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On Mon, 8/25/14, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] expected ship traffic
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Monday, August 25, 2014, 12:57 PM

 On 8/25/2014 12:19 PM,
 Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
 >
 This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow
 forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the
 sender's email address (xxxxxx@yahoo.com)
 has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message
 follows:
 >
 > Actually,
 there's another issue.
 >
 > I just don't believe that there would
 be *that* much trade volume on even the *heaviest*
 routes.
 >
 > I mean
 anyone can produce a table that will indicate that there
 will a gazillion dTons 'tween here & there but
 anyone else can also produce one that will show almost
 nothing in the same situation. From what I've read it
 appears that T5 leans heavily towards the latter rather than
 the former but haven't there been differences amongst
 each morph of Trav in this regard?
 >
 > I can remember reading about that on this
 very list, back in first 1/2 of the '90's.
 > Someone, in response to a question, posted
 about how MT changed the 3I (or TU, can't remember
 exactly) from a setting of smaller merchantmen to one of
 massively gigantic ones.
 >
 > Still, that's where the 17th century
 maritime analogy, that has always been the template for the
 TU from the beginning, comes in.
 > Esp by
 the late 18th century you had the monster warships w/
 smaller merchantmen.
 >
 > Then there's also the comm lag.
 >
 > Obviously that's
 not present these days so how would that affect things?
 > I think it would argue for smaller ship
 & more frequent visits.

 The "Age of Sail" analogy can only be
 pushed so far before it breaks.
 (And I
 think that Weber did just that with his HH books. :)

 I mean, we're not building
 these starships out of bonded superdense oak,
 with ultrabronze cannons loaded with laser
 grapeshot.  Nor is the frozen
 watch at
 risk of developing scurvy.

 We can fudge the feel a bit, with
 "mains" and terrain chokepoints and
 no-comms-faster-than-travel and all that, but
 what's unavoidable is that
 the scale is
 many orders of magnitude greater.  We're not dealing
 with
 regions on one world, but multiple
 worlds, thousands of them, some of
 them
 exceeding even 2014 Earth in terms of population,
 technology,
 industry/production volume,
 etc.

 Back in 1650, sure,
 you probably could fit all of Puerto Rico's incoming
 and outgoing cargo for a week into a handful of
 caravels.  I'm willing
 to bet that its
 volume of shipping today is "somewhat" higher.
 :/

 Kelly St.
 Clair
 xxxxxx@efn.org
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I, myself, have also previously expressed the opinion concerning "pushing the analogy".

So then what it comes down to, IMO, is this;

How would the super-tech (compared to the present day) levels w/i the TU affect trade volume?

IMO it would be much, much lower than MT levels.

And, from what I've read, T5 seems to indicate that it's even lower still.

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