Logic behind splitting Lacoon?

Bill Woods wrote:Can anyone justify why Manticore's merchant fleet makes up more than a trivial fraction of the League's shipping? Including all their dependencies, the League's planets outnumber Manticore's about a 1000-to-1. Now, I get that a lot of ships would be registered as Manty for the lower tolls at the Junction, but when the order comes for them to come 'home' to Manticore, I'd expect their owners to tell their skippers to get right back to work....

That's something that has always bugged me a bit. For Manticore to have control of a majority of the shipping in the League, that is an immense number of hulls and crews to have in space. Literally hundreds of thousands up to millions of ships, large and small are plying the space lanes hauling cargo and passengers. That would mean Manticore has more people in space than many planets have in population (I would think.) Millions and millions of ship crews.

Does anyone have any exact quote to what percentage Manticore of control did have of League shipping? I don't have A Rising Tide before me atm.

Either way, even with the parts of the SL that become one of the SEM's allies/friends, they should all be very careful to make sure that the SEM isn't in a position to economically devastate them like it did the SL.

I don't think it's that unreasonable. You're looking at a dozen-ish crew per ship. Even with a million ships (which I think is a grossly inflated estimate), 12 million is still a third the people that were in uniform for Manticore at the height of the First Havenite War.

And getting back to the estimate for the number of ships, let's remember that Grayson was building a dozen freighters for Hauptman, and everyone thought that was a pretty big deal. Those ships would be less than a drop in the bucket if there really were millions of Manty merchants floating around. Furthermore, the number of ships queued at the Manticore Wormhole Junction doesn't seem to imply that there are that many ships out there. The queue has been growing recently, but even at its worst ships seem to make transit in an hour or two of entering the queue. They're certainly not backed up in a traffic jam by the hundreds or thousands, which would be the case if there was that many ships trying to access the "highway" which is the wormhole network.

I could see the Manticore's merchant fleet number in the tens of thousands, maybe even as many as a hundred thousand, but not a whole lot higher than that.

Zakharra wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:Can anyone justify why Manticore's merchant fleet makes up more than a trivial fraction of the League's shipping? Including all their dependencies, the League's planets outnumber Manticore's about a 1000-to-1. Now, I get that a lot of ships would be registered as Manty for the lower tolls at the Junction, but when the order comes for them to come 'home' to Manticore, I'd expect their owners to tell their skippers to get right back to work....

That's something that has always bugged me a bit. For Manticore to have control of a majority of the shipping in the League, that is an immense number of hulls and crews to have in space. Literally hundreds of thousands up to millions of ships, large and small are plying the space lanes hauling cargo and passengers. That would mean Manticore has more people in space than many planets have in population (I would think.) Millions and millions of ship crews.

Does anyone have any exact quote to what percentage Manticore of control did have of League shipping? I don't have A Rising Tide before me atm.

Either way, even with the parts of the SL that become one of the SEM's allies/friends, they should all be very careful to make sure that the SEM isn't in a position to economically devastate them like it did the SL.

Some people on the forum collected the quotes a few years ago, but I can't recall the details off-hand. One important point I remember is that a large fraction (can't remember how big) of Solarian trade spends at least part of its journey on Manticoran hulls. It doesn't necessarily spend the entire trip on a Manticoran hull.

Lacoon I essentialy ment that all those Manticor owned ships were going to basicaly stop picking up new cargos and head out of SL controlled space. The effect is not going to be like flipping a switch on the SL(primarily) trade system so it stops that day because both of the length of time to pass the recall order and then to actualy get the ships home.

We saw two examples. In the first case, the captain was telling the manager of the transpolar that he was NOT going to pick up the 1.6million tons of product. He probably had something similar to that amount that he had just delivered to the system unless he was running somewhat light in anticipation of the amount he was CONTRACTED to pick up and take onward. It was never mentioned if he got the orders through someone in the system or this was (it appeared to be) his last stop before he headed back to Manticore.
The order may have been given to him by a RMN ship, by a diplomatic officer of a Consulate for either Manticore, someone at the local office of the Manticorian owned shipping or business agency handling commercial traffic. We don't know. We also don't know if he had off-loaded anything else (or rather everything else) that was not already heading for Manticore space (or places beyond) before showing up with the news for the manager. He probably would have tried to make some arrangements to keep from taking goods he didn't own back home. I would guess that his last port of call was already in-line with the closest wormhole bridge needed to clear out of SL controlled territory.
In the second case, the captain is talking directly to the commander of the SLN warship giving her the news. We don't know what she dropped in the locadtion she was having the discussion but it didn't appear to be at a wormhole (or he would have sent her thought it if it lead back to friendly space) She has a lot of cargo going to X which is sort of in the direction of the wormhole she will have to use to go home. The Officer lets her divert from a direct flight to the wormhole in order to deliver the major (it would appear portion of her remaining cargo ) and THEN she will go home.

