SLN Reserve

zyffyr wrote:

Tenshinai wrote:Secondly, i don´t think you understand just how much tonnage is around. Earth today has between 1 and 2 BILLION tons just of maritime transportation(depending on what exactly you´re counting), spread out over 53K to 89K vessels.

Just to reinforce this point....

The Port of Los Angeles, which is one of several major US ports, handles around 180 million tons of shipping per year (roughly 2/3 of that is inbound)

https://www.portoflosangeles.org/maritime/tonnage.asp

That for a country with a population of around 320 million.

So with the MMM as the only freight company in the entire universe (which it isn't), they will have 240 ships call on every planet every year. And yes, 8 mt is the common size for freighters, as it doesn't significantly increase the crew needed and only marginally increases costs of construction. So you have a ship with what, 30 million cubic meters of cargo space (assuming each 'ton' is 4 cubic meters in the honorverse, which I think is correct and assuming the ship systems in 2 million cubic meters). And it doesn't matter if you fill the ship with vacuum or iridium ingots, it's all volume based.

Iirc, you can ship the entire annual US wheat crop in two honorverse freighters,

I tend to think that people who, as an example, called on Grayson pre-HotQ 240 times a year are not going to be making money. It notes in the text that a lot of smaller systems get one to four ships a year calling on them, if that. The thousand or so wealthy industrialized worlds get a lot more, but they are 90% or so in the SL.

zyffyr wrote:
Just to reinforce this point....

The Port of Los Angeles, which is one of several major US ports, handles around 180 million tons of shipping per year (roughly 2/3 of that is inbound)

https://www.portoflosangeles.org/maritime/tonnage.asp

That for a country with a population of around 320 million.

Thank you for the reality data point, yeah exactly.


Just for fun, i went and looked up just shipping to/from Sweden.

2016Q1, 41Mt goods from a total of 17806 ships totalling 272M gross tonnage of which 248Mt was to/from foreign ports.

So, lets add together from the pdf files...
Total 2016, about 169Mt goods, total of 76451 ships entering port...

Actually, that´s a lot more than even i thought. And sure, lots of that are ships going 1-6 day trips across the Baltic sea only or some even just coastal traffic(part of the 10% of the total that was not international shipping), and lots of relatively small ships, but its still a crapload of maritime activity for a country with a 10M population.


So, if we assume a half of gross tonnage as cargoload, that would mean the current shipping of Sweden alone almost manages to require 1 of those 8Mt freighters, per week.

kzt wrote:So with the MMM as the only freight company in the entire universe (which it isn't), they will have 240 ships call on every planet every year. And yes, 8 mt is the common size for freighters, as it doesn't significantly increase the crew needed and only marginally increases costs of construction. So you have a ship with what, 30 million cubic meters of cargo space (assuming each 'ton' is 4 cubic meters in the honorverse, which I think is correct and assuming the ship systems in 2 million cubic meters). And it doesn't matter if you fill the ship with vacuum or iridium ingots, it's all volume based.

Iirc, you can ship the entire annual US wheat crop in two honorverse freighters,

I tend to think that people who, as an example, called on Grayson pre-HotQ 240 times a year are not going to be making money. It notes in the text that a lot of smaller systems get one to four ships a year calling on them, if that. The thousand or so wealthy industrialized worlds get a lot more, but they are 90% or so in the SL.

From where do you get that 8Mt freighters is the normal size?

And from what i recall, that "4 ships a year" is about the space version of outback wasteland planets with small populations and very little of interest. Not the normal or average.

And using extremes as examples, bad idea.

And unless something changed in the meantime, an 8Mt freighter cannot actually carry 8Mt.
As i noted above, i assumed half that as a realistic minimum value.


And if each ship loaded 4Mt, you would need 16 such freighters to move the US wheat production of 2016. Just under 63Mt.

I might add that WORLD total was just under 750Mt, with EU at the top followed by China, India and Russia.
Notably, Canada and Australia together manages as much as USA.

And it doesn't matter if you fill the ship with vacuum or iridium ingots, it's all volume based.

Really... That´s news.


And you still might want to think about just how much shipping there is just on earth.
And while about 3/4s of that would never go beyond orbital, that still leaves a HUGE amount.

zyffyr wrote:Just to reinforce this point....

The Port of Los Angeles, which is one of several major US ports, handles around 180 million tons of shipping per year (roughly 2/3 of that is inbound)

https://www.portoflosangeles.org/maritime/tonnage.asp

That for a country with a population of around 320 million.

Though to be completely fair some of that is only passing through the US. For example at least some of the China - Europe trade bypassed the Panama canal and went container ship to LA, railroad to the East Coast, and container ship again to Europe.

