Re: potpourri

Thomas Barclay 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.

The problem I have with this opinion is that waterborne merchant ships
are almost an order of magnitude cheaper than military vessels.
Whatever the latest REALLY BIG cruise ship happens to be (enclosing a
volume of 125,000 cubic metres), it only costs about as much as the
latest 747-400, with all of the bells and whistles [this is still about
$400 megabucks], and bulk cargo vessels cost even less.  Unlike
warships, the largest cost of a merchant ship is its hull (for warships,
it is systems integration, I suspect that for the smaller combatants,
the hull is practically free).

Do not forget one of the many reasons that there is a huge merchant
fleet: It is cheaper for Detroit to buy steel from Japan (smelted from
British Columbian iron ore with Albertan coal [depending on market
prices]), than steel from Pittsburg made from Wisconson iron ore and
Pennsylvanian coal.  Waterborne transport is amazingly cheap.  Before
two earnest attempts were made by the germans to starve Great Britain, a
significant percentage of british meat was raised on farms in Australia
and New Zealand.  In Ontario, Canada, New Zealand lamb significantly
outnumber the local lamb in supermarket freezers.  If sending a tonne of
cargo 50 light years, from one planetary surface to another is not as
cheap as trucking a tonne of cargo from New York to LA, massive
interstellar shipment of bulk goods cannot happen.  The frightening
thing is that if sending a tonne of cargo 50 light-years is more
expensive than sending a tonne of cargo by rail from NY to LA, there
will significant restrictions on interstellar trade.