Starfleet technology: who gets access to what and when?

[Crazy Eddie]

People in possession of fast alien spacecraft would be divided rather sharply in two, I'd think: those who want to get as far away from Earth as they can, never to return - and those who want to profit from their superior drives within the context of mankind. And the latter sort thus won't be interested in flying beyond mankind: speed won't translate to range, but to time, that is, less of it spent.

That, again, cannot be reconciled with the existence of the slow-moving cargo ships, for whom the extra time spent is not just wasted time, but also wasted money, and ALSO added risk of predation by pirates and/or negative space wedgies. There is simply ZERO room for the conjecture that those cargo ships voluntarily used slower warp drives when faster alien ones were available; they CLEARLY didn't have access to it, and Captain Keene even has this chagrined remark:
"The ships get faster. It's progress, I suppose. My family's been on the Fortunate for three generations. Now, I'm going to need at least a warp three engine to stay in business."

This explicitly rules out BOTH of your scenarios: Keene's family is the "fly far away" type AND he's trying to make a profit, and yet his ship is still slow as hell. And yet in sixty years they never once managed to score a more sophisticated warp drive from anyone else; this tells me that the more powerful drives simply aren't being used by anyone in the cargo service, or else Keene would ALREADY have gone bankrupt.

It doesn't appear as if there would be space for them to do that, though. Every planet out there is already taken, near and far

Exactly. Lots of trading partners, lots of new technologies to buy. Starfleet would be hard pressed to find a species that hadn't already heard of humans before, they'd be the newcomers to the galactic scene in more ways than one.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The ENT episode establishes that Alpha Centauri was not an option for a colony site. So presumably she wasn't Class M, and would only be colonized after the easier options had been used up. Heck, Mars was only colonized after Terra Nova!

Nope:

ARCHER: It was called the Great Experiment. Could humans colonise deep space? They'd already build New Berlin on the Moon, Utopia Planetia on Mars, even a few asteroid colonies, but all within our solar system. When they found an Earth-like planet less than twenty light-years away, it was hard to resist.

Archer also alludes to the argument that "there were no other habitable planets within range" as the reason for a second colonization mission, although given the context this is almost certainly bullshit: the "space agency" behind that expedition was not exactly a picture of rationality (considering the colonists protesting a second ship being sent to their planet... really? TWO HUNDRED of you land on a planet and suddenly you own the whole fucking thing???), and couldn't even bother to ASK the Vulcans to check on their lost colony. The fact that the second ship never even arrived suggests they probably disbanded soon after Terra Nova went silent, all their senior managers being fired for incompetence and/or corruption. Which means they probably only identified the planet in the first place because one of their warp probes did a flyby and confirmed it. Meanwhile, six other Earth-like planets were identified in the years that followed, all of them much closer and more accessible than Terra Nova (including one at Alpha Centauri) and people promptly stopped giving a damn about Terra Nova.

 

[Timo]

That, again, cannot be reconciled with the existence of the slow-moving cargo ships, for whom the extra time spent is not just wasted time, but also wasted money, and ALSO added risk of predation by pirates and/or negative space wedgies.

Why not? The slow boat is clearly a worthwhile business model that exists independently of the otherwise confirmed existence of powerboats, hydrofoils, fast ferries and whatever.

Wasted time is no issue today for those utilizing ships that travel at 15 knots rather than trains that travel at 50 knots or aircraft that do 500 knots. Indeed, going faster would waste money. And pirates are far more common on the high seas than alongside railroads or up in the air, too...

There exist diverse ways of making money on transportation today. There should probably exist diverse ways in the future, too, including fictional futures with specs like Trek's.

There is simply ZERO room for the conjecture that those cargo ships voluntarily used slower warp drives when faster alien ones were available; they CLEARLY didn't have access to it, and Captain Keene even has this chagrined remark:
"The ships get faster. It's progress, I suppose. My family's been on the Fortunate for three generations. Now, I'm going to need at least a warp three engine to stay in business."

And we know he was wrong; warp three engines were bad for business ultimately.

Why does Keene not have access to fast engines? Quite simply he might not be able to afford those (so he can't find out his business reasoning is flawed). Doesn't mean other humans couldn't afford a better engine. They just compete in a different league; Keene isn't competing with Archer, say, and is not worried about not having the latest in transporters and phase cannon aboard.

This explicitly rules out BOTH of your scenarios: Keene's family is the "fly far away" type AND he's trying to make a profit, and yet his ship is still slow as hell.

No, he's not the "fly far away" type at all - he's the returning type, doing business with humans for a living. We have seen those who never look back, and they establish these nutcase colonies or roam the universe in search of alien wonders.

