Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

penny wrote:I just cannot imagine that DBs are not really really important for commerce. The author could certainly offer a class or two on HV economics. But if there are so few of them, then it should be a given that their routes may consist of weeks to months. Especially considering the many systems in the HV.

No matter how many of them there are their routes consist of weeks to months. Haven is relatively close to a major wormhole Junction (and now can actually use it commercially again) and it's still 2 weeks (each way) just to get to Trevor's Star and access the terminus leading to the Junction. Most of the League is significantly further than that from the closest wormhole.

penny wrote:
I also think I am correct about the major hubs being highly dependent on time sensitive data. The SL and Haven should be highly dependent upon the data. I have to admit that I would not have thought that the most powerful economic powerhouses receive data so slowly. That just does not compute. Most economic hubs have access to a junction anyway, right? Junctions, like water sources in the Wild West, are what is responsible for economic powerhouses in the HV, I thought.

While the MWJ is a major cash cow, it "only" lets an otherwise better than average Verge power approach the system GDP of any single one of League Core worlds. But (except for Beowulf) those core worlds lack access to wormholes; there's no junction tying those economic powerhouses together. Heck Beowulf is quite close to Sol, and Sol's closest wormhole, and it's 5 days each way by DB. Grayson is a closer than that to Manticore but still nearly 4 days each way by DB.

In fact, it appears, that most of the wealth of Core Worlds (and many systems for that mater) is from internal investment, development and trade within each one's system -- it seems relatively rare for a system's wealth to be based on interstellar trade.

While there's some shipment of bulk goods and non-premium foodstuffs from systems that have surplus to systems that can buy the bulk good for less than it'd cost to pay their citizen to make/extract it, it seems that much of the interstellar trade is luxuries rather than critical supply chain for the system's industries or critical foodstuffs.

(That's why Lacoon wasn't a major disaster for the main member systems of the League -- their economies weren't reliant on that now interdicted trade and information. It was a massive crisis for some of the Intersellars, and the shipping companies, and it cut the funding stream right out from under the League government and navy, but it wasn't an existential crisis or even likely to cause a major economic depression to the League systems because their economies just weren't based so heavily on trade. A solar system is a hell of a lot of resources and can (once bootstrapped out of the initial colony phase) generally make all of anything it might need. And, given the vagaries of interstellar shipping and information flow, most system governments probably try to resist their planets overspecializing to the point where they're critical reliant on imported material)

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:However I think you're overestimating how many DB there are flying around and how important they are for commerce. The Honorverse (to the extent RFC has thought about its interstellar economy) seems to be far less connected that we're used to -- after all he modeled it on age of sail where economies, even trading ones, didn't rely on rapid flow of financial data; and most mail and dispatches simply road along with whatever boat was headed in the right direction.

I agree with the conclusion, but not the premise. I actually think it's the other way around: there are A LOT of DBs flying around. A moderately wealthy system with have a couple hundred of them. Manticore will have thousands. If the MMM had a couple thousand multi-million-tonne freighter hulls, they can definitely have ten thousand 30k-tonne DB.

Well I did say more than penny thought were flying around

I got the impression from some of his posts that he expected a near constant stream of them leaving major hubs; if you dropped out of the iota band it'd be like shooting geese, you couldn't miss. Even if we take that as a bit of hyperbole, that seems to require the major hubs to have more than just a couple thousand.

(Also, I suspect a DB isn't all that much cheaper to build and operate than a multi-million-ton freighter. Sure, you save a lot of steel.
* Both requires a compensator (and a Manty naval or crown courier presumably has a post-Grayson higher performance compensator).
* Both require the same number of impeller nodes (though the DB's are individually much smaller; which should cut costs).
* Both require hyper generator (which seems like a large and expensive engineering system); but the DB requires the more complex, expensive, and maintenance intensive military grade one that lets them reach the Theta bands.
* Both require rad shielding, but again the DB needs the more powerful military grade version to let it hit 0.6c (vs the 0.5 of the cheaper civilian grade shielding freighters carry).
* Neither has a large crew, and the DB requires more specialized skills to maintain its military grade propulsion as its safest and most effective -- so probably a higher paid crew.
* Both require warshaski detectors to see other ships and grav waves and turbulence in hyper. (As the faster ship, in the higher and more turbulent bands the DB might need more capable, and expensive, detectors)
* What the freighter has is (usually) heavy lift cargo shuffles and lot, and lots, of cubage to fill with cargo. But steel is cheap and vacuum is free.

