 January 15, 2013 - 2:27pm | I have been thinking about merchant work in the SF game. I know that there was some effort to nail down a standard idea on the size/mass of a Standard Cargo Unit. But now I am curious about shipping and handling costs. It is assumed that big industry (Mega Corps) are shipping manufactured goods all over the frontier. However, I think that it would be prohibitive to manufacture an item and then launch it into orbit before shipping it through the void. Can one of you smart guys come up with a cost to mass ratio to put a SCU into orbit. I imagine there should be some data out there on the space shuttle program to come up with something. I doubt that I can get a number from the yellow pages to see how much a company would charge to put a satellite in orbit for me. But some of you guys are more in the biz (and just smarter) than I am. I figure in SF it would be less expensive than today since there is a limited number of companies able to launch. If we had a base cost; a pseudo-realistic cost, we could water it down for game play. My thought too is that if (for instance)vehicles are so expensive to import, that most planets above outpost status would have some sort of manufacturing plant to create big ticket items. It would also cause a vast diversity in similar products. It would also be a throwback to a time when things were built to last. Items that would be locally produced (IMO) would not be built with the philosophy of Pre-Planned Obsolescence. Thus, some frontier manufactured items might become true treasure worthy of the price to transport to other systems. |
 January 15, 2013 - 4:00pm | Taking a page from Warhammer, I've found myself pondering that its not so much finished goods being shipped and sold, "interstellarly," as it is raw materials, hard to manfufacture components, and "templates." Your car was built local, but the design was from another world. Certain templates have certain tech limitations. So while you can buy the latest hovercycle design from Prenglar, but there is no factory on Laco "advanced" enough to make it. Of course you could still ship the components in but that makes it even more expensive. Or am I treading across ground already well trod? |
 January 15, 2013 - 4:01pm | $1500-6,000 per pound right now to low earth orbit (which is the reference for SF) depending on the rocket. That is coming down but slowly. Here's a white paper I found comparing costs of various rockets around the world. It's a decade out of date but gives you an idea. http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Space_Transportation_Costs_Trends_0902.pdf Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
January 15, 2013 - 4:08pm | I should sit down and work out some of these numbers based on the KH rules to see what it works out to in the game. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 January 15, 2013 - 6:06pm | One corporation is working on bringing it down to $600-$800 per kilogram in the short term. Ultimately, they want to bring it down to around $160 per kilo, if I remember correctly. I just read it a few days ago. A link I saw on g+, I think. For SF, I would think they would ultimately be able to acheive their goal of $160 per kilo. But I don't know how to transfer that to credits. View my profile for a list of articles I have written, am writing, will write. "It's yo' mama!" —Wicket W. Warrick, Star Wars Ep. VI: Return of the Jedi "That guy's wise." —Logray, Star Wars Ep.VI: Return of the Jedi Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? - Felicia Day (The Guild) |
 January 15, 2013 - 9:56pm | KH loosely touches on this. The cost of getting it off the ground entails "renting" a shuttle. Since a shuttle or system ship "burns an entire load of fuel for departure and re-entry (or round trip or however it's worded), that's your basis for creating a profit margin for the shuttle owner. As for manufacturing plants, those exist on the industrial worlds. If the planet key doesn't have the "I" in the discription (re: a resource and/or agircultural world), then it lacks the capacity for manufacturing. That's the basis of freight hauling in KH: you buy from the I worlds (source price) and sell to the A&R worlds (destination price). And considering how the recipient has to mark the goods up for sale on the surface, the price keeps going up each time a transaction is handled --- those industrial goods still require a shutle ride to the surface, which isn't free...and then it gets warehoused until it can be shipped from the starport to the sales floor, also not free. But there's your basics to go by, granted each item has a different buy/sell price so there really isn't going to be a formula if you go by what is written. |
