SLN Reserve

pnakasone wrote:As with cargo today how much are you willing to pay to ship it to its destination and how fast dos it need to be there? Cheap and fast are mutually exclusive when it comes to shipping.

The economics of the honorverse are kind of "odd". It's really hard to figure out how traveling 2.5 times as fast can't be worth the additional cost, but supposedly it isn't cost effective to install a military hyperdrive. Which seems totally insane as it means you are carrying 150% more cargo per year than a ship with a commercial hyperdrive. But so it goes.

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:As with cargo today how much are you willing to pay to ship it to its destination and how fast dos it need to be there? Cheap and fast are mutually exclusive when it comes to shipping.

The economics of the honorverse are kind of "odd". It's really hard to figure out how traveling 2.5 times as fast can't be worth the additional cost, but supposedly it isn't cost effective to install a military hyperdrive. Which seems totally insane as it means you are carrying 150% more cargo per year than a ship with a commercial hyperdrive. But so it goes.

The speed of the cargo ship may not always be the biggest factor in the cost of shipping. Is the ship going directly to your destination world or is it making stops along the way ? How long dos the ship stay at each of thous stops? Dos your cargo have to wait in storage to get transferred to different ship at one of thous stops? Do you want your cargo at the front of the unload que?

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:As with cargo today how much are you willing to pay to ship it to its destination and how fast dos it need to be there? Cheap and fast are mutually exclusive when it comes to shipping.

The economics of the honorverse are kind of "odd". It's really hard to figure out how traveling 2.5 times as fast can't be worth the additional cost, but supposedly it isn't cost effective to install a military hyperdrive. Which seems totally insane as it means you are carrying 150% more cargo per year than a ship with a commercial hyperdrive. But so it goes.

Depends on the proportion of time you actually spend traveling at speed. And that depends on how far you're going. For relatively short trips, the amount of time spent loading and unloading at the termini as well as the time spent accelerating and decelerating while shifting hyper bands can dominate your transit time.

Military hyperdrives and military particle shielding cost more, both in capital expense and maintenance expense.

JohnRoth wrote:

kzt wrote:The economics of the honorverse are kind of "odd". It's really hard to figure out how traveling 2.5 times as fast can't be worth the additional cost, but supposedly it isn't cost effective to install a military hyperdrive. Which seems totally insane as it means you are carrying 150% more cargo per year than a ship with a commercial hyperdrive. But so it goes.

Depends on the proportion of time you actually spend traveling at speed. And that depends on how far you're going. For relatively short trips, the amount of time spent loading and unloading at the termini as well as the time spent accelerating and decelerating while shifting hyper bands can dominate your transit time.

Military hyperdrives and military particle shielding cost more, both in capital expense and maintenance expense.

But, there should be a class of "long haul" freighters for the long, well, hauls, utilizing mil spec hardware. But it just doesn't seem to exist.

kzt wrote:The economics of the honorverse are kind of "odd". It's really hard to figure out how traveling 2.5 times as fast can't be worth the additional cost, but supposedly it isn't cost effective to install a military hyperdrive. Which seems totally insane as it means you are carrying 150% more cargo per year than a ship with a commercial hyperdrive. But so it goes.

JohnRoth wrote:Depends on the proportion of time you actually spend traveling at speed. And that depends on how far you're going. For relatively short trips, the amount of time spent loading and unloading at the termini as well as the time spent accelerating and decelerating while shifting hyper bands can dominate your transit time.

Military hyperdrives and military particle shielding cost more, both in capital expense and maintenance expense.

Theemile wrote:But, there should be a class of "long haul" freighters for the long, well, hauls, utilizing mil spec hardware. But it just doesn't seem to exist.

This also depends on how much the customer is willing to pay for faster delivery.

JohnRoth wrote:This also depends on how much the customer is willing to pay for faster delivery.

There is always someone. FedEx Custom Critical isn't close to the biggest division of FedEx, but I bet it makes a pretty decent profit.

