The problem is that you really can't create a consistent explanation for a civilization with Traveller tech (including cheap energy and easy travel), relatively laissez-faire capitalism, and pervasive local scarcity that *doesn't* result in the spacegoing equivalent of modern container ships. It's just the natural evolutionary direction that the market will push freight shipping to follow. Never mind that it's equally tough to account for pervasive local scarcity given the tech assumptions, as exhaustively discussed already.

My explanation for the CT view of shipping is that it was simply what mattered to small-lot shippers. The boat that runs supplies out to Two Harbors on Catalina Island off Los Angeles is a converted WWII LST with a crew of three. They sail to and from Long Beach Harbor, a gigantic container port. They pass many freighters along the way, most hundreds of times their size. But none of them are carrying a week's worth of groceries and fuel to Two Harbors, so from their point of view, those giant ships are economically irrelevant, part of the scenery.

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 12:43 PM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> 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:

--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 3/30/16, Bruce Johnson <xxxxxx@Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU> 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, 10:40 AM

> On
Mar 29, 2016, at 4:50 PM, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net>
wrote:
>
> On Tue,
Mar 29, 2016 at 06:48:22PM +0000, Phil Pugliese (via tml
list) wrote:
>> I've seen
'official' stats for up to 10,000DT's & have
heard of
>> others up to
20,000DT's.
>>
>> Would that be enough to run the CT
3I?
>
> Yes,
certainly. Economies of scale in the construction and
operation
> rules in most versions start
being fairly negligible around the 3k-10k
> dton range. You would just need more of
them to support the trade
> volumes than
you would of 100k dton ships, at about the same total
> cost.

Yet
this is not reflected in real-world experience: the trend
has been to ever-larger container ships rather than more of
them.

Why?

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

'Cuz the OTU (at least until DGP/MT came along) is based upon the 17th/18th century & not on the post-containerization 20th?

Works for me! ;-)
Which is only to be expected since I prefer CT. Someone who prefers MT is bound to differ, of course.

p.s. someone posted a very treatise to the list over 20 (pre-TNE) years ago detailing the fundamental changes in a lot of the basics that occurred when MT appeared. My impression was that the author was making the case that the CT 3I & the MT 3I were actually two different 'critters' &, rather than attempting to reconcile them, it was easier/better to just pick one or the other & go with that.

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Craig Berry (http://google.com/+CraigBerry)
"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." - William Blake