I'm saying that transportation costs are low, and that energy costs are low. It's hard to justify widespread scarcity given those two parameters.

In canon, we know that cheap, efficient, low-maintenance fusion reactors can be built without special resource requirements anywhere that has a sufficient TL. For jump drives, lanthanum is required. In the Earth's crust, lanthanum is the 28th most abundant element -- three times as abundant as lead. I can't find any estimates on its universal abundance, but there seems no reason to believe that it's unusually abundant on Earth. So any rocky world is going to be a ready source of lanthanum.

There just aren't any bottlenecks in canon that would prevent a flourishing post-scarcity economy. That has to be imposed by fiat (and without plausible explanation) if you want the Traveller feel for your TU.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 12:04 PM, <xxxxxx@mail.de> wrote:
Good point, but I don't think that is enough to create a post-scarcity universe. Even if it is cheap to go anywhere, if something is scarce, it will be gone by the time you go there. Or restricted. And if travel takes a week, opportunity costs kick in (time is money). Travel on Earth is absurdly cheap right now compared to even just the 19th century.
 
Actually, what you are arguing is just that transportation costs are low. That is perfect. It *creates* more reasons for interstellar trade. Lots of it.


--
Carlos Alós-Ferrer
Chair of Microeconomics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de


Am 29-Mar-2016 20:52:24 +0200 schrieb xxxxxx@gmail.com:

You don't even need transmutation. Cheap space travel lets you go anywhere cheaply. If unobtainium is only found in the Oort clouds of type F stars, then you just end up with a lot of unobtainium prospectors in those Oort clouds, and a flourishing export operation to all the nearby systems.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:43 AM, <xxxxxx@mail.de> wrote:
I actually meant something simpler with the "relic-tech" idea. Assume energy is cheap and abundant via fusion. However, energy alone without the technology to transmute elements does NOT yield a post-scarcity society. Most of interstellar space travel in Traveller is a handwave which does not really interact (AFAIK) with the key technologies which imply the capability to transmute elements. The two elements of Traveller which imply a capability to tweak the basic forces are, I think, antigrav and nuclear dampeners. But antigrav can be handwaved away as implying only a control of gravity, not, say, the strong nuclear force. Maybe I am missing something here, but it seems to me that the problem are nuclear dampers (http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Nuclear_Damper). But those are not really such a fundamental element of the setting, just a defensive device. They are not really necessary to explain interstellar travel in Traveller (are they?).
 
So assume that nuclear dampers are far above TL15/16. However, the imperium has them because of reverse-engineered relic tech. This does not mean that you need to put together your dampers with actual relic tech, merely that you can construct them, but you have no idea why they work. So you have no element transmutation and no replicators. It is a small step from there to large-scale interstellar trade.
 
 

--
Carlos Alós-Ferrer
Chair of Microeconomics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de


Am 28-Mar-2016 20:22:08 +0200 schrieb xxxxxx@Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU:


> On Mar 28, 2016, at 10:55 AM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
>
> *Common, convenient space travel* implies/requires "cheap, abundant energy". Which is why, among other things, we're still mostly stuck at the bottom of our gravity well, and ship's boats make great WMDs.
>
> A low-energy TU is one where most people don't do much Travelling. Conversely, a high-energy, high-traffic one is one where the genie is already well and truly out of the bottle.

Moreover, a TU where people don’t do much Travelling pretty much excludes PC-scale ships. If ships are rare, they’re really expensive, and only governments can afford them.

A TU that doesn’t have much trade has no need for an Imperial Navy, or an Imperium, as such.

You cannot have both a universe where PC's have a Type A far trader, that Far Trader is the standard mode of interstellar trade and an Imperial Navy patrolling a couple thousand subsectors.

The economics simply don’t make any sense at all. A low-trade TU cannot generate sufficient taxes to sustain such an Imperial Navy. Certainly not one with Tigress battleships and the like.

You can HAVE such a TU, it just won’t have internal consistency.

A relic-based TU like Carlos is proposing can work, but it’ll be far more anarchic and disorganized than he thinks, I think. PC’s will acquire ships by finding wrecks and bolting various bits of alien technology together until it works..kind of :-) Their ships will be far more Mad Max than the OTU. Fun to play in, though ….

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please goto
http://archives.simplelists.com

FreeMail powered by mail.de - mehr Sicherheit, Seriosität und Komfort 
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please goto 

http://archives.simplelists.com


 
--
Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please goto 
http://archives.simplelists.com

FreeMail powered by mail.de - mehr Sicherheit, Seriosität und Komfort 
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please goto 
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=PltOdItWBSgOP4y0Q6abkGbDI1eus0lz



--
Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake