Sharks, Spiders and Pod Layyers

SWM wrote:But most freight in the Honorverse is contracted deliveries. There is no race to get to the destination to beat the competition. And the people paying for delivery aren't going to pay 50% more to have it delivered 30% faster if they don't need it 30% faster.

How much of freight is contracted today?

Next to none outside of oil/coal/iron ore. Only bulk cargo is with a flat fee as those are very long lead items that do not vary much. So, if you believe what is being shipped in the Honorverse is mostly oil/coal/iron ore or its equivalent, Ok then you have a point.

All other cargo is not that way and never has been that way. TEU shipping prices vary day to day. It certainly is NOT fixed. The market is waaaayyyy too volatile for that and we have light speed communications! It will be even worse in the Honorverse. Ships will not know where their next load is coming from, how much, or how fast they need to deliver the load in. Yes, they will have a crude idea as routes will be established that generally have 'z' amount of cargo going to destination 'T'.

Today it goes like this:
0) Manufacturing Company ships TEU for "x" on a GUARANTEE it will arrive in "Y" days. They could even pay more for a faster GUARANTEE. And all contracts have steep penalties for late shipment, or require Huge sums of money for insurance to cover beyond general product insurance. Having the easter egg candy arrive too late is a rather stiff penalty. Having those Kitchen Aid mixers arrive late makes angry customers.

1) Terminal takes a "handling fee". Terminal is now responsible for the GUARANTEE it will arrive in "Y" days. Be it a private terminal owned by Hapog Lloyd, Hanjin, or the state.
1a) Different terminals have different handling fees. Shipping companies hop around.

2) Ship arrives, unloads. Its parent company has already been talking to the terminals to find out what may be available. In the Honorverse this would be done AS they come in system. Parent company negotiates a price point with the TERMINAL. Shipping company is now on the hook for the GUARANTEE delivery date.

Above is from the Guarantee side of things. How do freighters Operate? They have routes that they run continuously with alternate stop points that they arrive at less frequently. They try to remain as full as possible. Reality is that except at end destinations of regular route, freighters operate generally around 70-80% full. They also have competition on those same routes who are willing to do it cheaper, or guarantee a faster delivery date.

A faster ship will be able to not only do its normal guaranteed delivery date, but also stop at the alternate destinationsas well who might not have an enormous amount, still have plenty and will gladly let you take it off their hands as they were sweating their guarantee delivery time, creating a fuller hold percentage and higher gross returns.

A faster ship can pick up those guarantees and thus those bonus's that another shipping line failed to pick up because they were already full, or would not arrive in time. Said bonus cargoes today can run upwards of 3X what normal cargoes do. Shipping companies if they cannot meet their guarantee will auction off their guarantee to other shipping lines so they do not eat the steep penalties.

If you want more in depth of how shipping works here on earth. Check out your local Shipping exchange be it Seattle(puget sound), Shanghai, Baltic, etc.

No, I am no expert on this subject matter but I have had to ship many TEU's internationally and had to figure it all out so I didn't screw my company over and get my ignorant butt fired.

SWM wrote:But most freight in the Honorverse is contracted deliveries. There is no race to get to the destination to beat the competition. And the people paying for delivery aren't going to pay 50% more to have it delivered 30% faster if they don't need it 30% faster.

They don't need to. The fact that I can handle 50% more shipment means I make 50% more money.

wastedfly wrote:

SWM wrote:But most freight in the Honorverse is contracted deliveries. There is no race to get to the destination to beat the competition. And the people paying for delivery aren't going to pay 50% more to have it delivered 30% faster if they don't need it 30% faster.

How much of freight is contracted today?

Next to none outside of oil/coal/iron ore. Only bulk cargo is with a flat fee as those are very long lead items that do not vary much. So, if you believe what is being shipped in the Honorverse is mostly oil/coal/iron ore or its equivalent, Ok then you have a point.

All other cargo is not that way and never has been that way. TEU shipping prices vary day to day. It certainly is NOT fixed. The market is waaaayyyy too volatile for that and we have light speed communications! It will be even worse in the Honorverse. Ships will not know where their next load is coming from, how much, or how fast they need to deliver the load in. Yes, they will have a crude idea as routes will be established that generally have 'z' amount of cargo going to destination 'T'.

Today it goes like this:
0) Manufacturing Company ships TEU for "x" on a GUARANTEE it will arrive in "Y" days. They could even pay more for a faster GUARANTEE. And all contracts have steep penalties for late shipment, or require Huge sums of money for insurance to cover beyond general product insurance. Having the easter egg candy arrive too late is a rather stiff penalty. Having those Kitchen Aid mixers arrive late makes angry customers.

