Re: [OT]-Interstellar Trade: A new take

I compleatly agree.  Here are some of my additional thoughts...

OTOH...If FTL drives are slow/expensive/dangerous/require rare
materials, then interstellar trade will be severly limited, and will be
expensive items only.

How fast/convienent the FTL drive is has an effect on the colonies.

Fast/cheap/easy drives means anyone can establish a colony...and getting
needed things is only a short trip away.  (Ever notice how few small
towns (near a big city) have factories?)  Only isolationists/ect would
make self-sustaining colonies in these settings.

Slow/expensive/dangerous/rare drives means every trip is expensive, so
every colony must be self-sustaining from the start.  Colonies could
expect to be on their own, except in times of emergency.

Donald Hosford

Laserlight wrote:

> Much snippage.
>
>   It CERTAINLY would be prohibitively expensive--given what we
> know now.
>   And we have a tendency to base our calculations on what we
> know now.  However, that doesn't produce playable results.  The
> way to work it is to decide what model you want to use, and work
> out the implications from there.
>   If it takes a year to get from Rigel Kent to Earth, then
> products will have to be low mass, high value, and colonization
> will be very limited.  But our model is that ships can jump a
> few light years every day--call it 1LY per day to be
> conservative.  Okay, how long does it take to get from Earth to
> the planet you're interested in?  2-3 weeks? (Bear in mind that
> some maps are in parsecs not LY).  Compare that to shipping
> times in history and see what they shipped.  They shipped
> LAUNDRY from California to Hawaii to be washed during the Gold
> Rush ca 1850, and I'm willing to bet that was more than a two
> week round trip.  UK colonized Australia and I'd suspect the
> average trip was at least 2 months at that time.  Trip time from
> Europe to North America was, IIRC, about 4 weeks when
> colonization started here in late 1500's/early 1600's.  They
> might not have shipped much cavalry--horses died enroute, a
> problem tanks don't much worry about--but they could sure ship
> infantry and find it economical to do so.