Interstellar Shipping

Tomb wrote:

> 3) Regarding shipping things around in the  GZGverse. Take a look at 
> the real world people.  Real economies are huge. Look at the relative 

> total tonnage of merchant shipping to military  today. Then look at
the 
> size of the GZGverse fleets (a la Indy, but its a good estimate)...  
> many many many (care to throw out some mass totals Indy?) mass worth
of 
> ships. Figure civilian shipping will be many times this rated value.
It 
> must in order to keep the economy functioning. Ergo shipping large 
> heavy weight items between known endpoints isn't going to be terribly 
> expensive.... if it was, not so much would have happened and been
built 
> in 180 yrs.

Don't know if I agree.
There's very little in first world regional economies on earth _now_ 
that is absolutely essential  to be supplied from outside the region 
(although many things are cheaper/easier done that way nowadays). The 
modern world is, however,  growing more interdependent and therefore 
more reliant on mass shipping, but in the perios of interstellar 
colonization, new colonies will have a high priority on gaining self 
sufficiency, so shipping of large quantities of bulk materials will 
_primarily_ be for colonization efforts. I don't imagine that there will

be a great number of Nike container vessels ambling between Albion and 
Earth. I see non-colonial shipping as much smaller, than you're 
envisioning, Tomb. I see interstellar trade in high tech, munitions,  
cultural exports, exotic materials, luxury goods, but not things like 
ore (or other raw materials) or cars (or other low-med tech consumer 
goods).
All tolled, I wouldn't imagine the (non-colonial) civilian shipping 
industry tonnage exceeds military tonnage by a factor of a couple or 
three at most. Unless I'm missing something fundamental, which I've done

before.

I, Brazen Gnome     (Noam Izenberg)