Notes on trade... #2127
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Apparently I was asleep when I did this since I missed that I didn't do the conversion from per year to per day so these numbers are two orders of magnitude wrong... so I'd guess that our trade volume is just fine at the high end but has issues at the low end (since the orders of magnitude don't change the range). However there are some ameliarating effects I didn't take into account which put upwards trade pressure on colonies with growing populations on some planets: For colonies not increasing in size but that needed imported materials for construction in the first place (which includes all those on planetary classes I, J and S (gas giants) since they are effectively on stations just within the planetary atmosphere) they will need to import those materials from somewhere at between 1% and 10% (a year) to maintain their colony - this depends on the material and how good they are at recycling... space stations will have many more problems with this than planetary stations with the exception of planetary class Ds since a lack of any atmosphere is always going to make things harder on a planet. These numbers are on the order of a tonne per new person total based on the ISS with a little leeway so immigration rate is a factor but not a large one, especially as for planets with sources of Ores then the majority of heavy material needed for a new person is already there. Water is probably the biggest factor but it realtively easy to recycle, gases are the hardest to deal with and extracting oxygen from anything but water is tedious and slow and expensive at best - free oxygen being a very rare thing indeed. So, new numbers: For a million inhabitant spob in Naev this would mean; this spob would require about (in Fully Cargo Outfitted Rhinos Shipments (FCORS) per day): So the total number of Rhinos on all trade lanes that lead from an inhabited spob (IS) of a million population to another IS at any one time given the above travel times is on average less than one Rhino... taking into account that systems range from one spob with a population of 1000 to three billion** (and systems that have the minimum or maximum sized spobs have almost the same population as that one spob) we're looking at a range for total number of cargo trade ships in one system (assuming three adjacent systems to trade with) of one Llama a month (at best) to about 2180 Rhinos (or about 260 Zebras) in system at any one time... **(this is the Empire Home System, is there a more populous one?? - this suggests that the population of the entire Naev galaxy might only be in the billions... which seems a little weird but then there are only just over a thousand spobs and most are uninhabited and of the remaining there are a lot of stations, outposts, refueling stops and other barely inhabited places... if each factions population is less than ten billion then we'd be looking at a total galaxy population of sixty billion or so across a few hundred spobs, less than ten times the current Earth population across two spobs! ;) - then again the Incident probably wiped out most of the big population centres and this doesn't include another assumed twenty billion from the T+P, but even then this is, I feel, a highball estimate.) For reference; World migration has been, until 2015, increasing to just over 3% of the world population (though this depends on how countries claassify their population and there is quite a lot of statistics to suggest that the definition of who counts as an immigrant has been increasing the population rather than that many more people actually migrating - e.g. counting the children of migrants as also migrants even if they have never left the country of their birth). All of this seems to suggest that we need greater dynamic range of trade from a little more in some systems to a lot less in most systems. HOWEVER, none of this includes human travel... but then again we only have sightseeing and bounties on that front (and including bounties is a little stretching the point) so we could really do with making sure the new guild that deals with people includes missions for business and general passenger transport. To do this we probably need to introduce the concept of cabins and limits on the number of humans we can fit in a vessel. If cabins take up one tonne each then many vessels convert nicely (including all the yatchs) but we probably need a passenger liner for general passenger transport but only on the main "trade" routes between factions that also acts as a "round the world" cruise liner. Whether the player gets access to this is another matter, One proposal for a "passenger cabin" is that without a person it takes up half a tonne and only takes up the other half tonne when a passenger is using it, this represents open spaces that make a ship livable for a passenger that could be used for cargo containers when the space is not needed. Thoughts and ideas? |
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Lots of thought went into this. I like the FCORS metric. I think the numbers you crunched out could be used to define spobs (maybe based on new hyperparameters), and this could be used to do lots of cool things. Some things I can think of:
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This started out as just my notes on trade and developed into a comparison with Naev... please discuss and absolutely argue the point (even if you have to be a devil's advocate) with what thisa might or might not suggest about the trading system in Naev :)
world; 100 billion tonnes of materials a year - 13 tonnes per person - 2020ish
2017 - 56 million tonnes by air, 2020 - 11 billion tonnes by sea - 7.8 billion people - 1410kgs per person
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_model_of_trade
so... now 10% of material used travels by ship.
https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/archive-library/world-fleet-statistics
From the above about 100 million tones around when steam started to challenge sail (1850s/60s) - population 1.2 billion so 83kgs per person
And 10 million tons around 1800 - no steam - population 1 billion so 10 kgs per person
and so on...