1) Terminal takes a "handling fee". Terminal is now responsible for the GUARANTEE it will arrive in "Y" days. Be it a private terminal owned by Hapog Lloyd, Hanjin, or the state.
1a) Different terminals have different handling fees. Shipping companies hop around.

2) Ship arrives, unloads. Its parent company has already been talking to the terminals to find out what may be available. In the Honorverse this would be done AS they come in system. Parent company negotiates a price point with the TERMINAL. Shipping company is now on the hook for the GUARANTEE delivery date.

Above is from the Guarantee side of things. How do freighters Operate? They have routes that they run continuously with alternate stop points that they arrive at less frequently. They try to remain as full as possible. Reality is that except at end destinations of regular route, freighters operate generally around 70-80% full. They also have competition on those same routes who are willing to do it cheaper, or guarantee a faster delivery date.

A faster ship will be able to not only do its normal guaranteed delivery date, but also stop at the alternate destinationsas well who might not have an enormous amount, still have plenty and will gladly let you take it off their hands as they were sweating their guarantee delivery time, creating a fuller hold percentage and higher gross returns.

A faster ship can pick up those guarantees and thus those bonus's that another shipping line failed to pick up because they were already full, or would not arrive in time. Said bonus cargoes today can run upwards of 3X what normal cargoes do. Shipping companies if they cannot meet their guarantee will auction off their guarantee to other shipping lines so they do not eat the steep penalties.

If you want more in depth of how shipping works here on earth. Check out your local Shipping exchange be it Seattle(puget sound), Shanghai, Baltic, etc.

No, I am no expert on this subject matter but I have had to ship many TEU's internationally and had to figure it all out so I didn't screw my company over and get my ignorant butt fired.

1. A large proportion of journey time is eliminated by use of Wormholes. A Wormhole translation is effectively instantaneous regardless of the hyper generator fitted.

2. Radio and telephone communication on Earth are effectively instantaneous. As such, it is quick and easy to check up on pretty much every shipping company and find the most competitive to transport your cargo.
In the Honorverse, you can instantaneously check up on any shipping company with a planetary presence, but other communication with off-planet companies requires the use of a courier boat, and days or weeks of waiting.
Not only that, but a company with planetary presence most likely has ships calling on a regular basis, so your cargo can probably be squeezed in somewhere. Go off-planet and not only do you have to send the courier again with the signed contract, but you now need to wait for a ship to be diverted to your local orbital facility.

3. Remember that Honorverse cargo ships are massive. The biggest cargo ship in the world is CSCL Globe, at 400m long and 54m wide. The Caravan class transport of HAE is 1200m long, 200m wide and 185m high. There's only 1 ship the size of Globe. Ships the size of a Caravan are pretty common.

They're was a 4th point, but its slipped my mind now.

Most of it boils down to the lack of instantaneous interstellar communication.

For your consideration:
1800 core SL worlds
200LY radius
Average LY distance between planets is 25LY
Grayson to Manticore is 31LY takes a tidy week+

SL does not have wormholes connecting its thousands of worlds. It has a couple termini. 5 to be exact. RFC might ret-con this in upcoming books. That 5 number is really old.

Grav waves are most efficient method for transportation. Requires Warshawki sails + hypergenerator it is what made interstellar cargo feasible. Not wormholes. Fuel dropped out as a consideration for expense. Part that fails before any other on a ship is the Warshawki sail.

WLBjork wrote:2. Radio and telephone communication on Earth are effectively instantaneous. As such, it is quick and easy to check up on pretty much every shipping company and find the most competitive to transport your cargo.
In the Honorverse, you can instantaneously check up on any shipping company with a planetary presence, but other communication with off-planet companies requires the use of a courier boat, and days or weeks of waiting.
Not only that, but a company with planetary presence most likely has ships calling on a regular basis, so your cargo can probably be squeezed in somewhere. Go off-planet and not only do you have to send the courier again with the signed contract, but you now need to wait for a ship to be diverted to your local orbital facility.

1) A nodal shipping system will be present.
EDIT: Obviously take the major nodes(WHJ) out and you now have a major problem. Of course Manticore also took the ships out as well...

2) Honorverse does not have manufacturing companies as shippers. Historically on earth this has not been true either except in the case of very close distance shipping of say, iron ore.

3) Your captain is in charge of the contract negotiations. Same goes for payment. Couriers are not going anywhere. Done via credit vouchers. This is how it worked before the age of phone communication. Look in the pearls. RFC has several posts concerning how monetary and contractual obligations are dealt with concerning interstellar trade.