So I'd bet the build cost, crew costs, maintenance and running costs of a little DB are within an order of magnitude of a freighter 200 times its mass; and I wouldn't be particularly shocked if they were within a factor of 2.

Lacoon One was a major problem for the League and a lot of other systems. We were told that- at least at some point in its travels- something like 50% of the League goods moved on Manticore Flagged ships. What that did was mess up practically every regular trading rout, even within the League since for every ship which repatriated to Manticore, a high percentage of that cargo capacity would have had to been replaced from other sources.
In a perfect world, all of the MMM ships would have dropped their cargos (which were not heading out though the MWJ or though Hennessy on those ships) at whatever cargo storage facilities were available at the port where they received the Lacoon notice. Even with leaving all that material and goods w/i the League (or those areas controlled or patrolled by OFS and FF) there would be a very hectic long term scramble to find space for even partial lots of that freight on other vessels. It also removed that MMM shipping from the ability of the SLN to ship materials etc on commercial vessels without activating various laws (which we presume were on the books like the Taken Up From Trade ships and current Earth wet navies also have similar contracted arrangements) That now pressing need for the SLN to even move goods by taking over commercial capacity further messed with a lot of economies. Did any star systems go broke? Not likely. What was going to happen is a lot of companies and people/investors were going to be ruined.
Lacoon II massively screwed up the SLN ability to move ships around to where it needed them outside the Core and also effectively slammed shut the wormholes to most traffic lagged in the League.


Humans have been very good at figuring out new and faster (and or more secure) ways of moving data and information. Until the advent of transoceanic telegraph cables, the fastest way of moving anything around the world was by ship. Lots of ships were optimized for speed (think China Clippers to haul tea and other products) but it routine in certainly the 18th century to send critical messages in several copies with only the 1st arriving at the intended destination to be acted on. Sending financial drafts for payment or order goods and authorize payment for them were normally sent in at least triplicate using three separate ships.

The commercial world adjusts to what is possible for information. Couriers today routinely travel by commercial transport. Stock Market data from any given place goes by electronic transmission. That's not possible over interstellar distances but all sorts of "mail" is going to be sent using commercial transport and that would run from Dispatch Boats, fighters, passenger liners- whatever is heading in a particular direction to pass off the mail to other carriers.

When you have long distances and time delays, that falls back on your local agent(s) in business or anything else to use their judgement to make decisions. It's just a function of doing business.

Anyone else have the thought that for DB's to be human powered there must be something that allows them to be faster and therefore more economical to move data than an autonomous hypercapable DB which would never cross hyperlimits between systems moving on standard tracts between planets. Anyways...

penny wrote:But if it is that difficult, a war on the enemy's DBs might not be worth the trouble. Except perhaps with spider drive warships awaiting the flies. Although I still think that denying communication and financial data would be worth it.

Once the targets realize that such kind of warfare exists, the dispatch boats will just start to hyper in and out in random, unusal places. The reasons why ships usually use specific places have been discussed in the books (e. G. transitions in the ecliptics use less energy, direct routes need less time, etc...) - but avoiding destruction is of higher benefit in the long term.

The whole area of the hyper limit (a sphere several light hours in diameter) is just too much to guard with a few hidden boats.

Relax wrote:Anyone else have the thought that for DB's to be human powered there must be something that allows them to be faster and therefore more economical to move data than an autonomous hypercapable DB which would never cross hyperlimits between systems moving on standard tracts between planets. Anyways...

Yes, in theory.