I am going to guess that they both had the majority of their freight consigned to the next system in whatever route they were on when they had the conversation. In the first case, the captain had off-loaded but refused to take on the cargo for his next leg of a long standing freight route- and he was explaining why. In the second case, she had either finished loading a full cargo before she was given the news by the RMN Officer or she had stopped at that point for a cargo drop of much smaller size.

In both cases, I can see the merchant captains trying to find -very quickly- anything they can manage as far as cargo awaiting shipment into the SEM area or beyond it as a way of not flying empty or totaly empty.

The goods just stop moving as the vehicles to carry them leave the system.

Brigade XO wrote:In the second case, the captain is talking directly to the commander of the SLN warship giving her the news. We don't know what she dropped in the locadtion she was having the discussion but it didn't appear to be at a wormhole (or he would have sent her thought it if it lead back to friendly space) She has a lot of cargo going to X which is sort of in the direction of the wormhole she will have to use to go home. The Officer lets her divert from a direct flight to the wormhole in order to deliver the major (it would appear portion of her remaining cargo ) and THEN she will go home.

A minor nitpick. The captain the merchant ship talked to was a RMN captain, not a SLN one.

SWM wrote:Some people on the forum collected the quotes a few years ago, but I can't recall the details off-hand. One important point I remember is that a large fraction (can't remember how big) of Solarian trade spends at least part of its journey on Manticoran hulls. It doesn't necessarily spend the entire trip on a Manticoran hull.

I pulled ART from my bookshelves (need to read it again for another discussion I had here) and here' the quote I think you're looking for:

"A damned good one, and if you'd actually read the reports my staff's been generating for the last couple of T-months, you'd already know that," Wodoslawski said bluntly. "Better than two-thirds of our total interstellar commerce-the percentage is higher for freight, lower for passengers and information-travels in Manticore-registered bottoms at some point in the transport cycle, Immokently. Almost thirty percent of it travles in Manty ships all the way from point of origin to final destination; another twenty-seven percent travels in Manty bottoms for between thirty and fifty percent of the total voyage. Another ten or fifteen percent of it travels in Manty bottoms for up to a quarter of the total transit."

Zakharra wrote:That's something that has always bugged me a bit. For Manticore to have control of a majority of the shipping in the League, that is an immense number of hulls and crews to have in space. Literally hundreds of thousands up to millions of ships, large and small are plying the space lanes hauling cargo and passengers. That would mean Manticore has more people in space than many planets have in population (I would think.) Millions and millions of ship crews.

Lyonheart has done a lot of work on calculating how many merchant ships there would be. To use a real-world view, according to this site (http://www.worldportsource.com/), there are about 4,764 ports on Earth, and about 30,000-50,000 or so ships servicing them, depending on the source. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_transport or http://www.statista.com/statistics/2640 ... e-by-type/).

Even doubling that due to transit times (even with the wormholes) gives us about 100,000 ships max, with maybe 55-60,000 with Manticore registry.

so...I think hundreds of thousands or million+ may be a bit much.

Does anyone have any exact quote to what percentage Manticore of control did have of League shipping? I don't have A Rising Tide before me atm.

I've added the applicable quote in my above post. In sum, Wodoslawski states later that "As you can see, simply pulling their own shipping out of the loop will reduce our avaialble interstellar lift by better than half."

Either way, even with the parts of the SL that become one of the SEM's allies/friends, they should all be very careful to make sure that the SEM isn't in a position to economically devastate them like it did the SL.

Good intentions, but it would be costly to do so and you would face having to break into the MMM monopoly in many Verge and (ex)-Protectorate systems. Is the cost worth it, especially if the MMM has played nice before and has not been a grasping, greedy, corrupt group.

Still, we shall see.

Zakharra wrote:Either way, even with the parts of the SL that become one of the SEM's allies/friends, they should all be very careful to make sure that the SEM isn't in a position to economically devastate them like it did the SL.

The reason why the SEM can economically devastate the League is because the 2/3 of its revenue that aren't based on exploiting the verge is mostly fees related to interstellar commerce. Any League successor states will generate most of their revenue from their domestic economy (unless they're sitting on a major wormhole junction or the equivalent). So they won't be anywhere near as vulnerable.

Hutch wrote:

Zakharra wrote:That's something that has always bugged me a bit. For Manticore to have control of a majority of the shipping in the League, that is an immense number of hulls and crews to have in space. Literally hundreds of thousands up to millions of ships, large and small are plying the space lanes hauling cargo and passengers. That would mean Manticore has more people in space than many planets have in population (I would think.) Millions and millions of ship crews.