Intrasystem trade is about 1/9 of a day to travel, intersystem trade is about 1/3 of a day (per system travelled)
For a million inhabitant spob in Naev this would mean;
(2020s style trade): 1410 thousand tonnes a day
(1860s style trade): 83 thousand tons a day
(1800s style trade): 10 thousand tons a day
(1700s style trade): 5 thousand tons a day
(1500s style trade): 1 thousand tons a day
this spob would require about (in Fully Cargo Outfitted Rhinos Shipments (FCORS) per day):
2020 - 2820 FCORS
1860 - 166 FCORS
1800 - 20 FCORS
1700 - 10 FCORS
1500 - 2 FCORS
So the total number of Rhinos on all trade lanes that lead from an inhabited spob (IS) of a million population to another IS at any one time given the above travel times is on average:
2020 - 313 Rhinos
1860 - 9 Rhinos
1800 - 2 Rhinos
1700 - 1 Rhino
1500 - 1 Koala (maybe?)
Note: The number of Rhinos is not different if travelling insystem or out of system because this is per trade lane, the ships going out of system have to be three times as numerous but are also spread out over three times the length (jumps take one period, spob to jumps take an estimated average one period). So 0% in system travel is (X/3)/3 = X/9 for insystem travel.
I think that Naev currently acts like it is somwhere between 1800 and 1860 for million population spob systems but is drastically under populating billion spob systems and drastically overpopulating spacestation spob systems. Though I'm absolutely aware that some stations are designed for export almost entirely (in which case they need to buy less from the player or for much reduced prices but also sell goods for equaly much reduced prices with missions giving a much better price because these stations are clearly seriously short of transports).
Either way, the above suggests that we could do with increasing the dynamism of the number of cargo/mining ships in systems' trade lanes within faction trade lanes, even if we go with a 1700 model.
Anything higher and we probably need one or two significantly bigger ships (by cargo tonnage) than the Rhino/Mule (but the Zebra is in a class of its own, I calculated 5000 something tonnes vs 900 for a Mule (which is severely under combat powered compared to the Rhino and Zebra) and 600 for a Rhino... none of these except the Rhino take into account slowdown caused by an engines being not strong enough for that weight which is probably an issue since the Rhino is very close to that already.
So we probably need a cargo ship in the realms of 2000 to 2500 tonnes as well as something more along the lines of 10 to 15 thousand tonnes that would only really travel the main trade route between each faction's space (I'll remind that this is because a billion or ten billion population spob would be looking at 1660 or 16600 FCORS which equates to 184 or 1844 Rhinos total on the systems trade lanes for that one spob alone (and most large spobs have other spobs (sometimes large) in system) this is still 18 or 184 Zebras.
A 15000 tonne ship could reduce this to 6 (or 61) total or two (or twenty) per trade lane (asssuming three trade lanes which is reasonable for high population spobs), even so, this seems rather high unless we shift to making cargo transport carry the bulk of their cargo on the exterior of the hull or within a hard-vacuum "rib cage" with only shield protection. It might be that cargo trains make more sense... I suggest that these ultrahuge ships not be available to the player though (at least in chapter one) because fleets would mean that the player could completely mess with the economy of a spob (in theory).
If we prefer to model current day airtravel then our cargo ships are okay but the Zebra is too large and also almost all spobs over a 100,000 would have to be 99% self-sufficient (which can't be the case for a large number due to the planet they are on, around)... air cargo is just not worth comparing to actual cargo supplies.
I should note that all the above real-world numbers are for goods traded between nations only and do not include land transport (which would add another 5% - 10% to the total figure) but I figured that we don't have a land transport equivalent and the difference is too small to bother about.
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