With the new, larger, locks open that may have changed some but even with bigger ships now able to use it the canal is still, from what I understand, a bit of an expensive bottleneck and switching from ship to rail is cheap thanks to intermodal containerized shipping.

Jonathan_S wrote:Though to be completely fair some of that is only passing through the US. For example at least some of the China - Europe trade bypassed the Panama canal and went container ship to LA, railroad to the East Coast, and container ship again to Europe.

With the new, larger, locks open that may have changed some but even with bigger ships now able to use it the canal is still, from what I understand, a bit of an expensive bottleneck and switching from ship to rail is cheap thanks to intermodal containerized shipping.

To reiterate, almost 170Mt is the yearly maritime goods handled in Swedish ports.
And there´s near zero through traffic here, some small parts to/from Norway and Finland, but it´s barely noticeable part of the whole.
This is also despite now having a direct railroad connection to Denmark(and through there to central Europe) removing a BIG chunk of what previously went by ship.
So even that number isn´t really "big".

You guys have heard of the great resizing, right? Where David and Bu9 reset the density of honorverse ships to 0.25 tons per cubic meter? Instead of the density of cigar smoke?

So a honorverse ship mass doesn't actually refer to MASS at all, it refers to VOLUME. So a 8mt freighter doesn't mass 8 million tons, it contains 32 million cubic meters of volume.

If the cargo holds are full of iridium ingots the 8mt freighter would be loaded with something like 675 million tons of cargo. plus some unknown mass for the hull, fusion reactor, hyperdrive, crew/crew quarters and fuel.

In terms of size it's discussed somewhere. There are very few freighters smaller than 2MT, not a lot of 4mt or smaller, and the vast majority are 6-8mt. It's due to the fact that hulls are cheap and the incremental operating cost of an 8mt over 2mt is minor. There is a one time cost to put in the bigger hyperdrive etc, but not a huge increment.

kzt wrote:You guys have heard of the great resizing, right? Where David and Bu9 reset the density of honorverse ships to 0.25 tons per cubic meter? Instead of the density of cigar smoke?

So a honorverse ship mass doesn't actually refer to MASS at all, it refers to VOLUME. So a 8mt freighter doesn't mass 8 million tons, it contains 32 million cubic meters of volume.

Except that RFC has said that the compensator is limited both mass AND volume, which the fixed density from the resizing supports.

So an 8mt frieghter is at full load with 8 million tons of mass OR 32 million cubic meters of volume on carrying a load of just irridium will have ~99% of its cargo bays empty because that is the maximum mass it can haul.

Grashtel wrote:

kzt wrote:You guys have heard of the great resizing, right? Where David and Bu9 reset the density of honorverse ships to 0.25 tons per cubic meter? Instead of the density of cigar smoke?

So a honorverse ship mass doesn't actually refer to MASS at all, it refers to VOLUME. So a 8mt freighter doesn't mass 8 million tons, it contains 32 million cubic meters of volume.

Except that RFC has said that the compensator is limited both mass AND volume, which the fixed density from the resizing supports.

So an 8mt frieghter is at full load with 8 million tons of mass OR 32 million cubic meters of volume on carrying a load of just irridium will have ~99% of its cargo bays empty because that is the maximum mass it can haul.

He does say that. But we've never seen enough freight traffic closely described in the books to know where the tonnage part starts to exceed the volume part and slow down ships.

We have seen that SD(P)s don't get quicker even after dropping a megatons or two of pods - so volume appears to provide a ceiling to the max accel you can get out of a given size ship, and then the effects of mass alone would have to kick in no sooner than several times the density of a warship...
But we don't know exactly how much density it takes to trigger that nor how quickly the accel falls off past that point.

I recall that the mass within the compensated field actually has a relationship with the power requirements of the compensator. That said it is likely few compensators will be able to exceed the 'logical' density by much.

Jonathan_S wrote:He does say that. But we've never seen enough freight traffic closely described in the books to know where the tonnage part starts to exceed the volume part and slow down ships.

We have seen that SD(P)s don't get quicker even after dropping a megatons or two of pods - so volume appears to provide a ceiling to the max accel you can get out of a given size ship, and then the effects of mass alone would have to kick in no sooner than several times the density of a warship...
But we don't know exactly how much density it takes to trigger that nor how quickly the accel falls off past that point.

HungryKing wrote:We have seen that SD(P)s don't get quicker even after dropping a megatons or two of pods - so volume appears to provide a ceiling to the max accel you can get out of a given size ship, and then the effects of mass alone would have to kick in no sooner than several times the density of a warship...
But we don't know exactly how much density it takes to trigger that nor how quickly the accel falls off past that point.

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Given that a standard TEU has a volume of 38.5 M^3 and is allowed to weight up to 24,000 kg, that means freighters are going to be running very lightly loaded. The ones used for machinery are the same size and good for 30,500 kg.