And yet in sixty years they never once managed to score a more sophisticated warp drive from anyone else; this tells me that the more powerful drives simply aren't being used by anyone in the cargo service, or else Keene would ALREADY have gone bankrupt.

It simply tells us that ore is not worth hauling at better than warp two. Note how it's the very peculiar-looking container ship configuration that makes the Boomer lifestyle/business case - and how that configuration is specifically established to haul ore (dilithium ore is the generic load Mayweather assigns to ships like this) while different configurations are later seen handling different loads altogether.

The various alien ships seen in the "Twilight" fleet don't look like they could haul much ore. But we've seen plenty of mercantile use for small vessels like those. Arguing that Keene should have bought a faster engine is like arguing that those giving a ride to Valkris in ST3:TSfS should have bought a bigger hold.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

Nope:They'd already build New Berlin on the Moon, Utopia Planetia on Mars, even a few asteroid colonies

Yet we know from Janeway that Mars was only colonized in 2103, so our best hope here probably is to say that Utopia Planitia isn't a colony but, say, a shipyard.

Archer also alludes to the argument that "there were no other habitable planets within range" as the reason for a second colonization mission, although given the context this is almost certainly bullshit: the "space agency" behind that expedition was not exactly a picture of rationality (considering the colonists protesting a second ship being sent to their planet... really? TWO HUNDRED of you land on a planet and suddenly you own the whole fucking thing???)

Well, why not? If they can do it, that's already good enough a reason to do it. I just wonder how many sleeper ship skippers sold their cargo for slaves or meat, and how many dilithium haulers delivered to Romulus rather than Earth... It's not as if there would have been any authority to put a word or plasma gun in edgewise.

and couldn't even bother to ASK the Vulcans to check on their lost colony.

Why would Vulcans have fared better than Archer? The point was to keep it a human colony, not to have it evacuated by party X, worse still if X=Vulcans.

Which means they probably only identified the planet in the first place because one of their warp probes did a flyby and confirmed it.

Something like that probably has to be postulated because we already are close to having the means of checking for Class M planets from where we sit, and there's little reason to assume the Trek universe diverges from ours in this sense much.

Quite possibly a probe flyby (or its virtual counterpart, a rummaging through Vulcan databases at immense cost) is required because Class M planets in Trek are a dime in a dozen, but about 100% of them are unsuited for colonization by people who don't yet have phasers and photon torpedoes for staking their claim through the hearts of the previous owners.

Meanwhile, six other Earth-like planets were identified in the years that followed, all of them much closer and more accessible than Terra Nova (including one at Alpha Centauri) and people promptly stopped giving a damn about Terra Nova.

Why are we thinking that Alpha Centauri is Class M? By the time it absolutely has to sport a human colony, mankind has learned (for real) to live on Mars; Alpha Centauri City might lie under a dome.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Idran]

Not in ENT/the 22nd century/the pre-warp-5-era, which is the subject matter here.

Hm? Vega Colony was mentioned a couple times in ENT. Travis was born halfway between Draylax and Vega Colony by "Fortunate Son", so it had been founded at least by 2126.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Why not? The slow boat is clearly a worthwhile business model that exists independently of the otherwise confirmed existence of powerboats, hydrofoils, fast ferries and whatever.

That's because the difference in travel time between a slow boat and a hydrofoil is can be measured in hours. We do not, on the other hand, still conduct international commerce via sailing ship, nor do trade caravans pull horse-drawn carts thousands of miles to nearby ports. New technologies have reduced to several days a journey that, in previous centuries, would have taken MONTHS.

Slower forms of travel survive now because they're cheaper. You can ship a package by truck or by train because trucks and trains, while slower, are cheaper to maintain and you also get a better shipping rate because of economies of scale.

Boomers do not have this feature. Strapping a warp three engine on the ECS Fortunate will not reduce its cargo capacity or increase its operating costs; it will actually do the exact OPPOSITE of that, both by reducing the amount of food needed to sustain the crew AND reducing the maintenance costs of the ship in the long run.

Wasted time is no issue today for those utilizing ships that travel at 15 knots rather than trains that travel at 50 knots or aircraft that do 500 knots. Indeed, going faster would waste money.

That's because airplanes are REALLY EXPENSIVE and their uses are far more limited than boats. If you want to ship 200,000 tons of cargo, you can use a single container ship and get it there in six weeks, or you can use a thousand airplanes and get it there in one, for ten times the cost. There are reasons why the latter option might be attractive for some applications -- the military does it all the time -- but that doesn't apply to boomers, whose speed difference doesn't affect their cargo rate.

It's literally the difference between "200,000 tons of cargo in a year, or 200,000 tons of cargo in a month for 20% less"

There exist diverse ways of making money on transportation today.

