RE: Interstellar Shipping

I think the issue breaks down to economic cost to ship vs other costs. 
For instance, one reason the sweetner on most soda pop says high
fructose corn syrup and/or sugar is that due to tariffs and such it is
cheaper to ship corn syrup to Thailand, add refined sugar to it and ship
it back than it is to import pure refined sugar directly from Thailand.

If governments do bizzare things like that you can see a market where
people ship "raw" materials or parts to a place to be assembled, then
ship them on to other places.  Economically, one would think that it
would make more sense to have factories that could produce final
products from raw materials on planet, but some factors to consider:

a) the controlling power may not want heavy industries on that planet -
too much chance of it becoming independent and creating its own military
capacity.

b) economic control - if you control the tariffs, taxes and what you can
import/export from the planet, you can rake in more money.  If traffic
is high, your take gets larger.

c) cost-effectiveness - there might be a technology or technique that
requires a high tech level to maintain the technique.  The planet in
question might not be able to support that level, and so imports the
part or machines that require a high level to build - such as fusion
reactors but can maintain or complete the construction.  A modern
equivalent might be titanium welding.

d) a rare raw material that is used in multiple applications - If there
is a mineral or organic compound that is difficult to obtain or process
but is used in a multitude of sci-fi applications - hardener for
plastic, release agent for metal casting, stiffener for concrete,
tracking marker for explosives, semi-conductor for imprinted clothing
circuitry, then it becomes more useful to bring the raw compound or
semi-processed compound for distribution to the different manufacturing
lines.	A current example might be gold or diamonds.

--Binhan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Noam Izenberg [mailto:noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu]
> Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 7:52 AM
> To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
> Subject: 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)
> 
>