I'm finally back on for real! Yippee! And a big thank you to
2G Scott for forwarding me TMLs for the last six weeks :-)
In addition, thanks for getting me back on, James.
In relation to the sector developement discussion, but somewhat
tangential to it, I'd like to address what Scott 2G and Bruce
recently posted. With regards to natural resources and the siting
of industries that rely on those resources, I have to agree with
Bruce: industries tend to be sited to minimize the largest costs
(which in the old and new world is labor and transportation).
Transportation really is very important. Pittsburgh became an
industrial center, not because of it's proximity to coal deposits
but because it was (and still is) cheap to ship materials by barge
up the river. The anthrositic and bituminous coal deposits of
Pennsylvania are distributed throughout that state, but the best
and most productive of those deposits are in the eastern, not western
half of the state. The steel mills of Allentown and Bethleham are
actually better located than those of Pittsburgh, being close to
both good transportation (by rail and by river) and to the high-grade
anthrositic coal.
The steel mills of Gary, Indiana, are in a similar position. Being
at the juncture of several railroads and also being right on Lake
Michigan, they could ship both coal from the east and west cheaply
by rail (and still do), and had the advantage of being able to get
Masabi Range taconite iron ore by barge and lake freighter.
Let's look at the fate of Kaiser Steel in California. Eagle Mountain
is one of the only major high grade iron ore depostis of the western
US, but it's out in the middle of nowhere in the Corona Low Desert,
half way between Palm Springs and the Colorado River. They actually
mined the ore, processed it, and milled it to steel nearby. It was
then shipped by rail to LA. It was expensive compared to the cost
of milling steel in the rust belt, but eastern steel must be shipped.
The overall cost of eastern steel was more expensive when the cost
of transportation was factored in. For a while, a long time in fact,
Kaiser Steel in California was competitive. Then, in the 60's and 70's,
the cost of rail transportation put Kaiser Steel out of business. The
ore deposit of Eagle Mountain is still there, with millions of tons of
reserves left!
There's a place out in the high desert of Nevada on the other side of
the range from Imlay called the Nevada Iron Ore Mine. It's one of
my favorite rock collecting spots, incidentally. The deposit is
pure high-grade magnetite - lovely stuff, in a mafic emplacement
and some secondary enrichment of sulfides. Lots of good rock, including
crystals of olivine, all in one spot. (Is my rock fetish showing yet?
;-)
The Nevada Iron Ore Mine trucked the ore out of the basin, over the
range, to the rail stop of the Southern Pacific Railroad. From there,
it was shipped over the Donner Pass and down to the port of Oakland.
When the costs of rail transportation climbed in the late 50's, the
Nevada Iron Ore Mine went out of business.
Let's look briefly at Mercury, a strategic mineral according to the
US Bureau of Mines. The richest deposits of mercury in North America
are in the Coastal Ranges of California. During WWII, all of the
Allies' mercury production was from California (well, there was some
from Nevada too, but it was minor). If you look at where these deposits
are located, though, they are not on any of the major transportation
lines. In fact, most of them are damn hard to get to (I know, I've
been to most of them). But the price of mercury during the war made
it economic to mine mercury again in California. After the war, most
of these deposits were abandoned, because cheap Spanish and Trieste
mercury was back on the market. The only mercury mines still in
operation in Califonia are in the New Idria District, a place so hard
to get into (four hours drive from San Francisco on a horrible terrible
raod) that I've only been there once (for a rock maniac like me, that's
damn little). But the deposits in New Idria are so rich, that it's
still economic to mine them DISPITE the cost of transportation.
After much rambling, I think I've managed to make my point that it's
transportation cost that drives the availability of resources. I think
that regards to the siting of Class A starports with ship building
facilities, in-system transportation nets will develop to deliver
resource materials cheaply.
I'd also like to throw out another concept, and that is the lack OR
the expense of a material is one of the things that drives the
development of new materials technology. Eastern steel is a good
example of this. When you drive around the east, one of the things
you notice is that the road infrastructure is based on steel:
overpasses,underpasses, bridges and viaducts have steel superstructures.
Now go to the west coast: one of the first things an easterner will notice
is that concrete is the material used in most of the infrastructure.
Pre-stressed concrete is vastly cheaper to construct when compared to
the cost of eastern steel. Because of the cost of steel on the west
coast, most all of the advances in concrete engineering (prestressed
structure, in-place pored piles, light-weight high-strength concretes)
were made in California in the 1960's. An entire specialty of
engineering was developed because steel was too expensive to ship.
So what happens when your belters mine out all the high grade ores
in your asteroid belt, or when the cost of processing lower grade
ores plus transportation costs make your shipyard's materials too
expensive? I think there are two answers. First, your shipyard
becomes uncompetitive and is downgraded to being a reapir facility
(because people will go elsewhere to buy their ships). Second, your
engineers get their collective act together and develop a new materials
technology for constructing ships, one which exploits a previously
unused abundant material that's in-system.
Let's look briefly at the siting of major industries. They are all
near or at the nexi of transportation nets. Lockheed gets its materials
by rail from the port of Los Angeles (which is actually in Long Beach).
Boeing gets its materials by ship from the Port of Seattle. Electric
Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut nowadays receives the cylindrical
pieces of submarine hull for the 688 class and the Tridents by
ocean-going barge from the pre-fabrication facility at Quonset Point,
Rhode Island, which in turn receives the raw steel by ocean-going barge
from either Pennsylvania or from the Great Lakes steel mills. Small
components for the boats come by truck, on interstate 95. Medium-sized
stuff, like missile hatches and reactor vessels, come by rail (every
little kid in Groton knows what a reator vessel looks like on a flat
bed rail car! ;-)
The point is that the history
of industrial revolutions is one which driven by transportation systems.
The 19th century industrial centers of the northeast were all connected
by water, either by river, lake, ocean, or canal. When rail came into
the equation, some industrial centers developed at the nexus of rail
lines and major waterways, like Chicago and St. Louis. The industrial
centers of the 57th century will develop at the nexi of transportation
nets, both in-system and interstellar. Regardless of how sectors are
generated, there should be a good reason for the siting of a class A
starport, either because the cost of in-systems materials are cheap, or
because that starport is at the junction of several insterstellar trade
routes.
Just my 2 credits worth. Y'all can flame me now... ;->
Catie Helm, just a simple country rock-knocker
[email removed]