Re: (3324) Random responses

A few responses to Steve Higginbotham (TML msg 3324):

>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
>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.

Can't agree with you more. Especially the last sentence. Therefore,
has anyone seen a commercial game/publication that has a decent
economic system?

>As to the Cosmic Computer analogy, consider that the average merchant
>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

Two things jump at me here. In the Trav/MegaTrav universe either the
ships are too small or the planets don't produce as much as in Piper's
books. I would assume that planetary production is relatively similar
in both universes therefore it leaves ship size. Why aren't there big
freighter's in Trav/MTrav? It would seem to be a very economical way
to ship goods. As it stands now, speed wouldn't be affected much because
most ships travel at jump 1 or 2 anyway. Or it could be that since GDW
doesn't understand economics planets don't produce much therefore small
ships are adequate.

As another point. To me there is no way any ship no matter how big
(as in 9,000,000 MT tons) could store the harvest of a planet. Unless
that planet had only a small colony of a few thousand people or so.
The harvest would be so large that it would take several ships of that
size to move it. Of course that is assuming that a significant portion
of the harvest is for export. Otherwise you wouldn't get anyone to come
if the harvest isn't going to make them a profit.

>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.

This is what I wrote earlier about flights:
	>Since there would be frequent flights, one per day per major
	>planet for the major lines might be appropriate,...
I'm not sure how you managed to build that up to 500 per day when I
already stated that 1 per day per major line would be appropriate.
Granted that is probably too small but that was referring to Rob Dean's
original question on trying to get a handle on traffic.

>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
>sing the country/planet analogy.  You still have to consider ALL
>cross-border traffic, but the picture is probably more realistic.

I obviously didn't put enough qualifiers in my original statement.
Of course in order to get a more realistic picture all forms of
transport need to be included. I was using airports to illustrate
the size of the companies and the aircraft  involved not what they
carried. I don't know of anyone that ships bulk goods by air! So that
would be a pretty poor example.

I agree that sea travel is the best form of transportation to use when
making comparisons or using as a model. It includes most of the
necessary components used when making calculations; time, life support,
cargo types, etc.

Mike Surman