Why did it take so long to deal with Silesia?

Weird Harold wrote:

wastedfly wrote:300 << 30! New math. Sweet.

I will have to use that on my tax returns next year.

With Warshawski Sails and a handy Grave wave, it costs exactly zero fuel to transport any mass any distance. If I can sell you Pitchblende for a dollar a ton less than you can mine it yourself, why are you asking how far I had to haul it?

How prevalent are grav waves? Rare. So much for free fuel costs. How many worlds reside in grav waves? Very few. So much for free fuel costs. Fewer yet are actually in the direction of the grav wave you must travel along. So much for free fuel costs.

Yup, pick a rare example as a valid arguement. Heard of a bell curve?

PS. IS there even a 300LY grav wave anywhere not named a wormhole?

Duckk wrote:

wastedfly wrote:Sigh. There were over 1500 Bulk cargo freighters delievered this year alone. Roughly 1/2 the world production.

This does not count containerized freighters. Hundreds.
This does not count the oil tankers. Hundreds
This does not count all of the oil platforms. Roughly a hundred.

Now shall we go into all the tiny ships? Ferries etc?

1000 ships is hardly a lot in the HV with a population 1000 times our own.

Not my point. I'm questioning where you got the 2 weeks to build a Honorverse freighter.

Who said 2 weeks? Not me. You assumed a couple turned into 2.

A Destroyer requires 8? 10? weeks? I misplaced my building times pearl from DW and I do not believe this pearl was ever saved by Joe Buckley. Unless it is under some odd name and I just cannot find it. Wouldn't be the first time I could not find it.

Anyways, a Destroyer is a ship with vastly more complex systems requiring far more manhours to install, test, assemble while in dock than a freighter. More importantly, most of those systems are piled on top of eachother forcing the techs to wait for the other system tech to finish before they can do their job doubling or tripling the time required.

A freighter on the other hand is wide open with ease of assembly and maintenance designed in. Half the destroyers assembly time or less of 8-10 weeks is quite reasonable. 3-5 weeks.

787's are assembled in a mere couple of weeks, 10/month built. A system of competeing complexity with that of a HV freighter. Even then, the 787's main problem with assembly time is that it is not open enough and therefore the main hinderance to a faster build pace on a single assembly line is the number of techs able to work on the plane at any single instance. A freighter does not have this problem.

737's with 2 assembly lines has a production rate of over 20 per month off each assembly line and going to 24 a month.

Why I bring up airplanes is that the same number of airplanes are built each year as the number of freighter hulls projected to be built by Manticore. The same amount of hard yard assembly infrastructure would become economically feasible.

PS. Upthread I stated over 1500 bulk carriers were delievered last year. Not true. The year was 2012.

wastedfly wrote:Well, the UK doesn't build anything. They are are a 1st rate nation. Last 5 years they built a couple car feeries, a singular nuclear submarine, and a couple of destroyers. Last I checked they had a nice LONG coast line.

Could they build transports? No. No iron ore. No coal. No iron smelters capable of producing the quantity of steel required. Do they have the yards for modern sized ships? No. They have a couple naval yards and zilch else.

Does France build anything? No.
Does the USA build anything? No. Do we have the infrastructure to build any transports? No. Well maybe if one converts some of the oil platform building sites in Texas. Most of these buggers are bought elsewhere and towed in. I suppose you could go the retentive anal route and state we could convert all naval yards to civilian buildinng purposes.

Does Germany build anything? No
Does Greece build anything? No
Does Holland build anything? No

Do all of these nations have large merchant marines? Yes.

None of them have built a single freighter in 30 years. Any building yards/iron works/slips they do have are for SMALL freighters that are obsolescent along with the machinery for building said freighters.

So, sure, they could slowly, build some small, obsolete, inefficient ships. Or they could build completely new yards, machinery, dry docks that actually fit a modern world, and create/copy a modern design and eventually build a competent freighter.

This isn't 1940 kzt. A smidgeon of reality eh?

Are you on drugs? The US builds a rather large number of ships, including aircraft carriers. It builds a fairly small number of merchant ships, but it does in fact build them. http://shipbuildinghistory.com/history/ ... ankers.htm And no, the US merchant marine is tiny due to those same laws.

France is building a rather large amphib transport for Russia, and builds other ships too. http://www.stxfrance.fr//UK/stxfrance-r ... IS%203.awp

Yeah, the Netherlands doesn't build any ships... http://www.barkmeijer.com/en/products

I could keep going, but it's work to deal with skimper levels of ignorance, and today is my day off.

wastedfly wrote:Who said 2 weeks? Not me. You assumed a couple turned into 2.

We are using English, are we not? The usage of the word "couple" is, yes, 2 of a thing.

A Destroyer requires 8? 10? weeks? I misplaced my building times pearl from DW and I do not believe this pearl was ever saved by Joe Buckley. Unless it is under some odd name and I just cannot find it. Wouldn't be the first time I could not find it.

Anyways, a Destroyer is a ship with vastly more complex systems requiring far more manhours to install, test, assemble while in dock than a freighter. More importantly, most of those systems are piled on top of eachother forcing the techs to wait for the other system tech to finish before they can do their job doubling or tripling the time required.

A freighter on the other hand is wide open with ease of assembly and maintenance designed in. Half the destroyers assembly time or less of 8-10 weeks is quite reasonable. 3-5 weeks. 787's are assembled in a mere couple of weeks, 10/month built. A system of competeing complexity with that of a HV freighter. Even then, the 787's main problem with assembly time is that it is not open enough and therefore the main hinderance to a faster build pace on a single assembly line is the number of techs able to work on the plane at any single instance. A freighter does not have this problem.

