Friday, May 27, 2011

The Economics of Slow

My old friend and longtime collaborator Albert Bailey will be working with me on In the Beginning, the solar system setting for StarCluster 3. Yay!

One of the things I am interested in exploring with In the Beginning is The Economics of Slow. In SF games, everyone is interested in Fast. There are many things which must be delivered quickly - humans for example. Yet many more things would be more advantageous to deliver slowly - metals, ceramics, manufactured items, etc. - because of the steep cost reduction slow delivery entails.

Let's say we have a refinery in the Belt, and a market on Mars. Flying a ship from the belt to mars and back would be hideously expensive. A better way might be to set up a cycle of robotic light sail craft - cheap to build, and cheaper to operate, with no consubables and no lie support. Each individual craft might take months to move between the endpoints of the route, but if you use a lot of them, a delivery will happen every few days either way. Say it takes six months, 180 days, between Mars and the Belt via light sail. If you have 25 craft, you will have a delivery every (180/25)= 7.2 days. If you have 50 craft, that's a delivery every 3.6 days. The more craft, the more it becomes a flow, a waterfall of refined metal.

-clash

5 comments:

  1. Makes sense! But is there really a need for a space craft at all? Given proper technology for propulsion and reception can't you just slingshot your low value products from the Belt toward a Martian orbit and use some net or something to collect the goods? Might be messy but that's even less cost right there.

    Inspired by barges IRL, another reason to go for the slow transport : when transporting a complex/voluminous structure it can be very expensive to send it in small pieces. Transport in one block might be less competitive from a delivery delay POV but it saves money and time by not requiring assembly/reassembly.

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  2. I like the idea, but the initial cost of setting up such a transportation system with that many ships might be phenomenal. I suppose it'd make itself up over time with the low cost of shipping plus high demand for metals and whatnot.

    --Manda

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  3. What I am thinking when I say a "light-sail ship" is more like a big light sail, cables, motors, solar panels, sensors, and a robot brain strapped on the cargo. You could launch or slow it with lasers from the base,l and re-use it. It's not really a 'ship' in any sense, but I couldn't think of a better word.

    @ boulet;

    Yeah - I can imagine big structures being moved slowly into place, like the huge caterpillar thing that carries the space shuttle out. :D

    -clash

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  4. Now I'm caught imagining a station of space elves sending into orbit the biggest Christmas tree ever. Or maybe it was just a case of this transport robot getting a heat stroke during a solar eruption.. the cables got all tangled up in pine tree pattern. The fake candles was a nice touch from the Jesuit mining company of Phobos.

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  5. Hehe!

    The solar sails are not the only way to do this. Low thrust, high efficiency rockets like ion thrusters strapped to cargo modules would work very well too.

    -clash

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