But there are two issues with that. First, the major one, is that RFC ruled that there's no such thing as autonomous hypercapability, either through a wormhole or hyperspace. He hasn't given a reason why, but there isn't in the Honorverse. Probably the machinery breaks if someone isn't constantly looking at it.

Second, another in-universe reason may be that it's not that much faster or cheaper. You can save mass by removing crew spaces and life-support, but not completely because those drones would need maintenance anyway, so they can't be a big block of machinery. More importantly, the mass and size of such a hypercapable drone would be within a few percentage points of a crewed one because the largest portion would be taken by bunkerage, the hypergenerator, the nodes, the rad and particle shielding, etc. This is similar to Jonathan's argument above on cost of a DB versus a freighter.

Moreover, the majority of the trip is not spent on acceleration and deceleration, aside from very short trips. For example, a drone that could achieve 4500 gravities would reach its top speed of 0.6c 6x faster than a DB accelerating at 750 gravities: 68 minutes instead of 6.8 hours. But the difference in a full trip is minimal: if the DB would have taken 100 hours at top speed, for a total of 113.6 hours, the drone would keep the cruise speed for 105.6 for a total trip time of 107.9. That is, the drone would arrive 5.7 hours earlier, a 5% shorter trip.

Is this worth it?

It might be for short links, like those between termini of wormholes, that seem to be only a few days' travel.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I just cannot imagine that DBs are not really really important for commerce. The author could certainly offer a class or two on HV economics. But if there are so few of them, then it should be a given that their routes may consist of weeks to months. Especially considering the many systems in the HV.

No matter how many of them there are their routes consist of weeks to months. Haven is relatively close to a major wormhole Junction (and now can actually use it commercially again) and it's still 2 weeks (each way) just to get to Trevor's Star and access the terminus leading to the Junction. Most of the League is significantly further than that from the closest wormhole.

penny wrote:
I also think I am correct about the major hubs being highly dependent on time sensitive data. The SL and Haven should be highly dependent upon the data. I have to admit that I would not have thought that the most powerful economic powerhouses receive data so slowly. That just does not compute. Most economic hubs have access to a junction anyway, right? Junctions, like water sources in the Wild West, are what is responsible for economic powerhouses in the HV, I thought.

While the MWJ is a major cash cow, it "only" lets an otherwise better than average Verge power approach the system GDP of any single one of League Core worlds. But (except for Beowulf) those core worlds lack access to wormholes; there's no junction tying those economic powerhouses together. Heck Beowulf is quite close to Sol, and Sol's closest wormhole, and it's 5 days each way by DB. Grayson is a closer than that to Manticore but still nearly 4 days each way by DB.

In fact, it appears, that most of the wealth of Core Worlds (and many systems for that mater) is from internal investment, development and trade within each one's system -- it seems relatively rare for a system's wealth to be based on interstellar trade.

Wealth and livelihood are two different things. A system may not have gotten rich on interstellar trade. But they may have heavily invested those riches in interstellar trade, wanting and trying to grow those riches exponentially. If you don't make your money work for you, then you are working on losing it. Also, things change over time with a growing ever-changing expanding galaxy. But a system's livelihood can become tied to interstellar goods over time because you find it cheaper to outsource certain goods. See what has happened in the US with a plethora of goods and services.

Also, even though you invest internally, or think you are. You don't realize that those internal investments themselves have invested externally. See the American automakers. It used to be that American car parts were cheap for different reasons. The parts were made in America. Saving shipping costs, hidden costs, foreign taxes, other taxes, markups, etc. Nowadays, we only think we are investing in a local car company with the big name US automakers and we expect the cost of parts to still be cheaper than foreign parts like, historically, they always have been. Until we need a repair nowadays and find out that we make the car in the US with foreign parts. "The cost of that is going to be what?"

"Sorry, the part has to come from China."

Jonathan_S wrote:While there's some shipment of bulk goods and non-premium foodstuffs from systems that have surplus to systems that can buy the bulk good for less than it'd cost to pay their citizen to make/extract it, it seems that much of the interstellar trade is luxuries rather than critical supply chain for the system's industries or critical foodstuffs.

