The Misalignment of MA plans?

munroburton wrote:As an example, Manticore Colony Ltd paid 5.75 billion EuroDollars for the rights to what would become the Manticoran Binary System and had about a billion left over for insurance after acquiring a colony ship packed with all the essentials. With 93,000 adult colonists, that's an average investment of $75-100,000 each, though obviously individual contributions would vary.

And that's the price for a system that was readily colonizable with several planets in the goldilocks zone and no immediately apparent hazards.

I would imagine a system like Mesa, with only one marginally colonizable world in it is going to be quite a bit cheaper.

The E wrote:

munroburton wrote:As an example, Manticore Colony Ltd paid 5.75 billion EuroDollars for the rights to what would become the Manticoran Binary System and had about a billion left over for insurance after acquiring a colony ship packed with all the essentials. With 93,000 adult colonists, that's an average investment of $75-100,000 each, though obviously individual contributions would vary.

And that's the price for a system that was readily colonizable with several planets in the goldilocks zone and no immediately apparent hazards.

I would imagine a system like Mesa, with only one marginally colonizable world in it is going to be quite a bit cheaper.

On the flip side that was the cost for a system about 700 years away by cryogenic slow boat. There was no guarantee that hyper travel would become safer, so there was a good chance the colony might never receive more than the extremely rare port call by a passing survey ship that might drop off electronic mail. No new colonists, no routine interstellar news, etc, etc. That immense travel time and isolation should have driven down the cost to aquire rights to the system, no matter how nice the survey results were.

In contrast by the time Mesa was colonized routine safe hyper travel was almost two centuries old, making colonization far less risky. And Mesa was closer that Manticore to the center of human civilization (Earth and the League). Those should have tended to increase the bidding for nearby systems; especially one with new and rare wormholes. Even if there was no immediate economic payback it wouldn't be hard to realize there was a decent chance fhey'd become paths of exploration and exoansion, leading them to be trade lanes, which could be a source of revenue. I guess the gripping hand would be that with a couple centuries of safe routine hyper travel people had lots of even more earthlike planets the colonize, which might depress the price of more marginal worlds, even if they're not so far away...

This is one of those net present value problems that are the delight of bean counters: what do you pay now for assets that may acquire great value in the future. In this case, with no clear idea of the timescale, nor any way to accurately estimate the future potential value.

The assets are a currently-uninhabitable planet and a newly-discovered wormhole terminus. The timeframe and cost of terraforming the planet could probably be determined fairly accurately. The revenue to be gained from it, probably not: it would depend on the current demand for habitable real estate when the project was completed, and if - as seems likely - terraforming would be a long process there would be far too many unknowns involved. Because the terminus was in previously explored but, apparently, unexploited territory, and because it was found quite early in the history of junctions, before there was much experience with the way they influenced development in the surrounding area, the future value of the terminus was probably regarded as impossible to measure - or maybe not even taken into account in the calculation. That would be particularly true if the immediate surroundings were known to be largely uninteresting: easy access to places nobody wants to go isn't really a high-ticket item.


It wouldn't be surprising if Mesa was valued no higher than Manticore had been, if that much. It would certainly fetch far less than the value 6 centuries of experience and development attached to, say, Basilisk. In fact, I'll bet that the Detweiler Consortium couldn't have afforded the system at it's 20th-century price.

Jonathan_S wrote:On the flip side that was the cost for a system about 700 years away by cryogenic slow boat. There was no guarantee that hyper travel would become safer, so there was a good chance the colony might never receive more than the extremely rare port call by a passing survey ship that might drop off electronic mail. No new colonists, no routine interstellar news, etc, etc. That immense travel time and isolation should have driven down the cost to aquire rights to the system, no matter how nice the survey results were.

In contrast by the time Mesa was colonized routine safe hyper travel was almost two centuries old, making colonization far less risky. And Mesa was closer that Manticore to the center of human civilization (Earth and the League). Those should have tended to increase the bidding for nearby systems; especially one with new and rare wormholes. Even if there was no immediate economic payback it wouldn't be hard to realize there was a decent chance fhey'd become paths of exploration and exoansion, leading them to be trade lanes, which could be a source of revenue. I guess the gripping hand would be that with a couple centuries of safe routine hyper travel people had lots of even more earthlike planets the colonize, which might depress the price of more marginal worlds, even if they're not so far away...

munroburton wrote:

cthia wrote:John, your input begs to know where Detweiler came up with the funds to purchase Mesa. Though it was cheap, I don't imagine that any planet goes as cheaply as the Louisiana Purchase did. Was he a magnate of the likes of Hauptman? Following him in storyline alone implies great riches. Yet, from where?

Louisiana Purchase:
Louisiana Purchase, Encyclopædia, Britannica. inc., The western half of The Mississippi river basin was purchased in 1803 From france by The United States at less than three cents per acre 828,000 828000 square (2,144,520 2144520 square), km it was the greatest land bargain In U. S. history

Detweiler clearly wasn't working alone. He probably founded a consortium or a trust(something along those lines) which brought together the purchasing power of anywhere between tens of thousands to millions of Beowulfans who disagreed with the Code's limitations.

As an example, Manticore Colony Ltd paid 5.75 billion EuroDollars for the rights to what would become the Manticoran Binary System and had about a billion left over for insurance after acquiring a colony ship packed with all the essentials. With 93,000 adult colonists, that's an average investment of $75-100,000 each, though obviously individual contributions would vary.

A mass exodus of millions of people removing their wealth from Beowulf. Here in America, Uncle Sam would lay golden bricks to replace the wealth of taxes lost. Not to mention the workforce interrupted.

I wonder what the health of Beowulf's economy was at the time.

I suppose there was a bright side on Beowulf, as millions of jobs were suddenly available. I wonder if they gave a two week notice? LOL

darrell wrote:

munroburton" quote="cthia wrote:I'm searching the books trying to find a timeline when AD began seeding the galaxy with sleepers. He left Beowulf to found Mesa and engage in his research. How long before he was successful enough with his seeds for them to germinate and harvest?

The guy who left Beowulf was Leonard Detweiler. Albrecht came much, much later.

The information you're asking for is simply not available at present.

http://www.davidweber.net/files/downloa ... eline2.pdf

can give us 2 facts:
1447 PD: First wormhole junction is discovered.
1479 PD: Manpowers first known attempt to covertly study Treecats and the fauna of Sphinx (Short Story: The Stray)

IIRC there was something somewhere that said that lenard chose mesa because it had a wormhole? If it is true than mesa was founded sometime between 1447 & 1478.

Also IIRC there are several passages in the books that say the lenard detwilers stratagy was started 600 years ago, and 1447-1477 would be 545-575 years ago.

There also a passage that detweiler got mesa cheap because it would have required a lot of terraforming to make it habitable IIRC. Lenords solution was to make everyone a genie tailored to the planet.

That being the case, I would expect that the sleepers probably were started more than 500 years ago, but that is just a guess.

BTW 1585 PD: The Manticore Wormhole Junction is discovered
more than 150 years after the first wormhole was discovered and 100 years after manpower first attempts to study treecats.[/quote]


The timeline dates are wrong. First Treecats weren't discovered until 1519 PD (ABF) and the first covert attempt to acquire treecats by Manpower was in 1601 PD in the Ritchman scandal (WPD). Also the Visigoth WJ wasn't discovered until 1454 PD and Mesa was settled in 1460 PD.