I apologize for a belated addition to my previous post about a month ago, in that the largest freighters we know of [according to UHH] are 'only' 8.5 million tons, and the interval for a 8.5 MT SD/P was around 85 seconds in AAC, IIRC.
The size limit was because of the compensator limit [also in UHH] and so far there's no mention of the MMM taking advantage of that potential improvement.
The Solarian Dromedary class was designed to make a profit serving a sector or two of the verge, not the SL core systems which require much larger ships, which many SL members like Beowulf have built, though many more preferred to lease them from the MMM until recently.
So far all freighters can transit all wormholes, but warehousing is huge on both sides of any hyper bridge, since its more profitable time wise for the shipper to get the cargo to the hyper bridge warehouse, then load a cargo there to take back, rather than taking all the extra time needed to deliver a single cargo, which might easily be only a small fraction of the ship's capacity, with large odds there isn't a corresponding cargo as large or valuable to take back.
Of course there are many cargoes that are profitable for that very reason, and ferreting out profitable cargoes and routes are critical to the bottom line, NTM closely guarded from the competition.
Christopher Anvil had a series of short stories in Analog in the 1960's mainly, about commercial shippers of the future, some were quite amusing and thought provoking.
RAH's Citizen of the Galaxy also dwelled on interstellar commerce, and 'the People' who took the risk, including single sheets of porn being traded for a diamond by nonspeaking very nonhuman aliens, which the crew probably kept quiet about to keep that particular profit center all to themselves.
L
Jonathan_S wrote:That triggered a random thought. I wonder if traffic will ever get to a point, on a given wormhole leg, that it's a sufficient bottleneck that normal traffic will be restricted to ships whose tonnage triggered lock-down of the wormhole most closely matches the minimum safety separation ATC will accept.Theemile wrote:Larger ships may be used on specific, high volume routes and between hub routes. Like how UPS, Fed Ex, or other delivery services do today - they fly 747s between hubs, then smaller planes to regional delivery points, semi trailers to local delivery warehouses, and Brown\White cargo vans to your front door. Occasionally though, they will fly a 747 between point A and point B because there is enough demand to fill the plane with auto parts or fresh pork bellies required on a timely manner to justify the craft. There is no "one size fits all" solution.
(So freighters transfer cargo to speclialized ships that just jump from the warehouse on one end to the warehouse on the other -- think of it as analogous to intermodal freight containers going Chine to Europe using rail to cross the US)
For example if ATC is willing to accept 60 seconds separations between freighters a roughly 6 mton design will, I believe, lock down the wormhole for just about that.
If they were more conservative and wanted longer separations I think the tonnage / time chart would look roughly like this.
_60 seconds | _6.0 mtons
_90 seconds | _7.5 mtons
120 seconds | _8.6 mtons
180 seconds | 10.6 mtons
240 seconds | 12.2 mtons
300 seconds | 13.7 mtons