Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

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.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

Chapter 10 wrote:Like the original Manticoran settlers, Kuan Yin's colonists set out from Old Earth before the Warshawski sail had made hyper-space safe enough for colony vessels. They'd made the centuries-long voyage sublight, in cryo, only to discover that the original survey had missed a minor point about their new home's ecosystem. Specifically, about its microbiology. Kuan Yin's soil was rich in all the necessary minerals and most of the required nutrients for Terrestrial plants, but its local microorganisms had shown a voracious appetite for Terran chlorophyll and ravaged every crop the settlers put in. None of them had bothered the colonists or the Terrestrial animals they'd introduced, but no Terrestrial life form could live on the local vegetation, Terran food crops had been all but impossible to raise, and yields had been spectacularly low. The colonists had managed—somehow—to survive by endless, backbreaking labor in the fields, but some staple crops had been completely wiped out, dietary deficiencies had been terrible, and they'd known that for all their desperate efforts, they were waging an ultimately hopeless war against their own planet's microbiology. Eventually, they were bound to lose enough ground to push them over the precipice into extinction, and there'd been nothing they could do about it. All of which explained why they'd greeted Anderman's "conquest" of their home world almost as a relief expedition.

tlb wrote:We do have one example of a plague that attacked food production in the Honorverse: from Honor Among Enemies:

Chapter 10 wrote:Like the original Manticoran settlers, Kuan Yin's colonists set out from Old Earth before the Warshawski sail had made hyper-space safe enough for colony vessels. They'd made the centuries-long voyage sublight, in cryo, only to discover that the original survey had missed a minor point about their new home's ecosystem. Specifically, about its microbiology. Kuan Yin's soil was rich in all the necessary minerals and most of the required nutrients for Terrestrial plants, but its local microorganisms had shown a voracious appetite for Terran chlorophyll and ravaged every crop the settlers put in. None of them had bothered the colonists or the Terrestrial animals they'd introduced, but no Terrestrial life form could live on the local vegetation, Terran food crops had been all but impossible to raise, and yields had been spectacularly low. The colonists had managed—somehow—to survive by endless, backbreaking labor in the fields, but some staple crops had been completely wiped out, dietary deficiencies had been terrible, and they'd known that for all their desperate efforts, they were waging an ultimately hopeless war against their own planet's microbiology. Eventually, they were bound to lose enough ground to push them over the precipice into extinction, and there'd been nothing they could do about it. All of which explained why they'd greeted Anderman's "conquest" of their home world almost as a relief expedition.

The original colony ships might not have had the equipment necessary to immediately build orbital farms.

ThinksMarkedly 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?

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.

penny wrote:As I said upstream and tlb seems to concur, I did not think the early colony ships were so capable. And they might have used lots of resources keeping the ship running along the way. At any rate, consider the logistics. You are saying they should get busy building the first industrial nodes before going down. I don't have a problem with building initial nodes in space. However, consider what those industrial nodes will consist of and who will build them. Mostly everyone is in cryo. And everybody's effort will be needed. Where will these people live? And what will they eat? What will they drink? What will they breathe? Water should be at a premium. I suppose a few can build for the many who will awaken, eventually. But the environmental systems will be taxed in space. Shuttles will be used to mine the asteroid fields, and the colony ship and shuttles will require parts and service.

The Universe of Honor Harrington wrote:In 1502 pd, the first practical countergravity generator was developed by the Anderson Shipbuilding Corporation of New Glasgow. This had only limited applications for space travel (though it did mean cargoes could be lifted into orbit for negligible energy costs), but incalculable ones for planetary transport industries, rendering rail, road, and oceanic transport of bulk cargoes obsolete overnight.

tlb wrote:from Honor Among Enemies:

Chapter 10 wrote:Like the original Manticoran settlers, Kuan Yin's colonists set out from Old Earth before the Warshawski sail had made hyper-space safe enough for colony vessels. They'd made the centuries-long voyage sublight, in cryo, only to discover that the original survey had missed a minor point about their new home's ecosystem. Specifically, about its microbiology. Kuan Yin's soil was rich in all the necessary minerals and most of the required nutrients for Terrestrial plants, but its local microorganisms had shown a voracious appetite for Terran chlorophyll and ravaged every crop the settlers put in. None of them had bothered the colonists or the Terrestrial animals they'd introduced, but no Terrestrial life form could live on the local vegetation, Terran food crops had been all but impossible to raise, and yields had been spectacularly low. The colonists had managed—somehow—to survive by endless, backbreaking labor in the fields, but some staple crops had been completely wiped out, dietary deficiencies had been terrible, and they'd known that for all their desperate efforts, they were waging an ultimately hopeless war against their own planet's microbiology. Eventually, they were bound to lose enough ground to push them over the precipice into extinction, and there'd been nothing they could do about it. All of which explained why they'd greeted Anderman's "conquest" of their home world almost as a relief expedition.