And yet we no longer use sailing ships to move cargo in bulk. Why do you suppose that is?

And we know he was wrong; warp three engines were bad for business ultimately.

Tell that to Kassidy Yates.

Why does Keene not have access to fast engines?

Because he bought (obtained? Leased? was given?) the ship from an Earth manufacturer. When he buys a warp three engine, he'll have to acquire it much the same way. It's extremely likely that United Earth is actually subsidizing the purchase of those ships and a fair portion of their repairs, otherwise Keene's family would never have been able to afford the ship in the first place.

No, he's not the "fly far away" type at all - he's the returning type

No he's not. He's lived on the ship for three generations. His kids are the kind of people who "see another ship within ten light years, they get jumpy." They're deep space traders and nomads who deliberately live off the grid, and he's expressing despair that with the new warp drives coming out, the grid is about to catch up to him. If he didn't need a warp three engine BEFORE, he shouldn't need one now. The only reason he needs one now is because OTHER Earth ships are going to have them too, and it's only a matter of time before his turnaround rate is too slow to make a living. No money means no ship and no fuel, no fuel means no wild frontier freedom, and no frontier freedom makes Captain Keene a sad panda.

It simply tells us that ore is not worth hauling at better than warp two.

Of course it is. You haul the same amount of ore twice as fast, you make twice the amount of money in the same time period. Whoever you deliver the ore TO also becomes twice as productive in the same time period. So the person who has the faster ship does more business than the slowpoke. This means the faster ship can afford to sell the ore for a lower price -- potentially, MUCH lower -- since they're selling it more often and with lower operating expenses. The slowpoke has to lower his prices to stay competitive, which means he's now operating at a loss because his entire crew spends two and a half years sitting around with their thumbs up their asses just waiting to reach their next destination.

Take distance and speed out of the equation, and a cargo ship is really just a producer of goods. A new technology comes along that allows you to produce twice the amount of goods in the same time period, you can outcompete those who lack the technology. If that same technology also drastically reduces your operating expenses, makes you a harder target for thieves and vandals and even increases your useable inventory, then everyone using the old technology is 100% screwed. They either step up their game and adopt your methods, or they find a new market niche (say, cheap inter-system people movers) where they can still turn a profit.

The various alien ships seen in the "Twilight" fleet don't look like they could haul much ore. But we've seen plenty of mercantile use for small vessels like those. Arguing that Keene should have bought a faster engine is like arguing that those giving a ride to Valkris in ST3:TSfS should have bought a bigger hold.

How big of a cargo hold do you need to transport a Klingon spy across international borders?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Yet we know from Janeway that Mars was only colonized in 2103

She's obviously wrong.

Well, why not?

Because the colony wasn't exporting anything back to Earth, nor was there any competition for natural resources. They have no actual reason to protest the arrival of a second ship; they could just as easily insist that the ship land somewhere else and build a second settlement a hundred kilometers away.

Instead those two hundred assholes tried to claim the entire planet as their exclusive property and tried to exclude future settlers from landing there. Which tells you something about what kinds of people originally volunteered for the mission in the first place.

Why would Vulcans have fared better than Archer?

They definitely wouldn't have. A fact that only could have become known if they had actually ASKED the Vulcans to go and take a look.

But that's not what happened. Terra Nova went dark, the second expedition got canceled, and rather than ask the Vulcans "Hey, our colony isn't talking anymore, can you guys send fast ship over there and see if they're okay?" The space agency wrote them off and said "lol I dunno, it's a mystery or something!"

 

[Timo]

That's because...

Quite a number of "that's becauses" snipped, because, you know, they exist. They exist in the real world, and we have no justification for claiming they wouldn't exist in the Trek world as well. After all, we can observe the results: slow boats and three-star-systems-overnight-expresses both survive as business models side by side.

If you say "that doesn't apply to Boomers", you appear to be wrong. Because, as seen, it does.

And yet we no longer use sailing ships to move cargo in bulk. Why do you suppose that is?

Because wind can't be trusted, but far more importantly because wind is horrendously expensive (you have to pay the people to operate the sails). Yet grain moves no faster today than it did a century ago, so you are completely on the wrong track here.

Tell that to Kassidy Yates.

Tell what? That she should start hauling ore? It's apparently still a respectable business, but as far as we can tell, does not require ships as fast as hers.

Really, what's with this "there can only exist one profession in the universe" business? Bakers and welders can coexist, and the former does not have to upgrade to 1,500 C ovens in order to compete.

No he's not. He's lived on the ship for three generations.

...Dedicating his life to interacting with fellow humans. If he wanted to get away, he wouldn't be in a profession dependent on coming back.

