-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And yet a previous poster has stated that economies of scale become insignificant once the 3kDT-10kDT level is reached w/i the TU. So, at that point, the analogy the w/ 20th century post-container cargo maritime economy breaks down. You, & MT say "It must happen like this" while I, & CT maintain, "Well, it didn't". That's just another inconsistency w/i the TU that appeared with the advent of MT. Not to mention all the others before or since. (Or maybe the TU just hasn't made it into a position analogous to the '20th century' yet? Maybe it never will? Maybe it will, eventually?) There's lot's & lot's of things in the OTU that any number of folks view as "inexplicable". It's in the nature of the beast. In any case, & in my experience, inevitably, an individual decides on a desired outcome, in this case commerce modelling & then works backwards from there. (Wasn't that how the TU came to be n the first place?) Which is only natural when selecting a gaming universe to play w/i. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wed, 3/30/16, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [TML] Relic tech and Scarcity-Driven Imperium (was: Salvage Operations (and Submarines)) To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016, 1:36 PM We know there are economies of scale in Traveller ships. It's cheaper to move a ton of cargo on a larger ship. If there are enough tons of cargo moving between a pair of systems, simple capitalism will result in larger ships being used to move it, up to a limit constrained by factors such as required route and timing flexibility and maintenance downtime. E.g., even if you could move all the commerce between A and B in one ship, you would want at least a few of them so if one gets pulled for maintenance you only lose 1/N of your capacity. Or if a new market heats up, you want to have the ability to reallocate some fraction of your capacity to that run, rather than all or nothing. And further, you probably want daily departures for the 57th century equivalent of Amazon Prime. :) And even with all that, you end up with very large container ships, just as we have today, with those same constraints in place. You don't need to know anything beyond the available tech, the desired trade volume, and the relative absence of regulations or similar dampening factors (e.g., ongoing warfare or pervasive piracy) for that answer to pop out. To suppress that result, you need to change one of those assumptions. On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 1:24 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote: This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I've always been highly skeptical of "inevitable" evolutions of anything. My experience is that such a thing is usually highly subjective. In this case, one could easily posit that the supposedly "inevitable" result did not occur in the TU 'cuz the post-containerization 20th century is not a perfect (or perfect enough) analogy to the TU. Or that the 17/18th centuries are better analogies. Or any number of other speculative onclusions. Once again it really just comes down to a personal preference. It's really all about exactly what sort of TU is desired. In other words there is a desired outcome & the process is required to support that. After all, isn't that what the original conception of the TU was all about? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wed, 3/30/16, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [TML] Relic tech and Scarcity-Driven Imperium (was: Salvage Operations (and Submarines)) To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016, 12:54 PM The problem is that you really can't create a consistent explanation for a civilization with Traveller tech (including cheap energy and easy travel), relatively laissez-faire capitalism, and pervasive local scarcity that *doesn't* result in the spacegoing equivalent of modern container ships. It's just the natural evolutionary direction that the market will push freight shipping to follow. Never mind that it's equally tough to account for pervasive local scarcity given the tech assumptions, as exhaustively discussed already. My explanation for the CT view of shipping is that it was simply what mattered to small-lot shippers. The boat that runs supplies out to Two Harbors on Catalina Island off Los Angeles is a converted WWII LST with a crew of three. They sail to and from Long Beach Harbor, a gigantic container port. They pass many freighters along the way, most hundreds of times their size. But none of them are carrying a week's worth of groceries and fuel to Two Harbors, so from their point of view, those giant ships are economically irrelevant, part of the scenery. On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 12:43 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote: This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows: -------------------------------------------- On Wed, 3/30/16, Bruce Johnson <xxxxxx@Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU> wrote: Subject: Re: [TML] Relic tech and Scarcity-Driven Imperium (was: Salvage Operations (and Submarines)) To: "xxxxxx@simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016, 10:40 AM > On Mar 29, 2016, at 4:50 PM, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 06:48:22PM +0000, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote: >> I've seen 'official' stats for up to 10,000DT's & have heard of >> others up to 20,000DT's. >> >> Would that be enough to run the CT 3I? > > Yes, certainly. Economies of scale in the construction and operation > rules in most versions start being fairly negligible around the 3k-10k > dton range. You would just need more of them to support the trade > volumes than you would of 100k dton ships, at about the same total > cost. Yet this is not reflected in real-world experience: the trend has been to ever-larger container ships rather than more of them. Why? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 'Cuz the OTU (at least until DGP/MT came along) is based upon the 17th/18th century & not on the post-containerization 20th? Works for me! ;-) Which is only to be expected since I prefer CT. Someone who prefers MT is bound to differ, of course. p.s. someone posted a very treatise to the list over 20 (pre-TNE) years ago detailing the fundamental changes in a lot of the basics that occurred when MT appeared. My impression was that the author was making the case that the CT 3I & the MT 3I were actually two different 'critters' &, rather than attempting to reconcile them, it was easier/better to just pick one or the other & go with that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- 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 ----- 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://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=EwREIRgLK8vaUEhNlnoNdSGKwnjoID8a
