Random responses

I'm back.
This is mostly in reponse to Mike Surnam's responses to someone's
questions of a few days ago.
Plus a few odds and ends over the last few weeks worth.
Plus anything else I think of.
(note that this is not really planned in advance.)


>Whose the guy who regards himself as an expert on military affairs in
>traveller (as in the one who has access to email)

I think I am one of them.


>> Do 'balance of trade' issues affect individual merchants by making it
>> difficult to sell things on backwater worlds with few trade connections
>> to gain Imperial money?

>Backwater worlds would probably be happy they get visited by starships
>and would buy everything they could afford. Most sf literature is
>written under this assumption. These planets are not profitable for
>the big outfits but are for the little guys, the 'typical' tramp
>freighter ships that have lower overhead.

They sure would.  Unfortunately, lack of credit or items salable offworld
would leave them able to buy just about nothing.  Notice that there are
several worlds in the Spinward Marches (Nakege/Jewell/Spinward Marches
for instance) that produce no goods salable anywhere within a dozen
parsecs.  Since it wants to buy anything brought in, it must do so with
Imperial Credits.  Where do they come from?  In the real world, you get
foreign currency by selling things to the foreigners, but Nakege has
nothing anyone wants to buy.  It's a mystery to me!  Government subsidies?
Not likely, the Imperial government is too Laissez faire to do that.
Magic??  Probably.  The GDW people don't seem to be capable of adding,
much less doing economic (or any other) analysis of their system.


>> Do the megacorporations tie up all of the steady trade in items with
>> very high profit margins, leaving only occasional deals of this sort
>> for the little guys?

>I would think this depends upon the particular items and the quantity
>involved. If a market produced only a small quantity of something it
>probably wouldn't be worth it even if it was very profitable (Piper's
>Cosmic Computer novel had a planet that produced brandy that was
>very expensive on Terra but they could only sell it to the infrequent
>ships that passed through the system and then at a very reduced rate.
>They also salvaged military equipment but again couldn't sell it for
>what it was worth.)

Probably they do, on major worlds, anyway.  See Andre Norton's Free
Trader stories.
As to the Cosmic Computer analogy, consider that the average merchant
ship  being dealt with in those stories was about 9,000,000 MT tons.
There was a ship (approx. 1,000,000 MT tons) described as too small to
make it worthwhile to put FTL drives into.  So the average ship like that
could buy up the entire wine harvest, store it in one corner of Hold #10,
and then finish loading later.  The economic parallels between Piper's
works and MT are virtually nonexistant


>> Do planets  routinely pass trade-restricting (or trade enhancing)
>> legislation?

>I think this would depend upon the government type. A Dictatorship
>would want to keep the populace ignorant so would enforce strong
>import conditions (i.e. keeping all the high tech goods for its own
>use).
>A more liberal govenment would want to better the conditions of its
>citizens and would be probably have less severe import conditions.
>But even in this type of system imports would be monitored so as to
>lessen the impact upon society.

Interestingly enough, trade restricting legislation seems to be a
crucial part of many published adventures, most GM's arsenals, etc.
HOWEVER, any such trade would pretty much violate Imperial Law on
interstellar trade (there are supposed to be no restrictions on such).
Odd, isn't it?


>> I think it would also be very nice to get some idea of the volume of
>> shipping available in various regions of the Imperium...

>I would probably say it is very similar to the conditions today.
>Heavy traffic through the main trade routes by the everyone with
>lighter traffic to the outlying regions by small subsidiaries or
>small independents.
>Look at any major city. Planes, for instance. Every airline in the area
>has flights into the city so connections can be made. But only the
>small airlines service the smaller regional airports.

>To pin down actual numbers would take some time. But even in the
>Imperium scheduled flights would be an integral component of
>communications.

>Since there would be frequent flights, one per day per major planet
>for the major lines might be appropriate, would necessitate cheaper
>travel costs. Travel costs, as they are now, seem to be too high.
>Which is another point I find irritating. I would think that the
>average or at least the above average citizen would want to take
>a cruise offplanet. As it is now it would take a major portion of
>a citizens income just for the ticket!

Hmmm.   One Tukera Long-Liner per day landing at Efate.  So we are
talking about 90 passengers arriving at a world of 6,000,000,000
or so per day.  Atlanta has several hundred arriving flights per
day, at 300+ passengers per flight.  Atlanta also has a population
of 2,000,000 or so.  Trying to match traffic patterns would result
in about 10,000 Tukera Liners per day arriving at Efate.
Because of the high cost (similar to Cruise Ships, as opposed to
airplanes), divide that by 20.  That would leave about 500 Tukera
Liners per day at Efate.  One per 3 minutes.
It would also result in about one per 20 seconds at Terra or Muan
Gwi.
Note that travel by starship parallels travel by merchant ship
early in this century, rather than air travel.  Note also that when
using the city/planet analogy to compare the real world to MT, you
should include air transport, water transport, rail transport, and
highway traffic to get a good picture of amount of trade between
cities/planets.  The analogy is really pretty poor, anyway, so try
using the country/planet analogy.  You still have to consider ALL
cross-border traffic, but the picture is probably more realistic.


To Rob Dean:

>system.  Along those lines, let me ask if anyone else thinks that Cr2000
per
>person per jump seems to be a bit excessive as a life support cost.  In my

The life support costs are a joke.  Everything, except possibly airline
food, should be covered by the life support systems you pay for when
you buy the ship.

In response to the discussion of Potential energy in MT, the maximum
potential energy relative to anything is equal to the energy of escape
velocity from the thing.  Therefore, the potential energy relative to
the Sun when halfway to AlphaCent is slightly less than KE of escape
velocity from the Sun (which is about 1.905 E 11 Joules per Kilogram)
Note that the PE with respect to the Sun of someone on Terra is about
- -1.887 E 11 Joules per Kg.  The actual PE needed to get anywhere
relative to the Sun from Terra is only 886,000,000 Joules per Kg.




                               Steve Higginbotham.



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