Why did it take so long to deal with Silesia?

This subject sent me off down a rabbit trail:

Read on if you wish. It has a little to do with the subject, but only tangentially.

Food strategic storage:

In 2011, Thailand/SE Asia had giant floods. They immediately stopped all exports of rice.

Why?

Because they feared the floods ruined their crops and they were already counting on that crop to obtain greater than 2 years food storage for their own country.

My friend who worked at Costco, told me, Thailand was down to a 1.4 year food storage number if the entire crop was ruined. The entire crop was not ruined, rather a good percentage was. With what was left over, I believe the number I heard was the crop boosted them to a 2.2 or so rice storage allowing them to export the 0.2. My numbers are probably wrong. I am sure they are. Memory is too fuzy. The principle remains. 2 years food storage for the entire population + enough for planting 2 years in a row is accepted as good practice. What is it? Over half of recent years have seen more consumption than grain I do believe the US department of agriculture was going to address this problem in the USA recently as the number has dropped to historically LOW numbers.

Lets look as the USDA numbers.
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/grst0314.txt

Corn: 7Billion Bu, 3.45B bu dissapearnce(planting is what I think they mean?) ~2:1
Soybeans: 992Million Bu, 1.16B Bu ~1:1
Wheat: 1.06B Bu, 419B bu ~2.5:1
ETC.

Seems USA is doing just fine with about 2:1

Actually B Bu grown:
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/crop1113.pdf

Corn Grown in 2013: 14B Bu
Soybean 2013 3.26B bu
+ too lazy to look up wheat, barley, rice etc.

That is a Gigantic amount of tonnage of grain grown.
370M tons of Corn and 86M tons of Soybeans etc.

Anyways, a little perspective.

Somewhere on USDA there are totals for bushels grown world wide. Didn't look.

In either case, a LOT of HV 8M ton bulk freighters from the USA alone even when we have 100M acres of fertile land(compared to the rest of the world but it is in the CRP anyways) lying fallow.

Enjoy the perusal guys.

J6P wrote:
How many Mtons of grain do you think is moved from the fields of E. Washington to Port of Longview? 160Million bushels of wheat, corn, and soybeans annually or roughly 5 Mtons. One bushel is 60lbs. 37 Bushels to the ton roughly. Note this is the amount exported, not amount grown which is several times this amount. The states of Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota make the Pacific Northwest look like minnows. I only used my local knowledge as a reference to save time. If you wish to look up the other info feel free.

Slight nitpick here. Eight states (Montana/Kansas/Nebraska/Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota) are always going to outproduce three states (the Pacific Northwest. ie Washington, Oregon and Idaho) if they all grow the same thing. So saying that the production of those eight states will make the production of the three states look like minnows is a 'Duh' kind of thing.

TWIT NIT:
A single one of those states make Washington look like a minnow.

Going to weigh in, and I hope I don't regret this :
I think the point being described by RFC is that the cost to ship goods across interstellar distances is less per ton then to ship the same amount of goods across a solar system. Due to the size of the bulk carriers, thay can transport X tons of cargo dozens of light years for a cheaper per ton cost than to ship the same X tons around a system in smaller vessels.

J6P just demonstrated via a very simple calculation, your presumption for smaller vessels, is not true. Not even close to true. I happen to agree with his very Back of the Envelope calculation. I personally think it is worse than what he presented due to how HV population distribution into dense mega cities creates even larger localized stores.

If you would take a closer look at the 2 links I provided, you will see that Mtons of grain need to be transported to major distribution points(population centers) from the grow areas. We are talking Billions of tons. Not simply Millions of tons.

PS. There is no reason from what I can see, engineering limit, for the size of a counter grav bulk carrier to be small. No reason bulk carriers able to move around in the atmosphere would not be Mtons large.

PPS. If we were building railroads today from scratch without the historical legacy of the cart industry and lack of power equipment able to move RR ballast easily, railroads would all be over 3 meters wide today. Probably over 5. If we had stronger steels able to be welded cheaply, all Ship bulk carriers would instantly triple or quadruple in size if not more. A ships size today is only limited by the materials available to us. They would be Mtons large if we could build them. An Mton of cargo is not that much when one starts looking at the gigantic tonnages being moved to centralized distribution centers.

wastedfly wrote:TWIT NIT:
A single one of those states make Washington look like a minnow.

The closest I could find to numbers lists Washington as being the 5th largest wheat producer in the US by 2004.

wastedfly wrote:PS. There is no reason from what I can see, engineering limit, for the size of a counter grav bulk carrier to be small. No reason bulk carriers able to move around in the atmosphere would not be Mtons large.

So your argument is that they build 2 freighters and leave the hyperspace generators and sails off one of them. That one is then used for intra-system shipping. Does this sum your point up?