The original colony ships might not have had the equipment necessary to immediately build orbital farms.

penny wrote:Normally man bootstraps himself before going up the gravity well. You are suggesting they do so before going down the well. Interesting. Although I do understand your logic, I don't think you are looking at the big picture.

Anyway, there are shuttles to conquer the gravity well. Landing resources down the well should be easy to do and as a result easy to build an infrastructure on the planet. And acquiring water sources on planet should be much easier and practical. Oxygen should not be a problem on planet either. I see orbital farms as something you finally consider later. Growing foodstuffs on planet should be more desirable with HV agricultural methods. So, unless there are problems with plant diseases and or pests, farming the land would be more desirable. I would think. I don't see anything wrong with a few farms in space. But when exactly are you planning to settle the planet? And when are you planning to awaken the settlers?

As I said upstream and tlb seems to concur, I did not think the early colony ships were so capable. And they might have used lots of resources keeping the ship running along the way. At any rate, consider the logistics. You are saying they should get busy building the first industrial nodes before going down. I don't have a problem with building initial nodes in space. However, consider what those industrial nodes will consist of and who will build them. Mostly everyone is in cryo. And everybody's effort will be needed. Where will these people live? And what will they eat? What will they drink? What will they breathe? Water should be at a premium. I suppose a few can build for the many who will awaken, eventually. But the environmental systems will be taxed in space. Shuttles will be used to mine the asteroid fields, and the colony ship and shuttles will require parts and service.

People will want to be awakened when they finally arrive at their home. Politics will come into play. There could be a civil war before you can be awakened in a year or two? Three? Four?

People are put in cryo for a reason. There simply is not only not enough food to feed everyone on the voyage home, but there isn't enough water and oxygen either. It seems silly to spend so much effort acquiring water down the gravity well to transport up the well. And utilizing technology for oxygen when you chose a planet to furnish both.

At any rate, I cannot understand why a world is being built in space if you are planning to live on the planet. Perhaps the planet should be settled along with keeping a base in space as well.

At any rate, politics should prevent a plan which involves keeping people in cryo for an extended period of time after they arrive. They have a stake in this planet that they cannot claim if in cryo. At any rate, as far as solving the possibility of a catastrophe to the orbital farms by building many small farms, do consider that the catastrophe could involve the colony ship itself where everyone in cryo is lost. All of those sleeping eggs are in one basket and could be destroyed before they "hatch."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But let me give you yet another example of poor planning in an otherwise well-executed and well-funded effort: Manticore. Why did they send one frigging ship? Talk about putting all your eggs in a single basket! They should have sent at least a dozen, slightly separated out but still within communications range (half a light-second for the full diameter of all ships is more than fine). If any engineering problem befell one of the ships, it wouldn't compromise the entire effort. Plus, they can help one another, because they're coasting anyway, so it's not like the one with problems is going to fall behind.

Yes, it's more expensive to build 12 ships than 1. If the interior volume is the same, the square-cube law says that the amount of armour and hull shielding is smaller. But not by much: engines would be roughly the same, since they have to be proportional to mass, which is roughly proportional to volume (12 ships would have higher mass because armour and shielding will have higher density). Similarly for other fuel and provisions.

Columbus when he went to find a passage to the Indies didn't set out in a single sailship. He had three, which is probably the minimum viable expedition.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I don't see why farming on the planet should be more desirable if the cost is roughly the same. You are churning the land there, after all, destroying the native landscape and ecosystem by introducing Terran fauna and flora. Though the same technology that would allow for orbital farms should allow for entirely self-contained, domed farms on the ground too. So the issue of alien contamination should not occur in the first place, either way.

Flag in Exile wrote:The orbital farms were far more productive, on a volume-for-volume basis, than any dirt-side farm, but building them had been hideously expensive, especially with pre-Alliance technology. Historically, simply feeding its people had soaked up something like seventy percent of Yeltsin's gross system product, but that was about to change.