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On Thu, 5/7/15, Bruce Johnson <xxxxxx@Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Finding transport
 To: "xxxxxx@simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
 Date: Thursday, May 7, 2015, 7:05 AM

 > On
 May 6, 2015, at 5:18 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
 wrote:
 >
 >
 > Also, there's the old, old canon that
 the OTU represents the 'Age of Sail' & NOT the
 post-container cargo ship 20th century.
 > (A point that I suspect DGP was NOT aware of)

 actually no. The OTU is like
 the ‘Age of Sail’ only insofar as communications are
 limited to the speed of physical travel.This has important
 implications about the structure of governance, finance, and
 to a greater or lesser extent society, but it doesn’t
 actually affect the scale of the economy or interstellar
 trade.

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Actually , yes. It is more like the 'Age of Sail; then you admit.
And, of course, we're both interpreting that 'similarity' in ways that support the disparate views of the TU's economy that we individually prefer.

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 Again, when all
 interstellar trade is being carried on a relative handful of
 tiny ships, the Imperium has no reason to exist, nor the tax
 base to pay for itself. Why join (and pay for) the Imperium
 if you could do without interstellar trade, which amounts to
 a vanishingly small portion of the entire economy?

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Well, one reason is so that the vargr & aslan etc. don't come & take everything away from you!

Again, & as another poster has written;

It is absolutely possible for the OTU to exist w/o gigantic volumes of trade carried by gigantic ships.

Also,"a relative handful of tiny ships" is pure exaggeration. 12,000dT merchantmen (the biggest size that could make J1 w/ a size Z jump drive, or a 6,000dT J2 one, are hardly tiny ships. Nor will there only be "a relative handful'.

An interstellar economy w/o monster bulk carriers may not be able to exist w/i the economic system that you hypothesize but, so what? Just replace it with a system that does & everythings hunky-dorey!

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 As for the ‘each planetary
 system has essentially infinite resources’ I beg to
 differ.
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Yeah, Right, there ain't nothin' out there!

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 By the time of the
 OTU (in any era) large swaths of the Imperium has been home
 to a highly advanced industrial civilization for over ten
 thousand years. They’ve been reduced to mining their
 landfills and tailings piles for a long, long time.

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Maybe, & maybe not, but, all those things are still resources, even if infinitely recycled.
Besides, if those civilizations really have depleted their home systems then they would by now have also depleted equally large swaths of 'uncivilized' areas. And, considering that the Ancients spread galaxy-wide, there shouldn't really be anything except leftovers left around anyway.
And speaking of thousands of years, I seriously doubt that all the polities in the OTU follow the same template as the 3I does.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the 3I's template has evolved considerably over the last millenia as it changed from a vigorously expanding polity into an essentially static one.

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