Enjoy the search. http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/series/Harrington/

EDIT: Grrr: Can't find shipping Pearl on how paid. Just read it a month ago too...

wastedfly wrote:For your consideration:
1800 core SL worlds
200LY radius
Average LY distance between planets is 25LY
Grayson to Manticore is 31LY takes a tidy week+

SL does not have wormholes connecting its thousands of worlds. It has a couple termini. 5 to be exact. RFC might ret-con this in upcoming books. That 5 number is really old.

Grav waves are most efficient method for transportation. Requires Warshawki sails + hypergenerator it is what made interstellar cargo feasible. Not wormholes. Fuel dropped out as a consideration for expense. Part that fails before any other on a ship is the Warshawki sail.

Point of clarification: 1800+ member worlds.

Not necessarily "core" worlds if what you mean by "core" is the area of human space that is marked as "The Old League" on most maps of the Honorverse.

By at least implication in both text and pearls, there are lots of member worlds in the Shell. There are probably some few member systems in the Inner Protectorates, and maybe the occasional high achiever in the Outer Protectorates, especially where membership at some time in past served the needs of a particular transtellar mogul or regional governor. There are virtually (possibly actually) no member worlds in the Verge (although the exact status of the Mayan systems may be ambiguous, among those we know.)

dreamrider

kzt wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:40% more speed amounting to 40% more ships would assume that they spend about 0% of the time moving in-system, loading, unloading, and waiting for cargo, crew, orders, etc. If it's 40% more speed during, say, the 25% of their time spent moving through hyper - and using a bit more reaction mass too for the velocity to recover with the additional translations upward and downward - you get less than 10% more utility out of it in terms of units delivered per unit time and per unit cost.

It takes, IIRC, maybe 4 hours from when a freighter crosses the wall till it's in orbit. It usually takes weeks in hyper to get to its destination. So no, the vast majority of the time is spent in hyper.

If you can't figure out how to effectively run your ships such that they are usually spending weeks to months in orbit after each trip then going faster is not going to help your real problem.

Great points, and others put some cargo-ship stuf in play that is better written than mine.

Other issues which I think are brought up as early as HotQ (book 2) regarding merchant speed has to do with "impeller grab" vs. inertial compensator size and strength, hull reinforcement, and particle shielding. Those combinations limit both the top hyperspace speed "in band" and which bands the ships can use.

For the lack of a better comparison, wet navy ships are sleekly designed to go as fast as possible trans-oceanic, container ships are not. Everything is different, and for most cargoes, shipping time doesn't matter as much as economy. Let's say you're importing X million tons of FoodStuff and CoolStuffImports to System Y, once a month, but the TYPE of cargo doesn't vary enough to matter. Also assume you can run twelve big ships for the price of six vastly smaller mil-spec ships, in terms of crewing and maintenance. Then you pick up X million tons of cargo Z and take it on to the next place. Which is more economical?

Likely there's a trade off, and there are likely some speedy freighters in the SL/Haven sector, but RFC patterns his universe to be similar to life on Planet Earth in which the big ships will always win in terms of overall carrying capacity per time and fuel unit. Otherwise the HonorVerse would have way too much in the form of Free Lunch economics, something that RFC would not allow to stand, 16+ books into the series.

Real world ships have a real correlation between speed and fuel usage, because water has friction. Plus the costs of a ship isn't nearly as crazy high as it is in the Honorverse.

kzt wrote:

SWM wrote:But most freight in the Honorverse is contracted deliveries. There is no race to get to the destination to beat the competition. And the people paying for delivery aren't going to pay 50% more to have it delivered 30% faster if they don't need it 30% faster.

They don't need to. The fact that I can handle 50% more shipment means I make 50% more money.

I don't think you read my statement correctly. In my scenario you cam move 30% faster, but it costs 50% more to do so. So in this scenario, if you can't get people to pay you more, you can get 30% more money, but it is costing you 50% more money. You are losing money if you do this.

And if you say you can get bonuses for the faster delivery, go back and reread what I said the first time. I said that it would only make sense if you got a bonus for faster delivery. What I am saying is that it doesn't make sense unless you do get such bonuses. And David has indicated that it isn't worthwhile, which suggests that most cargos don't get those bonuses.

SWM wrote:I don't think you read my statement correctly. In my scenario you cam move 30% faster, but it costs 50% more to do so. So in this scenario, if you can't get people to pay you more, you can get 30% more money, but it is costing you 50% more money. You are losing money if you do this.

Yes, I'm arguing that this assumption is absurd. There is no V^2 friction from water in space, and your fuel is the most common element in the universe. Military grade hyper generator designs have been stable (prior to the MA) for literally centuries, so it's not like you have any problem buying them or they are leading edge technology.