KISS principle. If it truly took as little time as you said it does, then Willie Alexander and Caparelli would not have been surprised at Grayson building freighters. Such a miniscule cost in construction facilities and time could have easily been absorbed by Manticore in wartime.

Additionally, even though a freighter is mostly open space, you're still building a hellova lot more ship. A smallish sized freighter in the 2 million ton range is going to take longer to build than a 75,000 ton destroyer simply because it's a larger ship with more stuff to produce to get it - even if it's just superstructure.

wastedfly wrote:How prevalent are grav waves? Rare. So much for free fuel costs. How many worlds reside in grav waves? Very few. So much for free fuel costs. Fewer yet are actually in the direction of the grav wave you must travel along. So much for free fuel costs.

...

PS. IS there even a 300LY grav wave anywhere not named a wormhole?

From Worlds of Honor:

As a result, the dreaded grav wave became the path to ever more efficient hyper travel, and captains who had previously avoided them in terror now used their new instrumentation to find them and cruised on standard impeller drive between them.

There doesn't need to be a single grav wave for the whole distance nor does the whole trip have to be free. The only thing that matters is that you pay less on delivery than it would cost you to mine it yourself, or buy it closer.

wastedfly wrote:Yup, pick a rare example as a valid arguement. Heard of a bell curve?

Yep, I've heard of a bell curve, but that isn't what you asked. You asked, "Who in their right mind would transport bulk materials 300 light years?"

The answer to that is, "Anyone who could make a profit by doing so."

It doesn't matter where on the bell curve that profiteer might fit or how numerous such profiteers might be, if there is ONE person who can make a profit hauling bulk ore 300LY, then there is at least one person "in their right mind" who will be hauling bulk ore 300LY.

BTW, another data point. Rozak's Masquerade class arsenal ships are just a very minimally modified civilian freighter design (basically just military grade drives and particle screens). They are also, if anything, even more barebones than typical freighters simply because all their cargo space is derived from attachable modules. Under your model of shipbuilding they could be built even faster than other freighters. Yet even after a year's time, Rozak's force only had 3 arsenal ships in time for the Battle of Torch. If it truly were possible to build merchant ships that rapidly, Rozsak could easily have had dozens of arsenal ships, but he does not. Again, KISS principle leads to the conclusion that building merchants must take longer.

wastedfly wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:With Warshawski Sails and a handy Grave wave, it costs exactly zero fuel to transport any mass any distance. If I can sell you Pitchblende for a dollar a ton less than you can mine it yourself, why are you asking how far I had to haul it?

How prevalent are grav waves? Rare. So much for free fuel costs. How many worlds reside in grav waves? Very few. So much for free fuel costs. Fewer yet are actually in the direction of the grav wave you must travel along. So much for free fuel costs.

Yup, pick a rare example as a valid arguement. Heard of a bell curve?

PS. IS there even a 300LY grav wave anywhere not named a wormhole?

And even if there is a handy grav wave the vast majority of the way there; you still have to pay a crew's salary and the wear on the alpha nodes is partially a function of runtime. A 300 ly trip in the Delta bands is a 100 day run for a freighter. Even spread over a few megatons you'd want decent profit per ton to pay for almost a 1/3 of a year's crew salary.

Weird Harold wrote: You asked, "Who in their right mind would transport bulk materials 300 light years?"

The answer to that is, "Anyone who could make a profit by doing so."

To be more correct it would be "anyone who could make their best available profit by doing so; rather than on a shorter route". Because if you can make the same profit by going only 150 ly you're do that and make money twice as fast.
Even if you can turn a profit on bulk cargo over 300 ly there's probably some other system within, say, 75 light years that would pay about as much for that same cargo.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Weird Harold wrote: You asked, "Who in their right mind would transport bulk materials 300 light years?"

The answer to that is, "Anyone who could make a profit by doing so."

To be more correct it would be "anyone who could make their best available profit by doing so; rather than on a shorter route".

No, the answer to the question is still, "anyone who could make a profit."

Crew costs, fuel costs, maintenance costs, and all of your other objections fall under accounting to "make a profit." Whether a shipper could make more somewhere closer is irrelevant; as long as they make a profit on the longer run, they will make the run.

There is nothing in the stated circumstance to preclude intermediate stops for trade or requiring a certain level of profit, only a logical reason for hauling raw ore 300LY -- the answer is "to make a profit."

That is the basic principle of "Trade" buy cheap in one place, sell high in another, and make a profit. Everything else is mere details.

Weird Harold wrote: You asked, "Who in their right mind would transport bulk materials 300 light years?"

The answer to that is, "Anyone who could make a profit by doing so."

Jonathan_S wrote:To be more correct it would be "anyone who could make their best available profit by doing so; rather than on a shorter route".

Weird Harold wrote:No, the answer to the question is still, "anyone who could make a profit."

Crew costs, fuel costs, maintenance costs, and all of your other objections fall under accounting to "make a profit." Whether a shipper could make more somewhere closer is irrelevant; as long as they make a profit on the longer run, they will make the run.

There is nothing in the stated circumstance to preclude intermediate stops for trade or requiring a certain level of profit, only a logical reason for hauling raw ore 300LY -- the answer is "to make a profit."

That is the basic principle of "Trade" buy cheap in one place, sell high in another, and make a profit. Everything else is mere details.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. What people are trying to tell you is that once you do a reasonably decent economic analysis bulk interstellar trade makes no sense - it's far cheaper to do the resource extraction and so forth locally.