeding the galaxy. In those early days of expanding across the galaxy, would it have been been conceivable to depend on an infrastructure in space with those generation ships before the technology groundside can support the infrastructure in space?

Indeed. Right now, there are no known Earth-compatible planets out there and the chances that we'll find one within driving range is negligible. The HV seems to have a lot of them, with conveniently-located wormholes (see my "improbability" thread from a few years ago).

I agree with you that early colony ships should have been designed to live in space before ascertaining that the world below was indeed suitable for life. Manticore was explored by hyperspace, but it was only settled in the 1400s PD. That means there were 1400 years of diaspora before then, and at least 725 of those were without hyperspace at all. We would have had technology to send probes at sublight and get results back, but the risk is high for either case that something was missed in the survey.

So why didn't they do it?

One has to first build the infrastructure groundside that will support the infrastructure in space. This reminds me of Babylon 5. Those early generation ships were limited as a whole.

No, they don't. That's upside-down. You come from space, so you build your first industrial nodes before going down. You have plenty of resources already in space and you have the technology to do all of that, because that's how your system of origin was set up, all the way back to the Sol system. Resources are far easier to acquire in space, because they come in digestible sizes and not at the bottom of a gravity well.

At the very least, you'll set up your hydrogen, deuterium, and helium extraction plants in space to fuel your fusion-based economy. By definition, terrestrial planets don't have a lot of those three because they're too light and escape into space in geological times.

In the long run, planets have far more mass and resources than asteroids. At a combined 10^25 kg of mass, Venus and Earth are ~90% of the mass of the Solar System outside of the Sun and the gas giants. But getting to all that mass would mean breaking up the planet you're trying to live on, so you don't put heavy, long-term industries on the planet in the first place.

We may very well skip the "let's break up small planets" stage of evolution and go straight into "let's get our material from the gas giants and the Sun." The difference is that those provide us with the energy required to extract the material we need from them too.

The backstory of Refuge comes to mind.

Indeed. That's the very counter-example of what I am trying to show would be a good colony planning. The Calvin's Hope was launched with a bare minimum of safety factor... early in the diaspora. Aeroplanes have a total safety factor of 1.2 today but we have a lot of experience in what needs to have redundancy and what doesn't, while lifts in tall buildings still have a safety factor of 10 or so. Calvin's Hope didn't have the data yet to know what could and what couldn't be spared. They prepared their expedition based on the results of a single successful colony, the one in the Sigma Draconis system that founded Beowulf. When they arrived in the Calvin system, they didn't have fuel and supplies to redirect to anything more than two dozen or so light-years. Looking again at aeroplanes, one area they don't skimp on is fuel, though easily the heaviest portion of the flight: they carry fuel to get to the destination, from there to an alternate, plus some predefined time having to wait, plus contingency.

They were strapped for cash and really wanted to get away. So at least here there's an economic and political explanation for why they launched what was an all-but-doomed expedition. That should make it an outlier, not the common / average expedition.

Jonathan_S wrote:And even if you'd planned on keeping the industrial infrastructure to build, access, and maintain large scale space farms there are enough sci-fi stories about colonies backsliding that I doubt the early colony expeditions would have been comfortable relying on orbital farms to prevent mass starvation. Even if the orbital farm approach was provable less risky it would probably be perceived as riskier thanks to the stories about backsliding colonies. And planners have to account for perceived as well as actual risks.

That's a Sci-Fi trope that is unlikely to really come to pass. Sure, there may be some lunatics that do try to do it on purpose, but within a few generations, cultural drift from the founders' ideals may cause them to redevelop and reinvent technology anyway. Think of the Nuncio system in the Talbott Quadrant: they came to call their founders the "Founding Idiots" for trying to do what Grayson tried to too. Note how in neither cases was the vision successful: Grayson retained genetic engineering for a while, retained orbital farms, and did reinvent a lot of technology too.

Excepting those cases where you're trying to "go back to a more peaceful existence," colonies will be in contact with each other, even prior to FTL. There's no reason why you'd lose your technology because you're in contact with your origin worlds. You also have redundancy, both in databases and spaceships. You should retain your colony ships (plural, probably tens of times over) before deciding that this system is indeed good to settle. And you would, as I argued, build your industrial and food-production support well and well before the colony ships left onwards or were dismantled.

Plus, having those space farms and industrial nodes prevents you from backsliding in the first place. That's one big reason why Reverend Austin Grayson's vision never came to pass: they couldn't ditch their technology because the planet was inhospitable and they needed to keep food going down, with people going up.

As for the perceived risk... well, remember that the origin system of all of those people is likely another space-based economy. It's either the Sol System, or a daughter colony that followed on the same model. Any colony that did manage to ditch their space presence wouldn't send out colonisation in the first place. So those people are likely very well acquainted with space-based industry.

(Plus, if they can use just a fraction of the industrial production required for orbital farms to instead operate dirtside ones then that saved production can be turned to other additional uses; whether that's infrastructure building or just quality of life improvements)

That's like saying that it takes much less resource to have people doing agriculture manually with shovels than building tractors and other modern agricultural machines. It is true that the initial capital, time, and energy investment is smaller, but the returns are also much, much smaller. More importantly, those returns are proportionately much smaller.

I do not expect any colony we found to ever go back to shovels and ox-pulled carts and I don't think that's what you're thinking of either. You're probably thinking of industrialised agriculture, with machines and robots, possibly even with domes over plots of land to protect against the elements. That's how the Harrington Freehold was described to us in Stephanie's stories, anyway.

At that point, the only thing the planet contributed was gravity, water, and soil. All of which you can get in space too, possibly even in far greater quantities, even without countergrav and gravitics: just spin your cylinder. And that's assuming the soil was compatible in the first place: if it was poor in some required element, like Phosphorus, you'd have to mine it somewhere. If that is coming from elsewhere in space, why would you then drop it down onto the planet so it could get washed away and absorbed into the crust?

penny wrote:I would think that orbital farms would have been riskier. If there is an orbital disaster it would tend to be total. The foodstuffs and the orbital infrastructure would be gone. With no way to replenish either. That would be like putting all of your eggs and chickens in one basket.

Then don't. Build multiple of them. There's no reason you can't.

Besides, the planet chosen is supposed to be ideal. So no need to be timid. You need to find out what kind of planet it is you now call home. So, take the plunge.

That's reckless bordering on criminal negligence. You should have an exit strategy if it turns out that it is not a good place to live. So you should never dismantle all your ships until a few decades later (if ever).

Besides, we've been told that the more ideal the place is, the more likely it is to have nasty surprises that the surveys missed.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's a Sci-Fi trope that is unlikely to really come to pass. Sure, there may be some lunatics that do try to do it on purpose, but within a few generations, cultural drift from the founders' ideals may cause them to redevelop and reinvent technology anyway. Think of the Nuncio system in the Talbott Quadrant: they came to call their founders the "Founding Idiots" for trying to do what Grayson tried to too. Note how in neither cases was the vision successful: Grayson retained genetic engineering for a while, retained orbital farms, and did reinvent a lot of technology too.

Pretty sure Grayson had to painfully regain the tech for orbital farms.

They fell back to black powder cannon and animal drawn carts! Okay, the later can make some situational sense even when you've got better tech - but if black powder cannon are your highest military technology you lack the tech base to operate a space industry.

But yes, Grayson did preserve (for a time) their life science technology -- as that wasn't the "bad" tech that they'd deliberately avoided bringing material, textbooks, or teachers for. And it would have taken a while for their colony ship and its shuttles to have worn out (even if they'd smashed its Cryo chambers to end/avoid debate about looking for a less dangerous planet)