Jim Baranski writes:
> Subject: (1898) RE: Shipping
> This is a response to Robert Dean's response to me...
> He suggests that caravans made a better model for star trading then water
> shipping. He mentioned that sea shipping was quite a bit cheaper then
> caravans, especially in bulk. I agree with him mostly, but I am wondering why
> expensive cargos were shipping in caravans then ships? Why wasn't all shipping
> (where possible) done by sea; was there any advantages to shipping by caravans.
> Was it substantially quicker, so that expensive cargos could have a quick
> turnaround?
I looked back over what I said, and there was one important thing that got
left out of my remark. I think that a better analogy for interstellar shipping
than 16th century sea trade would be the pre-15th century caravan trade.
The critical difference is that by the 16th century you had direct sailing
routes with these exotic far-off places that provided those goods that you
were willing to spend enormous amounts of money on, like silk and pepper.
Ultimately, this decreased the price and made them available to larger
quantities of people, so that, tea drinking for example, was common in 18th
Century England despite the fact that every pound of tea was carried thousands
of miles by sea. A caravan had to make many intermediate stops, as do our
starships, for the equivalent of refueling. A sailing ship's cruising radius
was only limited by the amount of food and fresh water it could carry (and
even water could be obtained), which meant that voyages of many months (and
even years) were achievable. This has a strong effect (I think) on the
economics of the transportation method. So a caravan, I think, was more like
our ships--to make a journey lasting months across a desert (space) you had
to stop frequently (weekly) at towns and oases (planets and star systems)
along the way. A sailing ship would be the functional equivalent of a
starship that needed no jump fuel.
Rob Dean