On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Bruce Johnson
<xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
>
> To replace that volume with Liberty Ships, you would need 47,857 ships, 8 times the size of the existing fleet.
>
> Yes, there is room in the OTU for small traders of PC scale; even 10Kt ships. But no way in hell does the total tonnage needed to generate the income for an entity the size of the 3I survive on liberty ship scale.

Kind of an odd thought here....

CT has "the draft" which could be thought to act as a equalizer
between the six 'universal draft' service paths.
So, 1/6 of the people 18 to 38 (ish) should be "Merchants"
http://www.indexmundi.com/world/demographics_profile.html
Earth has about 4 billion people in that age group, give or take.
That gives us about 660 million "merchants"
Figure half of them on "shore duty" gives us about 330 million "in ships"
Type A has a spec crew of 4, so that's about 750,000 type A's crewed.
Cargo is 75 dtons each, or about 56 million dtons
I'm reading that as around 19.7 million TEU ....

>The 2012 global container fleet capacity is 15406610 TEU,

So we're right in the ballpark, I think  19.7 MTEU vs 15.4 MTEU

Now, that number above _does_ differ  from the T5 estimates on 'number
of ships in system' by about 5 orders of magnitude... maybe 6.