Zakharra wrote:kzt wrote:
Can you suggest exactly where the books suggest that Grayson has become wealthy through interstellar trade? Exactly what and who does it trade with? What is Grayson known for in the greater galaxy, and does it produce that the rest of the universe desires and will pay for?
Since it allied with Manticore, Grayson has profited greatly from the trade trade with Manticore and has access to the greater universe through the wormhole junction. It's brought in a lot more money, new knowledge such as prolong, medical knowledge that is combating the Grayson cancers and tendencies to have 2-3 females per male, the technology for the sky-domes and more, the ability to build and support the SD and other ships they have. Without that critical trade, Grayson would not be any better off than before Manticore came knocking. RFC hasn't expounded upon what Grayson trades in (ores perhaps, the Grayson system is lousy with a lot of ore), but that doesn't mean Grayson isn't benefiting from being allies with Manticore (it would be stupid as hell to think no one is trading with Grayson and they can still do what they are doing. He rarely goes into the details of interstellar economics, so at the best, all we can do is guess.
I've maintained that systems can survive and possible do so adequately, but to truly prosper, the system needs active and vibrant trade, otherwise the system is nothing more than a backwater. Manticore would be a backwater system if the wormhole junction didn't exist there. Trading equals prosperity. It's as simple as that. No trade, the system is a backwater. With trade, the system economy can be supercharged.
Okay, I've been largely staying out of this, but I am now going to make a few points.
(1) The Honorverse doesn't normally have the need for the bulk shipment of raw materials on anything approaching the scale that they are currently moved by water here on Earth. I.e., there are not huge fleets of interstellar Honorverse supertankers or large ore carriers. That isn't to say that there aren't some of those sorts of carriers serving specialty needs, usually over fairly short (by interstellar standards) routes. They are, of course, much more common for in-system, sublight use.
(2) The Honorverse interstellar trade network does transport very large cargoes — i.e., bulk cargoes — of commodities one would not normally think of as interstellar commodities. Grain, for example, and meat products. Before anyone goes "Yeah, sure," let me point out that depending on whose estimate one uses, the average American citizen eats between three quarters of a pound (that's the UN's estimate) and a quarter pound of meat (that's the NCI's latest estimate) each day. Split the difference and call it half a pound, then multiply it by 313,000,000, and you get 156,500,000 pounds per day or 57,122,500,000 pounds (28,561,250 tons per year) of total US meat consumption. By the same token, the average American consumes 1,763 pounds of grain per year, which comes to a national consumption of 551,819,000,000 pounds (275,909,500 tons) per year. If one assumes an entire planetary/system population of, say, 3.5 billion consuming food at comparative rates, you have a multiplier of just under 11.2, so call it 319,886,000 tons of meat and 3,090,186,400 of grain per year, for a total of just under 3.5 billion tons (combined) per year. Assume that only 10% of all foods consumed in a star system with that population (and don't forget that the Core World populations are much higher than that), is shipped in from an extra-system source, somebody would be hauling in 350,000,000 tons — or 68 5,000,000-ton loads — of food per year. Oops.
Minor math error. If you show a profit of $1 per pound on five million tons of cargo, the total profit comes to $10,000,000,000, not the $5,000,000 I originally posted. Economies of scale and all. 
That doesn't mean that a star system couldn't feed itself entirely out of its own in-system resources. It does mean, given the low cost of interstellar transport in the Honorverse, that it would be entirely economically viable to ship food into the system from extra-system sources. The climate here in South Carolina is very suitable for growing lettuce; an awful lot of the lettuce I see in the produce section of my local grocery store is grown in California or some other state and shipped in. Grain is a major commodity in international shipping here on Earth. The Roman Empire built the biggest ships in the ancient world specifically to transport grain from Egypt to Rome and Constantinople. My point is that Montanan beef destined for the luxury foods market may be somewhat less atypical of Honorverse interstellar economics than some people seem to be assuming. And in some cases, a system population may very well not be able to feed itself economically out of its own local resources. Grayson would be one example, perhaps. If it costs $6 per pound to grow/produce non-toxic food in-system and it costs only $1 per pound to produce that same food somewhere else, then someone could buy in the less expensive system, absorb 400% in transportation costs, and still show a $1 net profit. If you're shipping five million tons at a whack, that's a $5,000,000 profit on the voyage, and at least until Skydomes came along, the differential would actually have been higher and that on Grayson. Even with Skydomes, food production costs on Grayson are very high compared to the majority of inhabited worlds and insanely high compared to inhabited worlds especially well-suited to farming. I'm sure [he said innocently
] that someone will see a market opportunity and shipping in not only basic foodstuffs but exotic ones — the equivalent in our economy today, perhaps, of shipping in, oh, coffee, for example.(3) There will also be a constant market in supplying needed equipment and commodities to recently colonized or growing/modernizing star systems. The sheer size of each shipment probably isn't going to be as huge as the equivalent of a bulk grain carrier arriving in, say, Shanghai or Mumbai, but a mid-sized Honorverse freighter on a regular run carrying consignments to be dropped off and picking up "on-spec" cargo — or contracted cargo — along the way can show a tidy profit.