And if I was the SL building new freighters they would ALL have military grade hyperdrives and screens, because that's how you can somewhat compensate for loss of the WHs.

kzt wrote:The economics of the honorverse are kind of "odd". It's really hard to figure out how traveling 2.5 times as fast can't be worth the additional cost, but supposedly it isn't cost effective to install a military hyperdrive. Which seems totally insane as it means you are carrying 150% more cargo per year than a ship with a commercial hyperdrive. But so it goes.

The impression i´ve gained is that if you put in a miltiary hyperdrive, you also need military levels of maintenance. Which means more spare parts almost constantly available...

And more importantly, a noticeably larger AND better trained crew.

So, you have a greater construction cost, you have a drastically higher spare parts cost( and how much room you need for those on the ship ) and you get maybe twice the personnel cost.

Nope, just not worth it. Only exception is for highspeed transports, which has been shown to exist(some passenger liners), but being very rare.

Also, as Pnakasone mentions, speed likely isn´t going to be the most important part of merchant ships, loading and unloading is going to be a bigger hassle, more so the shorter the trips they run or the larger the ships.

And if I was the SL building new freighters they would ALL have military grade hyperdrives and screens, because that's how you can somewhat compensate for loss of the WHs.

And you just forced your merchant marine to need to double their personnel even before they expand their number of ships.
Just HOW are you getting all those new and welltrained personnel?

Tenshinai wrote:And you just forced your merchant marine to need to double their personnel even before they expand their number of ships.
Just HOW are you getting all those new and welltrained personnel?

You have a thousand planets with an average population of 6 billion and each needs to crew 100 ships to produce 100,000 new ships. I suspect they can come up with some sort of solution while they are building those ships.

kzt wrote:You have a thousand planets with an average population of 6 billion and each needs to crew 100 ships to produce 100,000 new ships. I suspect they can come up with some sort of solution while they are building those ships.

It takes longer to train qualified personnel than it takes to build ships for them to man.

Raising the minimum level required for acceptable crew while doubling the number of new crew you need to train? Exceptionally TERRIBLE idea.

The more trainees you have for every teacher, the longer it will take to train new people AND the if the teachers don´t have a clue about the new gear, then you have to first retrain the teachers.

Really, while building the ships is going to take years anyway, maybe even MANY years, with your "addition", it´s going to take decades to get crews ready for those ships to actually be used.

You´re adding 1-4 years to the time just by forcing the teachers that will be needed to be retrained to new, higher level tech.
That ALSO, by the way, means that some of those teachers who used to be good enough, no longer will be, because higher level tech, some people just can´t handle it.

Same goes for the new recruits, and you´re not going to find out which ones can´t handle it until maybe a year or two into training.

You´re basically trying to very elaborately shoot yourself in the foot.
With a machinegun.
While dancing a tango AND a walz at the same time. With a very confused gorilla.

Seriously, absolutely awful idea. It´s like begging to be run over by a steamroller, then when it´s gone over you, cough loudly and say "come back! I´m not dead enough yet!".

You really think that a planet with 8 billion people can't scrape up 10,000 trained spacers, of whom about about 1000 need to understand by the time the ship is in service the basics of how to maintain and operate military grade hyperdrives.

Do you think that if I offered you a million dollars and a year you could recruit 50 people qualified to be a ship reactor operator from just the 330 million people in the US if I was paying $150,000/year to them?

And people in the US do things like grow old and die. Nobody on a core world does that. Most everyone who served in the SLN over the last hundred years is still alive and healthy. There are something like 20 million people in the SLN at any given moment, which means likely over 150 million vets.

And if you already understand how to operate and maintain a hyperdrive you can probably be taught how to manage a more complex version given a year of training. Since the entire US navy nuclear power training program from street to graduation is on the order of 18 months a year of retraining seems pretty viable.

So yeah, I think this is totally doable.