I agree for the most part with a caveat. I never associated self-sufficient with totally non reliant upon other systems for materials and foodstuffs. And reliance slowly sneaks up on you with time. See America's current dilemma and dependence on lots of items once "Made in USA."

Jonathan_S wrote:(That's why Lacoon wasn't a major disaster for the main member systems of the League -- their economies weren't reliant on that now interdicted trade and information. It was a massive crisis for some of the Intersellars, and the shipping companies, and it cut the funding stream right out from under the League government and navy, but it wasn't an existential crisis or even likely to cause a major economic depression to the League systems because their economies just weren't based so heavily on trade. A solar system is a hell of a lot of resources and can (once bootstrapped out of the initial colony phase) generally make all of anything it might need. And, given the vagaries of interstellar shipping and information flow, most system governments probably try to resist their planets overspecializing to the point where they're critical reliant on imported material)

It is a two-edged sword that has cut America deeply. On the one hand the USA can make its own masks. OTOH, why do it if we can't make them as cheaply as other countries whose labor laws are so slack that it employs children who works long hours along with unsafe conditions that allows for dirt cheap costs? There is also that give and take of ~ balancing exports with imports. The "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine." It is why a lot of Americans are screaming at certain politicians for "selling out." To be fair though, oftentimes we civilians fail to see the big picture and the tight rope politicians and government walk.

I also imagine that there are goods that absolutely can not be made or extracted from ones own system. Goods that a system has slowly come to be dependent upon. Before you know it, you fall into that hole you didn't even know you have dug for yourself.

Modernization and progress tends to do that to you.

At any rate, I was under the impression that the League as a whole has, or will, suffer quite a bit. The Core Worlds will simply pass down those losses to the poorer planets. Shit always rolls downhill.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:However I think you're overestimating how many DB there are flying around and how important they are for commerce. The Honorverse (to the extent RFC has thought about its interstellar economy) seems to be far less connected that we're used to -- after all he modeled it on age of sail where economies, even trading ones, didn't rely on rapid flow of financial data; and most mail and dispatches simply road along with whatever boat was headed in the right direction.

I agree with the conclusion, but not the premise. I actually think it's the other way around: there are A LOT of DBs flying around. A moderately wealthy system with have a couple hundred of them. Manticore will have thousands. If the MMM had a couple thousand multi-million-tonne freighter hulls, they can definitely have ten thousand 30k-tonne DB.

Jonathan_S wrote:Well I did say more than penny thought were flying around

I got the impression from some of his posts that he expected a near constant stream of them leaving major hubs; if you dropped out of the iota band it'd be like shooting geese, you couldn't miss. Even if we take that as a bit of hyperbole, that seems to require the major hubs to have more than just a couple thousand.

(Also, I suspect a DB isn't all that much cheaper to build and operate than a multi-million-ton freighter. Sure, you save a lot of steel.
* Both requires a compensator (and a Manty naval or crown courier presumably has a post-Grayson higher performance compensator).
* Both require the same number of impeller nodes (though the DB's are individually much smaller; which should cut costs).
* Both require hyper generator (which seems like a large and expensive engineering system); but the DB requires the more complex, expensive, and maintenance intensive military grade one that lets them reach the Theta bands.
* Both require rad shielding, but again the DB needs the more powerful military grade version to let it hit 0.6c (vs the 0.5 of the cheaper civilian grade shielding freighters carry).
* Neither has a large crew, and the DB requires more specialized skills to maintain its military grade propulsion as its safest and most effective -- so probably a higher paid crew.
* Both require warshaski detectors to see other ships and grav waves and turbulence in hyper. (As the faster ship, in the higher and more turbulent bands the DB might need more capable, and expensive, detectors)
* What the freighter has is (usually) heavy lift cargo shuffles and lot, and lots, of cubage to fill with cargo. But steel is cheap and vacuum is free.

