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Long term consequences of the League's collapse

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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by Weird Harold   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 7:00 pm

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kzt wrote:Going from Delta to Iota (and streak opens up the next band too) roughly triples your speed. This doesn't just get the cargo there faster, it means one ship can make 3 times as many trips ...


Going from Delta To Theta provides the same sort of benefit. Why don't merchant ships take advantage of that advantage; how would skipping over a hyperband that is not cost effective by using a bigger, more expensive hyper-generator be more cost effective than staying in the Delta band?

Interstellar News Agencies, luxury liners, and possibly specialized secure courier services for Banks and high-priority mail. There is a very small market for the Streak Drive that could demand high-enough prices to make it economically feasible.

I also note that nobody has suggested a civilian use for the Spider Drive. :roll:
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by kzt   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 7:05 pm

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Simple. If my ships can each make 3x as many trips as your ships per year I will get paid 200% more money per year per ship as you. Now the questions is how does that interact with the cost of having the more sophisticated systems and larger crew, and THAT very unclear since these are not exactly economics textbooks.
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by Zakharra   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 7:41 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:
kzt wrote:
I also note that nobody has suggested a civilian use for the Spider Drive. :roll:



Interstellar hide and seek by collage grads making spaceships for science fairs. >_>

The spider drives seem to be slow as hell, but a lot harder to detect. I can't really think of any civilian uses unless a spider drive is more effective at transiting wormholes. Maybe they aren't as useful as I thought.
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by Weird Harold   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 7:49 pm

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Zakharra wrote:I can't really think of any civilian uses


I can think of one non-combat use, but it isn't precisely civilian -- taxi inside an Impeller Drive exclusion zone; similar to the restrictions around Manticore's space stations. I get the impression that it would take a long run for a spider drive ship to get enough momentum to be an effective suicide bomber, so it would be ideal for "safe" transport where Impellers could be dangerous.
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by Zakharra   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 7:56 pm

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Weird Harold wrote:
Zakharra wrote:I can't really think of any civilian uses


I can think of one non-combat use, but it isn't precisely civilian -- taxi inside an Impeller Drive exclusion zone; similar to the restrictions around Manticore's space stations. I get the impression that it would take a long run for a spider drive ship to get enough momentum to be an effective suicide bomber, so it would be ideal for "safe" transport where Impellers could be dangerous.



A Terrorist Assault Vessel. Cause You only Need it for One Use!

Seriously though, you think it might be good as a tug for towing larger ships around space stations?
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by svenhauke   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 7:59 pm

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my opinion

when the solarian league collapses

it will be to busy to take on the GA as its not in the center

it will start to dominate solarian league worlds like it did fringe worlds and that will produce a huricane of destruction when league worlds start to defend their independance agains the dictators

so manticore and haven will become ignored as the fighting goes to the core they will become refugees for a lot of people who can escape and a core of a better gouverned starnation then the SL ever was
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by Weird Harold   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 8:19 pm

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Zakharra wrote: Seriously though, you think it might be good as a tug for towing larger ships around space stations?


Probably not. I get the impression that Spider Drives aren't that powerful. It wouldn't be able to serve the defensive purpose of a Tug's huge wedge, either.

I'm sure a tug could be built using a spider drive, but I'm not sure there would be much demand when an Impeller Tug is so much more versatile.
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by JohnRoth   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 8:57 pm

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MaxxQ wrote:
Zakharra wrote:John Roth has it right. There's no reason why some merchant ships wouldn't be using the better rad/particle shielding, inertial compensator and such, other than being cheap. It also might be simply, that the military spec hyperdrive engines simply aren't allowed to be used by select authorized users. Hauptman clearly is one such authorized user. His corporations build warships so they have access to the parts.

Another consideration might be a scarcity of spare parts. There's likely a much higher chance of replacement parts for the commercial hyperdrives merchant ships use. But also take this into considerations; Manticore merchant ships likely have better engines, shielding and compensators than most Solarian vessels do, but you don't see the Manty ships downgrading to Solly level of drives and such. It would be cheaper after all to use such, but it's also somewhat slower. So speed is a factor to be taken into consideration. Hence my idea of some commercial vessels using things like the milspec drives or even streak drives. There should be a market for very speedy vessels that can carry decent cargoes -fast-. This wouldn't affect bulk transport which would move by slower ships, but it can mean a nice bottom line for some select companies that do follow this model as they satisfy a niche market.


First, why would anyone downgrade? That's stupid and costly. If you *already* have a speedier ship than the Sollies, why would you drop to their level? Even new-build, why would you do that?

Second, we both seem to be saying the same thing as far as special, or specialized ships. I just don't think the *general* merchant ships will get anything like a civilian version of a streak drive, or improved rad and particle shielding, or compensators.

Vince summed up the types of ships that might get those improvements pretty well.


It's basically cost-benefit. Being able to go up one hyper band results in faster transit times which saves money on a lot of fronts. The "streak drive" is the result of improvements in a number of apparently unrelated fields. Can a commercial hyper generator benefit from those improvements without ruinous additional cost? Only RFC knows, and I suspect that it's beyond the time horizon he's got for the end of the series.

The same logic goes for improved compensators. The longer the voyage, the less important compensator efficiency becomes. However, if the improvements eventually trickle down to the basic commercial systems at a cost that doesn't eat up reductions in transit times, I don't see why they wouldn't be adopted. Right now, they're military secrets, so I expect that nobody is working on applying the same principles to commercial engines.
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by Weird Harold   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:08 pm

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JohnRoth wrote:It's basically cost-benefit. Being able to go up one hyper band results in faster transit times which saves money on a lot of fronts. The "streak drive" is the result of improvements in a number of apparently unrelated fields. Can a commercial hyper generator benefit from those improvements without ruinous additional cost?


It's possible that the "unrelated improvements" might be applied to making the Theta band accessible to civilian Hyper Generators without the full Streak Drive's access to the Iota band and higher.

But as the technology stands, the peak of the cost-benefit curve seems to be the Delta Band, two bands below where a Streak Drive could begin to pay for itself.
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Re: Long term consequences of the League's collapse
Post by BobfromSydney   » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:45 pm

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Just continuing to play devil's advocate here:

Everyone is assuming that 200% additional trips means 200% additional profits. But wouldn't larger hyper generators, crew compartments etc. take up additional space? Which in turn would reduce the size of the cargo holds? (probably by a relatively small margin).

What about time spent in port? Or short hops? Those would see little or no benefits.

As for dispatch boats they have very small crews, but I was under the impression that people are willing to take 'risks' with dispatch boats that they wouldn't with ships with larger crews.
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