Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:This allows me to comment on someone pointing out that the HV was patterned after the age of sail. Although that fact is true, does it remain true? Certainly not on the same degree? Nowhere near it actually.

The point about age of sail, was that it could take weeks to months for goods and information to go from one part of civilization to another. That is still true (unless there is a direct connection via wormhole), even with a streak drive to cut days off of voyage.

Sorry, but I do not consider weeks or months to align with the age of sail. Heck, when I was a kid, it could take 4-6 weeks to receive shipment from overseas. Some products I remember waiting for a couple of months, if a product is out of stock. And mail used to take over a month if communicating with a loved one in the military. It is simply the inconvenient woes of a modern society. The 20th century is certainly not the age of sail. I suppose the fact that goods were shipped over the ocean when I was a kid (and still now) still qualifies even though sails were not used. Shrug.

I also think the entire logistics of the HV is being misconstrued. Sure, it may take a month to get from system A to system B. But if a steady stream of arrivals and departures are happening, these transit times are almost imperceptible to the end user as far as the stock market is concerned. If Manticore cornered the market with its humongous merchant fleet, it would have been advantageous to the MBS to move data quickly, frequently and reliably. Why do you think the MBS invested so heavily in its merchant fleet? I will go out on a limb and say that that fleet served the MBS's needs first. Move that data. I would not be surprised if a steady stream of boats arrived to and from the MBS daily! Manticoran markets can do as much business as Manty bottoms can sit on!

tlb wrote:The point about age of sail, was that it could take weeks to months for goods and information to go from one part of civilization to another. That is still true (unless there is a direct connection via wormhole), even with a streak drive to cut days off of voyage.

penny wrote:Sorry, but I do not consider weeks or months to align with the age of sail. Heck, when I was a kid, it could take 4-6 weeks to receive shipment from overseas. Some products I remember waiting for a couple of months, if a product is out of stock. And mail used to take over a month if communicating with a loved one in the military. It is simply the inconvenient woes of a modern society. The 20th century is certainly not the age of sail. I suppose the fact that goods were shipped over the ocean when I was a kid (and still now) still qualifies even though sails were not used.

What time frames did you expect, something in years? What you are remembering has as much to do with infrastructure as travel time, particularly for something out of stock.

In the early age of sail, it took over six months to go from England to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Moreover it took about 6 weeks to 4 months to cross the Atlantic, depending on the weather. Columbus did it in 61 days. Note that in the absence of weather information, travel in the oldest days of sail was very much a matter of chance.

By the early 1800s sailing ships had improved to the point that the average time from New York to the English Channel was around 25 to 30 days. In contrast, by 1907 a steamship (no sails) could do it in 5 days.

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.

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.

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.

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

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Moreover, you don't do this:

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.

If you are worried about vandals; aren't they more likely to be in the form of pirates, than people picked to form the colony? Orbital farms are easier to destroy.

I would accept some orbitals farms, until everyone is certain that there is no local microbe; but a mixture is best.

penny wrote:I also think the entire logistics of the HV is being misconstrued. Sure, it may take a month to get from system A to system B. But if a steady stream of arrivals and departures are happening, these transit times are almost imperceptible to the end user as far as the stock market is concerned. If Manticore cornered the market with its humongous merchant fleet, it would have been advantageous to the MBS to move data quickly, frequently and reliably. Why do you think the MBS invested so heavily in its merchant fleet? I will go out on a limb and say that that fleet served the MBS's needs first. Move that data. I would not be surprised if a steady stream of boats arrived to and from the MBS daily! Manticoran markets can do as much business as Manty bottoms can sit on!

That only works for commodities or other products where it doesn't matter when it was sent. That is, non-perishable and non-time-sensitive.

That cannot be the case for information, because it is usually time-sensitive. You don't design a production line that depends on real-time communication without real-time communication.

That's not to say that Manticore couldn't have cornered the market on DBs either, especially having access to the MWHJ and a few others under advantageous terms. I just think it's less likely than bulk trade in general because anyone can carry information and it can be easily duplicated, sent over multiple hulls.

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:I wonder if it would be practical to couple freighters together, like triple-trailored semis. That way, you'd only pay for one transit. It should be cheaper.

Someone is always trying to buck the system.

No - not coupled together. That'd make the geometry all wrong.

Now if Astro Control will allow it you could do a simultaneous transit. It's riskier than a solo transit, and takes some more preparation, but it's not that risky.

Mind you they'd probably still charge you per ship so it wouldn't help.

Also it doesn't help with transit times. Even if we take a pair of small 4.5 mton ships (around the size of the JNMTC fast freighters Honor was escorting during 'In Enemy Hands') their minimum transit time normally would be 120 seconds (they'd each lock it down for 32.5 seconds, but the Junction has a 60 second separation as a minimum permitted interval). If they instead did a simultaneous transit their combined 9 mtons would lock the route down for 129.6 seconds.

(And of course most freighters are larger than that, which makes the time impact even worse)

pg. 4 of thread

A temporary detour, if you will.

Isn't that what it took to transport the Silver Bullets? Two freighters coupled together? Am I misremembering that?

penny wrote:Isn't that what it took to transport the Silver Bullets? Two freighters coupled together? Am I misremembering that?

No, it was two freight containers put together; not two freighters.

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Isn't that what it took to transport the Silver Bullets? Two freighters coupled together? Am I misremembering that?

No, it was two freight containers put together; not two freighters.

That was a container that looked like 2 regular containers joined together for EACH Silver Bullet platform.

Thanks to you both. I knew I must have misremembered that somehow.