January 15, 2013 - 9:06pm | One corporation is working on bringing it down to $600-$800 per kilogram in the short term. Ultimately, they want to bring it down to around $160 per kilo, if I remember correctly. I just read it a few days ago. A link I saw on g+, I think. Absolutely, that is what the newer space companies like SpaceX are trying to achieve and they have a little more incentive, and lower costs, than the older players like Orbital and Lockheed Martin. $160 per kilo is about $75 per pound and is more than an order of magnitude cheaper than current systems. At those prices you can get a lot of stuff up cheaply and a whole lot of things become possible.For SF, I would think they would ultimately be able to acheive their goal of $160 per kilo. But I don't know how to transfer that to credits. I suspect that when I look at the KH numbers, we'll find something on the order of 1-10 cr per kilo or even less as the launch cost, another 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper (assuming that a credit is roughly equivalent to a dollar). BTW as soon as I get issue 3 of the Frontier Explorer out the door, I'll sit down and do the number crunching if no one beats me to it. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
January 16, 2013 - 6:01am | $1 per credit in 1982 or $1 per credit in 2013? Inflation has risen to at least 5 times as much since 1982. Back then, you could buy a Snickers bar for 22 cents, and a prepackaged sandwich for 45 cents. Though computers are around one seventh of the cost they were back then and their quality is immeasurably superior, (with the exception of the new Windows 8 interface,) but then the tech market doesn't play by the same rules of other markets. Though, tech cost reduction over time can also be attributed somewhat to the reduction in weight, and thus shipping costs, along with its ability to depend upon less durable materials and upon more recent consolidated manufacturing. View my profile for a list of articles I have written, am writing, will write. "It's yo' mama!" —Wicket W. Warrick, Star Wars Ep. VI: Return of the Jedi "That guy's wise." —Logray, Star Wars Ep.VI: Return of the Jedi Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? - Felicia Day (The Guild) |
January 16, 2013 - 12:00pm | Back then, you could buy a Snickers bar for 22 cents, and a prepackaged sandwich for 45 cents. ...and a prostitute was two prepackaged sandwiches. (graciously plagarized from the Adult Swim commercials) Though computers are around one seventh of the cost they were back then and their quality is immeasurably superior, (with the exception of the new Windows 8 interface,) I can't imagine 8 or anything else ever being worse than Windows ME. You didn't need any viruses to get a PC to act up when you had ME installed, it was buggy enough without even connecting to the internet, Windows ME was the ultimate virus. |
February 11, 2013 - 11:54am | The problem with lifting resources rather than the finished product is that there is more mass in materials in creating the final product, than there is in the product itself. Just as you have mining units and refineries that can be transported to planets, I believe that there would be a market for foundry units and generic (programmable)robotic presses and assembly lines. With these units, a planet could turn raw materials into metals, alloys, plastics, etc. and then transform those into some finished goods. Units can be reconfigured to manufacture various goods. However, the units would be small compared of regular production factories so the rate of production would be pretty low. |
February 24, 2013 - 7:30am | I would expect that they would have reclamation and refinery space stations where refuse is bioremediated and metals are extracted and melted down, allowing them to be resuable and easily shipped without increasing fuel costs. Salvage would be primarily legal, but regulated. (Salvage teams must have a license to loot and register their claims before hauling.) Most goods, however, would be in the manner of designs sold on the Frontier web and fabricated on the new world. Foods would be imported by seed and likely grown on a space station with simulated gravity and a controlled environment. View my profile for a list of articles I have written, am writing, will write. "It's yo' mama!" —Wicket W. Warrick, Star Wars Ep. VI: Return of the Jedi "That guy's wise." —Logray, Star Wars Ep.VI: Return of the Jedi Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? - Felicia Day (The Guild) |
February 27, 2013 - 10:03am | I think that space elevators would be more common than they currently are believed to be or at least more highly sought after. Mining is a fairly large part of the SF economy and if it is done on a planet surface, then the cost to lift it to orbit would cut into the profit margin of sale of the harvested resource. I don't think we ever came up with a plausible standard for a Cargo Unit. I plan to use A standard 40' sea cargo container in my game. It holds approximately (because I slept through math class) 850 cubic meters; 6,800 kg, and is 13x3x3 meters. If it costs 10 cr per kg, you are talking 68,000 credits per Cargo Unit. The average profit from cargos listed on the Resource Center cargo chart is 47,000 credits. So most cargoes will cost more to launch into space than the profits offered from the selling price at its destination. This of course won't be an issue with asteroid mining. However, corporations are exploring and colonizing planets. And the most common reason for them doing so is for the exploitation of the resources found there. They want them off those worlds and into the galactic market. Of course this is based off my numbers for CU's. The cost for lifting products into orbit can be tweeked or as the rules have done, ignored. I may go with a lower cr per kg shipping cost and alter the costs/value of the cargo. |
