munroburton wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:I agree there's a hard limit - but you might have been too simplistic in calculating it.
By using the wormhole to save 65 days not only saves the owner 65 days of loan payments, salary, maintenance, etc. but using the wormhole consistently also generates revenue more frequently. Cutting the average trip duration in half should double the annual revenue a ship can generate.
And so a shipping line judging the point where a wormhole transit becomes unaffordable must be balancing the fees incurred against a combination of both their cost savings and their additional revenue possible per year.
Of course not all trade routes get equal benefit from the wormhole, so climbing fee will choke off some routes before others.
That kind of indirect cargo taxing is theoretically possible, but could be very volatile. Reusing the Suez example, due to fluctuations in oil prices, tankers sometimes find it more economical to not pay the canal's fee and instead travel the long way around. The same tankers also tend to be empty on their return legs.
It'd definitely happen if a wormhole was saturated with traffic and had to force low-value cargoes out. That'd be something like 150 freighters per bridge per day - hard to say if traffic at the MWJ is that heavy yet. Otherwise, they might as well collect an universal fee from even empty ships returning somewhere.
Yes you could reach wormhole saturation. But 150 freighters per bridge per day is still almost 10 minutes between transits. Though there would be some level of other traffic (couriers, warships, etc.) that'd drive down that delay somewhat.
Still 150 per bridge per day seems too low a number for a maximum allowed.
During OBS "Under normal circumstances, the Junction handled inbound and outbound vessels at an average rate of one every three minutes, day in and day out, year after year." But that seems to be the average across the entire Junction; so spread unevenly across the 6 then known remote termini.
And several years later in EOH we're told that "Under normal circumstances, the minimum allowable transit window was one minute. Usually the windows actually ran considerably longer than that, since the number of ships awaiting passage was seldom large enough to cause ACS to push the minimum." That is probably up some, despite the higher fees, since OBS but sounds like even the busiest remote termini within the junction were still, say, 5 minutes minimum (or 288 transits per day).
We also know that there often seems to be a queue of ships waiting to transit and it could exceed 25 minutes. (Since we've seen queues chased off during EoH's emergency transits, and even in OBS HMS Fearless not only had to wait her turn to transit, but her pinnaces out at Basilisk ACS were responsible for policing their transit queue) So ACS must have some metric for how lengthy queue is acceptable and use that to adjust the transit window lengths - rather than cranking down the delay to try to zero out any queue as quickly as possible.
Still Manticoran ACS determined that the hard max is 1,440 transits per day! OTOH if any of those transits mass more than about 6.1 mtons they'll reduce that total since the transit will lock that bridge down for over 60 seconds. An 8.5 mton freighter would lock it down about 116 seconds (so even flat out you could only transit about 740 of them a day per bridge).
It's been years since EoH but I'd still be surprised if any leg of the Junction had ever been consistently pushing close to its maximum allowed transits per day.
