runsforcelery wrote:Interplanetary and interstellar freighters are huge. They routinely transport cargo in quantities no conceivable point-to-point delivery on a single planet are going to require. Therefore, they can practice the same economies of scale railroads can practice vis-à-vis trucking lines. It therefor costs less to transport the same tonnages because the parameters are totally different.
Did I mention anything about local distribution? No. There is local distribution on every planet and has no bearing on the cost as the cost of distribution is intrinsically fixed. Besides, local distribution costs in Honorverse would be very low as it would appear, from my reading of your books, most planets have Giant centralized cities, making Tokyo/Shanghai look down right vacuous.
Grain/Meat, goes from giant storage site(where it is grown/butchered) to slightly less giant storage site positioned
Inside, or on the outside of a city. Around these storage sites are most of your local food processors taking said BULK grain/meat and creating finished goods that THEN and only THEN get distributed locally for hundreds of miles “locally” at times.
How many Mtons of grain do you think is moved from the fields of E. Washington to Port of Longview? 160Million bushels of wheat, corn, and soybeans annually or roughly 5 Mtons. One bushel is 60lbs. 37 Bushels to the ton roughly. Note this is the amount exported, not amount grown which is several times this amount. The states of Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota make the Pacific Northwest look like minnows. I only used my local knowledge as a reference to save time. If you wish to look up the other info feel free.
Where/how does this grain move? In PNW case, Truck to major storage usually owned by the largest local grower or a COOP with their giant storage facility who then sell it, to barge or to rail, to ship carrying in excess of 100,000 tons, to the Orient where it then sits in giant city storage sites with multi millions of bushels of storage. Note, I was being very generous only stating 100,000 tons of grain per bulk carrier. If they could build larger ships they would, and they are trying as they keep getting larger. Currently limited by the quality of the steel. If they could ship a couple Mtons of grain at once, they would. It would be cheaper.
How many Mtons of grain goes from Kansas to NewYork and its city storage facility? Well, 1.5lb of grain per person per day is a short estimate. NY has 14Million. So, roughly 20Million lbs a day, or 20,000tons/day. Yearly, NY by itself needs crudely 7M tons/year. If they could use a more efficient mode of transportation than train or barge/ship(100,000tons) they would.
How large is Mendal/Grendal on Beowulf? Much larger than New York is my read on your books. Cities like these seem commonplace in the HV. Are there smaller cities? Sure, but the way I read your books is that the vast majority of populations are in mega cities like NY, LA, Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc. Just like today, I assume they will have a centralized grain storage site with the food processors right next to it as this is the most efficient method for distribution of food.
runsforcelery wrote:I have never said one damned word about boosting million-ton orbital transports and then dropping them back to the planetary surface again, because that's not how planetary cargoes are transported. You are either willfully misunderstanding to create straw men or else totally missing the difference between the transportation environments.
You just got done stating, counter grav of Mega tons of grain from a farm planet to LEO orbit where it is then transferred to ~8M ton freighters is common place and cheap to do. Right?
You also just got done saying, via More than Honor quote, that moving Mtons of grain down on the planet to a local food processing distribution network is more expensive than moving said grain, up to a 8Mton ship(25% of which is ship mass in my guestimate, or are they actually transporting this tonnage?), transport it, 100LY, and then dropping it down onto yet a different planet at Mtons at a time. Pathetic little 1000 ton loads are not going to get the job done efficiently. Unless you are going to have thousands of shuttle flights every day of every year distributing, "just enough" for everyone's daily meal. Its as sure shooting that the grain storage sites will be on planet and not in space. One stray comet, and oops, you guys are now starving till the next crop...
A simple calculation as to how many Mtons of grain a city like New York needs will show it needs Mtons of grain per year. I did this previously. Efficiency dictates instead of shipping 100,000 tons of grain at a time(assuming your city is on the water, most are not, as is done today, the more efficient method would be to ship Mtons of grain at a time. Or exactly what you are ALREADY proposing to do on an interstellar basis!
I just got done in my previous post showing via simple local knowledge of how much grain is grown at a medium sized growing site, Washington, how if these growing sites could transport 5M tons of grain at a time they would as major cities NEED this much grain on a yearly basis. If you wish to state that these cities would rather only receive grain quarterly, I could go with this. Even then NY, on a quarterly basis will need over 1.5M tons of grain by itself.
Either Moving Mtons of grain to LEO orbit is cheap or it is not. If it is cheap, then moving an Mton of grain to LEO and then dropping it down to a city for its quarterly grain shipment is just as efficient and cheap as moving said Mton of grain to a Hyper capable ship.
