Re: COLONIAL WEAPONS

Laserlight wrote:

> From: Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
>
> > Remember the assumption that it it costs a lot to send to send an
> empty starship
> > somewhere.	The other assumption is that even full starships are
> expensive, if
> > they are not large.
>
> Er, where do these assumptions come from?  If travel was all that
> expensive, we wouldn't have colonized all these planets, we'd've stuck
> to just a couple --"NAC gets this continent, ESU gets that one, Pan
> Europe gets the other  one, and all the little guys can have those
> islands".  It takes a while to fill up a planet.

There is a whole spectrum of possibilities, but you can lump them into
two
thresholds and the area in between.  The lower threshold is that it is
no
more expensive to travel between the stars than it now cost to ship
things
by sea.  The higher threshold is that travelling between the stars will
be
at least as expensive as sending things by air is now.	At the lower
threshold, the people will buy most of their finished goods from off
planet as the only point to manufacture locally what can be imported
from
anywhere else is cost.	Shipping costs add little to the price of any
commodity.  At the higher threshold, only things so valuable that the
high
transport costs are still only a small fraction of the overall price
will
be imported.  I confess a certain amount of disbelief that interstellar
travel will be as inexpensive as shipping by sea is today.

Given the inevitability of planet wide disasters, interstellar colonies