The real world shows some favor toward the Traveller Universe, to some extent. You can order an iPhone now and it is drop shipped from manufacture in China, rather than manufactured in the US even if you are in the US. So long as it is cheaper to transport manufactured goods than to pay for local labor, I don't really see a reason that manufacture of high technology devices, at least, couldn't be from outside the system. Raw materials, though, is difficult to imagine being shipped from outside the system, in particular in the Traveller Universe where starships are very small. Additionally, information doesn't travel any faster than physical goods, unlike on Earth. On Earth, we can just transmit the design of whatever to a makerbot wherever and that bot could locally manufacture it a few minutes after the designs were received. In Traveller, both information and finished goods travel between the systems at the same speed.
One way to look at the Third Imperium is not as a vast collection of 11,000 worlds but really just a handful of very high population worlds among those 11,000 worlds. The vast majority resource extraction and trade occur within system, but since there is a large group of low population worlds out there that can't really support themselves without trade, and those volumes are low enough that large ships on regular routes aren't economical. A cottage industry of free traders popped up, filling that particular niche. That helps explain why Traveller starships are so small - 100 displacement tons is around the size of a 737.
There actually is more than just a handful of very high population worlds, 304 with a population of 10 billion or more, 31 with a population of 90 billion or more.
I wonder how often worlds are outright forgotten. Still on the maps, but the last starship visit having been decades before.
-------- Original Message --------
On January 20, 2018 12:27 AM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
You've just put your finger on one of the bigger bugaboos of the TU.
Systems will have effectively infinite resources.
Systems smashed up by the Ancient's War could be an exception.
Way back when, SPI published Ares, a sci-fi analog to their S&T gaming mag, & there was a review of Trav where the author opined that, with few exceptions, what would really be traded was information & artifacts with almost all production/fabrication done w/i the local system.
Still, I like the idea of 'FreeTrading' so.....
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