---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Which brings us right back to what I've said a number of time before;

You can produce any sort of mercantile system desired by just tweaking the tables (rules) that you use.

You want mega DT vessels to dominate, change the tables to favor them.
You want < 1000 DT to be the best, do the same.

But for the TU, it's a detailed below.

thanks , Tim

--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 3/30/16, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Relic tech and Scarcity-Driven Imperium (was: Salvage Operations (and Submarines))
 To: "xxxxxx@simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
 Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016, 8:43 PM

 On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 05:40:58PM
 +0000, Bruce  Johnson wrote:
 > Yet this is not reflected in real-world experience: the
 trend has
 > been to ever-larger container ships rather than more of
 them.
 >
 > Why?

 Real-world ships do have many economies of scale that
 Traveller ships,
 at least per the published design and operation rules, do
 not.  High
 in these are fuel costs, which in turn depend upon the
 various sources
 of hydrodynamic drag with various scaling laws.  All of
 these work out
 to less than linear per unit volume.  Much weaker
 economies of scale
 come with efficiencies of larger scale engines, maintenance,
 capital
 costs, and crew requirements.  There are also a few
 diseconomies of
 scale, mostly driven by port and canal capacities.

 Traveller starship costs are not dependent upon drag at all,
 and their
 fuel costs per unit volume are essentially constant. 
 Efficiency is
 mostly irrelevant, while all of the other costs I listed
 work out to
 be pretty closely proportional to jump drive size for all
 but the
 smallest ships.  So once you get a few small overheads
 out of the way,
 cost per unit freight volume is pretty much constant for a
 given route
 for ship sizes from ~3k dtons up.  The exact threshold
 depends upon
 how many decimal places you care about.

 This could be changed with different construction and
 operation rules,
 of course.  The purely linear relation of fuel consumed
 and jump drive
 cost to volume of ship is the main factor driving the lack
 of
 economies of scale in large ships.  If you tweaked them
 to be
 supralinear, you get a mostly small-ship universe. 
 Sublinear, and you
 get enormous superfreighters.  The easiest way to
 arrange the latter
 would be for one or both of the costs to be proportional to
 the hull
 area, rather than the volume.

 - Tim
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