(4) In addition to the above, there will always be specialty markets. Given the diversity of planetary biospheres into which humanity has expanded in the Honorverse, there is tremendous room for specialty woods, mutated genetically engineered food products, exotic pelts, locally produced beers and wines, etc., which will always find markets if only because of scarcity and/or their exotic "prestige" value.
(5) It's highly probable that even in the Honorverse, some star systems' industry is going to be able to produce goods more cheaply than other star systems' industry. Those goods can range from clothing items to heavy industrial machinery to construction equipment to computers, medical tech, or air cars. As long as the manufacturer's cost plus the cost of shipping are lower than the local costs of production, there will be a market transporting those goods. In many cases — again, like that of Montana — a star system may be able to support a very comfortable lifestyle for its citizens without possessing the "heavy industry" necessary to support that lifestyle locally, as long as it has an export commodity that makes it cheaper for that star system to purchase the products of heavy industry somewhere else and ship them in. And there are — especially where OFS is involved — a depressingly high number of "captive economies" which have no choice but to buy the goods they cannot produce locally from their transstellar masters.
(6) The point of all of the above is that interstellar commerce moves steadily throughout the Honorverse. A lot of it is fairly "local," that is shipped across a distance of less than 50-75 light-years. With the existence of the warp bridges and of the grav waves, longer passages are entirely feasible, however, and it's not uncommon for goods to be shipped 200-300 light-years, although they are frequently transshipped along the way rather than sending a single ship on a voyage of that length.
(7) By the same token, interstellar trade is not by any means essential to the economies of most star systems. There are inhabited systems (like Yildun, which literally cannot feed its citizens) whose economies simply could not exist at all without interstellar shipping, however. There are also systems where the economy would promptly collapse without access to interstellar markets, and a larger number of systems where the economy would suffer a severe, potentially crippling blow if they were suddenly cut off from those interstellar markets. For the majority of star systems — especially the Core Systems of the Solarian League — the result would more probably be a moderately severe to very severe recession with the potential to become something worse in a ripple/cascade fashion if it goes on long enough. The blow to the Solarian League's governmental revenues, on the other hand, would be massive, which is the very weakness that Lacoön was designed to exploit. It will inflict financial pain on the majority of the Solarian League's most prosperous star systems; it will (ultimately) inflict lethal financial damage upon the Solarian League's government.
[8] In the meantime, it will inflict a lot of pain on Manticore, as well. There's no question of that, which was an enormous factor in Manticore's not having resorted to something like Lacoön when the Solarian League wasn't trying all that hard to enforce the official embargo of military technology to the People's Republic of Haven. This isn't something you resort to casually. It's almost the equivalent of shooting through the hostage's shoulder with a high-powered rifle to take down the terrorist holding a pistol to the hostage's head. The damage to the Old Star Kingdom's industrial infrastructure inflicted by Oyster Bay only made Lacoön II an even more painful/difficult choice for the Star Empire, but short of actually invading the Solarian League, it offered Manticore the most effective weapon for bringing the mandarins to their knees without inflicting wholesale economic or physical damage upon the League as a whole. In the event, the sudden reopening of Havenite space, the increased trade in Silesia, and the local agreements Manticore is hammering out with independent Verge and Shell systems — and, under the radar, with quite a few star systems which are legally members of the Solarian League — are mitigating the self-inflicted economic damage to a much greater extent than anyone in Manticore had ever anticipated. Which, of course, is not to say that it isn't still hurting . . . a lot.
On the other hand, one of the things which is going to emerge from all of this — especially as Manticore gets its space infrastructure replaced and up and running once more — is that quite a few of the Solarian transstellars are going to find themselves frozen out of once-captive markets in favor of Manticoran and Havenite manufacturing cartels who are smart enough not to practice the completely and brutally exploitative policies of their Solarian predecessors. After the war, then, the economies of the Grand Alliance are going to be nicely placed to supplant or at least very closely challenge the Solarian League as the galaxy's 800-kilo economic gorilla.
[9] In terms of Grayson, it wasn't access to interstellar trade which was so economically transformative. It was access to modern interstellar technology, which it acquired through its alliance with Manticore much more than through general interstellar commerce. This is, in fact, one of the huge pro-Manticore influences in Yeltsin; the Graysons understand what Manticore's tech transfers have meant to themselves and to their children's futures. The Grayson economic boom, however, is largely self-fueled as the constraints on food production are gradually eliminated or at least greatly reduced (courtesy of Skydomes), as industry becomes geometrically more productive (courtesy of those tech transfers and of Manticoran investment), and as the Grayson labor force's purchasing power expands in step. The only real export product Grayson has at the moment are starships — military or commercial — and I believe that one can safely assume that Grayson will become/remain part of the Manticoran shipbuilding industry's network for the foreseeable future. In most other respects, however, Grayson's much more likely to be a net importer in the interstellar economy.
Don't know how much this will help, but there it is.
Edited to correct math error.