So I'd bet the build cost, crew costs, maintenance and running costs of a little DB are within an order of magnitude of a freighter 200 times its mass; and I wouldn't be particularly shocked if they were within a factor of 2.

Um, actually I thought there was a shitload of DBs flying around. A googol even! I didn't want to be stoned for suggesting such a thing so I second guessed myself and decided not to post it. The author hasn't passed down quick heal yet. Lol

That is why I suggested it would be like shooting geese with a shotgun. You are bound to hit something. And also why I thought that they are herded into a certain sector of space like cabs and ubers at an airport. It is also why I changed my mind about generally allowing so many DBs to congest in-system traffic by coming in too deeply to deliver and receive data. Think about it. Stock reports change daily! DBs simply don't have the luxury of dilly-dallying around. Time is essentially money to these ships. They are always on the move and don't have time for the pleasantries of chitter-chatter or "shooting the shit." Also, consider this. The list of commodities on the stock exchange are probably in the thousands! Whose value may not change daily while others do.

Very late edit: Also, just as it would take way too long to search every charted and uncharted system to find the MAlign because there are not enough resources. It should also take way too long to service thousands of systems with DBs and freighters with a very small number of DBs and freighters even though you know where and who they are. There are a shitload er shipload of systems to be serviced.

markusschaber wrote:

penny wrote:But if it is that difficult, a war on the enemy's DBs might not be worth the trouble. Except perhaps with spider drive warships awaiting the flies. Although I still think that denying communication and financial data would be worth it.

Once the targets realize that such kind of warfare exists, the dispatch boats will just start to hyper in and out in random, unusal places. The reasons why ships usually use specific places have been discussed in the books (e. G. transitions in the ecliptics use less energy, direct routes need less time, etc...) - but avoiding destruction is of higher benefit in the long term.

The whole area of the hyper limit (a sphere several light hours in diameter) is just too much to guard with a few hidden boats.

I would certainly hope so. So I would say that that is true. However, the MAlign is the one entity that really needs opening up cans of kick-ass (their formal declaration of war via flaming datums) to be short and victorious. And they are the one entity that I think truly has the tools to do it. No, I don't think the god of the HV will allow it. But I think the MA will certainly make the correct plans to pull it off. That is why I think targeting all DBs would be the strategy used. All DBs would also include news agencies and the like. One would want to cut all lines of communication so that a warning of huge, invisible venomous Spiders spreading and infecting systems will slowly disseminate around the galaxy. So by the time anyone knows what is happening, the shit has already destroyed the many fans.

That would also produce an added benefit of causing the victims to redeploy military assets to fill in the gaps of lost or incapable DBs. Literally too many birds with one stone.

penny wrote:That is why I suggested it would be like shooting geese with a shotgun. You are bound to hit something. And also why I thought that they are herded into a certain sector of space like cabs and ubers at an airport. It is also why I changed my mind about generally allowing so many DBs to congest in-system traffic by coming in too deeply to deliver and receive data. Think about it. Stock reports change daily! DBs simply don't have the luxury of dilly-dallying around. Time is essentially money to these ships.

I'd actually argue again that the fact that stock reports change daily (or hourly) is a reason why they're not critical to send out on a daily stream of DBs -- because it takes them a minimum of a few days to reach their destination, and more usually weeks to months. What's the good of getting a daily update on someone's stock market when you're getting it 3 weeks later and it'll take another 3 weeks for your order to get back and be executed?

The time delay means that, in my opinion, you either need to entrust some local agent on that planet to do stock trading on your behalf - or you need to follow such a long term buy and hold strategy that daily updates are irrelevant to you.

Heck, about the shortest possible interstellar update time would be Manticore to Beowulf - and if a courier was waiting to jump the instant an update was received, and another waiting to bring the order back immediately and you used hermes buoy FTL comms between the planets and the junction it'd still take about half an hour for an update to get to Beowulf and an order based on it to come back and be executed. That's way better than weeks -- but still loses out badly to traders working from Landing where the round trip might be milliseconds.