If so, remember a freighter may be delivering X tons in its hold but rarely drops all of it at one port. I can see a case where if it is a grain shipment, or similer neccesity, for a planet starving for that resource. But I think it usally will drop a % of X tons, not all. The ships for local in-system transport needs not be so large because they are not shipping the same quantity. I feel the presumtion for larger vessels is unfounded because larger vessles would not be needed to ship the, theoretical, lower amounts of tonnage being dropped.
A real life example: Space is Ocean and Systems are Land. Cargo container ships rarely drop their entire cargo at one port. Also, we dont use massive cargo container ships to ship goods from overseas over land. We transfer the cargo to smaller veihcles, tracter tailers for example, to transport over land.

Regardless if it is the same size ship: I feel it would cost more to operate its impeller wedges constantly as opposed to sails in hyperspace. I know the sails cost more but I feel that it would be cheaper to ship X tons 75 light years via hyper then X tons 75 light years via impeller. When you add the fact that you are shipping hugely greater differences, operating in new and different markets, the cost efectivness of hyper shipping goes up while impeller drives only benifit from local markets.

This is mostly extrapolation from my mind , which may have been lost, so is very much in my humble opinion , but I feel I am following the logic behind shipping and the Honorverse.

I am going to try this one more time and then, frankly, I don't give a damn. Hopefully, unless someone is willfully misunderstanding me, they will be able to follow this very simple explanation.

(1) The passage quoted about planetary and interstellar and in-system transport costs does not equate them to one another, nor does it assert anywhere that they do not add to one another when it comes to calculating the total end-to-end cost of moving something.

(2) Planetary and atmospheric transport from the passage quoted does not and never did refer to the least possible theoretical cost of planetary or atmospheric shipping. It refers to the actual cost per ton of the way goods are shipped, and it assumes distribution from/to nodal positions on a planetary surface, period.

(3) I never said that it wasn't possible to ship goods cheaply in atmosphere or from point-to-point. What I said was that the cost of interplanetary and interstellar shipping is lower than the actual cost --- that is, the way planetary and atmospheric shipping logistics actually work in the Honorverse --- of shipping those goods in a planetary environment, and it is. This results --- I repeat one more time --- because of the difference in scale.

(4) People simply don't ship five-million-ton lots of goods in planetary and atmospheric environments. Not because they couldn't but because, by and large, there is no need to, anymore than there is a need to deliver 5,000,000-tons of tires simultaneously to a single Wall Mart location in Houston, Texas. Goods are shipped in much smaller quantities, and in the Honorverse, the cost of shipping 5 tons is closely approximate to the cost of shipping 5 million tons. This means --- pay attention closely now, this is really complicated --- that the actual cost of shipping each of those 5 tons is one million times greater than the theoretical cost of shipping each of the five million tons.

(5) At no point have I ever said that planetary/atmospheric transport costs were not a factor in interstellar or interplanetary commerce. Once a 5,000,000 ton shipment reaches its destination, it has to be delivered to the surface of the planet (or the internal systems of an orbital habitat, or whatever) where it manifestly (i.e., I thought it was so damned obvious there was no need to point this out to anyone with functioning neurons) enters the local distribution system and incurs whatever transportation costs purely local goods would incur in addition to the interplanetary or interstellar transportation costs. My entire point in the quoted passage --- and every single other place I have addressed this issue --- is that on a ton-for-ton basis, the interplanetary and/or interstellar portion of the trip costs less than the planetary portion(s) of a cargo's trip. I've never said, asserted, or suggested anything more than that.


Please do me the courtesy of reading what I've actually said and not assuming that I've said something that I haven't.

And now, I'm done.

runsforcelery wrote:(5) At no point have I ever said that planetary/atmospheric transport costs were not a factor in interstellar or interplanetary commerce. Once a 5,000,000 ton shipment reaches its destination, it has to be delivered to the surface of the planet (or the internal systems of an orbital habitat, or whatever) where it manifestly (i.e., I thought it was so damned obvious there was no need to point this out to anyone with functioning neurons) enters the local distribution system and incurs whatever transportation costs purely local goods would incur in addition to the interplanetary or interstellar transportation costs. My entire point in the quoted passage --- and every single other place I have addressed this issue --- is that on a ton-for-ton basis, the interplanetary and/or interstellar portion of the trip costs less than the planetary portion(s) of a cargo's trip. I've never said, asserted, or suggested anything more than that.


Please do me the courtesy of reading what I've actually said and not assuming that I've said something that I haven't.

And now, I'm done.

That's what I thought you said lol

Zakharra wrote:

wastedfly wrote:TWIT NIT:
A single one of those states make Washington look like a minnow.

The closest I could find to numbers lists Washington as being the 5th largest wheat producer in the US by 2004.

Yup, if you only look at wheat production, Washington looks pretty good. When all other grains grown into consideration, Washington is a minnow. Large, yes, but a minnow in comparison to Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Iowa, illinois, etc.