Lyonheart has done a lot of work on calculating how many merchant ships there would be. To use a real-world view, according to this site (http://www.worldportsource.com/), there are about 4,764 ports on Earth, and about 30,000-50,000 or so ships servicing them, depending on the source. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_transport or http://www.statista.com/statistics/2640 ... e-by-type/).

Even doubling that due to transit times (even with the wormholes) gives us about 100,000 ships max, with maybe 55-60,000 with Manticore registry.

so...I think hundreds of thousands or million+ may be a bit much.


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Does anyone have any exact quote to what percentage Manticore of control did have of League shipping? I don't have A Rising Tide before me atm.

I've added the applicable quote in my above post. In sum, Wodoslawski states later that "As you can see, simply pulling their own shipping out of the loop will reduce our avaialble interstellar lift by better than half."

Probably a fair point there.

Either way, even with the parts of the SL that become one of the SEM's allies/friends, they should all be very careful to make sure that the SEM isn't in a position to economically devastate them like it did the SL.

Good intentions, but it would be costly to do so and you would face having to break into the MMM monopoly in many Verge and (ex)-Protectorate systems. Is the cost worth it, especially if the MMM has played nice before and has not been a grasping, greedy, corrupt group.

Still, we shall see.

The thing is, they can't be sure that the SEM will always play fair. It elected a High Ridge government once (and likely has done so in the past), and the SL is getting a real close look at what damage letting someone else control most of your shipping can do to your economy. Remember that just because the SEM is nice now, doesn't mean they will always be so. If the systems and new polities are smart, they will take steps to make sure that the SEM doesn't have a stranglehold on their economy. Having enough shipping to offset that would go a long way to easing that concern. And I'd think the SEM would understand that. After all they wouldn't like it if someone else controlled most of their shipping, so unless they are going to engage in economic warfare to actively keep control of every one elses shipping, I think they will let the matter lie rather than actively try to take over all or most of the lines.

drothgery wrote:

Zakharra wrote:Either way, even with the parts of the SL that become one of the SEM's allies/friends, they should all be very careful to make sure that the SEM isn't in a position to economically devastate them like it did the SL.

The reason why the SEM can economically devastate the League is because the 2/3 of its revenue that aren't based on exploiting the verge is mostly fees related to interstellar commerce. Any League successor states will generate most of their revenue from their domestic economy (unless they're sitting on a major wormhole junction or the equivalent). So they won't be anywhere near as vulnerable.

It's a little more than that. The SEM dominated the shipping. So when they pulled the ships out of SL space, they stranded a LOT of cargo and people. With no way to get goods to market and back, the SL economy is stalling and breaking apart. The revenue the SL got from exploiting the Verge/Protectorate didn't necessarily go to the official federal budget (as far as I know). It paid for the bureaucracies that worked around the SL constitution. I could be wrong though, but I am sure that its not the loss of the fees that's killing the SL (although that is hurting), but the loss of hulls to haul everything that's really killing the SL simply because nothing can move.

Zakharra wrote:The thing is, they can't be sure that the SEM will always play fair. It elected a High Ridge government once (and likely has done so in the past), and the SL is getting a real close look at what damage letting someone else control most of your shipping can do to your economy. Remember that just because the SEM is nice now, doesn't mean they will always be so. If the systems and new polities are smart, they will take steps to make sure that the SEM doesn't have a stranglehold on their economy. Having enough shipping to offset that would go a long way to easing that concern. And I'd think the SEM would understand that. After all they wouldn't like it if someone else controlled most of their shipping, so unless they are going to engage in economic warfare to actively keep control of every one elses shipping, I think they will let the matter lie rather than actively try to take over all or most of the lines.

Just to carry this out further, let's take the above number of 100,000 hulls moving passengers and freight in Known Space (YMMV). If, based on your conclusions (which I agree, are hard to argue with if you're the body politic on a Core planet that lives through a severe economic downturn brought on by the MMM departure), 500 Core systems decide to build 100 frieghters each for their own purposes--well, that gives you 50,000 new frieghters, or an increase of 50% (not counting ships Manticore, Haven and others are building a part of natural growth/replacement) of the merchant fleet. Now where is that additional 50% cargo going to come from?

Building like that may lead to more economic troubles than solutions. NTM the most cut-throat competition would be between those 500 'newbies', since the Manties are now (and will continue) to dominate the Verge and other systems in their region (I suspect that the Huaptman cartel will be announcing new deals and mergers with Haven shippers any day now).

Still...I can;t argue your logic in why they would want to build freighters. We'll just have to see if RFC deals with this in the books (he does have a few other things to worry about, after all...)