Of course it is. You haul the same amount of ore twice as fast, you make twice the amount of money in the same time period.

An ignorant person might think that today. But it's far more profitable to cut the speed of ore transports today, because the savings in fuel costs increase the profits. Bulk today moves slower than it did fifty years ago, and businesses are benefiting.

If the amount of bulk per week doesn't satisfy the needs of the industry, the business case today is to have more steel - more of those slower-than-ever-before ships plying the same route nose to tail. Did the same thing happen in Trek? We know that robotic ore haulers are in fashion a century after ENT, perhaps indicative of such a phenomenon, perhaps offering an alternate explanation.

A new technology comes along that allows you to produce twice the amount of goods in the same time period, you can outcompete those who lack the technology.

More usually, you create an all-new market. And often enough, it's a flop: it doesn't pay to have your naval diesel replaced by the vastly superior fission reactor and turbine combo (superior in terms of sustained speed, unrefueled range, maintenance costs, you name it), for a great many reasons X that you couldn't think of when you invested heavily in your nuclear freighter.

Something did stall the development of speed in a certain category of freighter in Star Trek. This is in no way unexpected or unnatural, in light of what we know.

How big of a cargo hold do you need to transport a Klingon spy across international borders?

And that's her luggage in those cargo nets?

You again prove my point. There are market niches for all sorts of freighter, and we have seen many of those in Trek already. We can infer the existence of others, including ones we couldn't possibly comprehend, just like ITRW.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

She's obviously wrong.

You and I can be wrong because we don't have access to the pertinent pseudo-facts. Janeway is either right or lying.

Why would she lie? It's not much of a joke to make, getting the year deliberately wrong. Yet it's a very specific year, and Janeway knows her early colonization trivia personally. Archer's posse in turn is proximal to the facts, and also likely to be right. We just have to figure out how they can both be right at the same time.

Because the colony wasn't exporting anything back to Earth, nor was there any competition for natural resources. They have no actual reason to protest the arrival of a second ship; they could just as easily insist that the ship land somewhere else and build a second settlement a hundred kilometers away.

Nonsense. They're in a position to claim a whole planet to themselves, so why wouldn't they? Everybody else is a competitor and an enemy, at least in potentia.

Instead those two hundred assholes tried to claim the entire planet as their exclusive property and tried to exclude future settlers from landing there. Which tells you something about what kinds of people originally volunteered for the mission in the first place.

Typical colonists, then. Just read a couple of history books...

But that's not what happened. Terra Nova went dark, the second expedition got canceled, and rather than ask the Vulcans "Hey, our colony isn't talking anymore, can you guys send fast ship over there and see if they're okay?" The space agency wrote them off and said "lol I dunno, it's a mystery or something!"

No mystery - they said they wanted nothing to do with Earth, and then had nothing to do with Earth. And Earth could do nothing about it, until NX-01 came along. Archer is sailing to the planet assuming to meet with a bunch of assholes who will probably just tell him to go away; it's only after his hails go unanswered that a mystery emerges.

Vulcans wouldn't have done any better with the "establish orbit and hail" thing, and Earth really didn't need to know anything about the colony or any related mysteries until that bit was sorted out. It's an excellent case for not groveling to the Vulcans for help.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Idran]

You and I can be wrong because we don't have access to the pertinent pseudo-facts. Janeway is either right or lying.

Why would she lie? It's not much of a joke to make, getting the year deliberately wrong. Yet it's a very specific year, and Janeway knows her early colonization trivia personally.

Are you saying that you've never once slipped up and said something related to a personal interest you have a great deal of investment in that turned out to be incorrect, and didn't realize it at the time? Something you "should" have known but you just happened to remember wrong, or mixed up with something else, or something like that? That's never happened to you? Because it happens to me.

I mean, you can go ahead and stretch and strain for a clever answer that encompasses both contradictory points, but how is that more reasonable than just saying "she was mistaken"?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Quite a number of "that's becauses" snipped, because, you know, they exist.

"Quite a number of" meaning "one"? Because you know good and damn well that air freight and merchant shipping aren't in the same market, and aren't even in the same ballpark. It's a meaningless comparison, and it's silly of you to have made it; it's like suggesting that Kirk's motorcycle is just as good as a starship because, well, he still drives it around, right?

They exist in the real world, and we have no justification for claiming they wouldn't exist in the Trek world as well.

Yes, but not for the same applications. Air freight is NOT a competing technology with maritime shipping. Faster warp drive IS a competing technology with, well, not-as-fast warp drive.

We're not talking airplanes and ships here. We're talking "boat" and "ridiculously faster boat." Hence the comparison between the sail and the steam engine which, by the way, had the exact same progression that Keene is describing: as soon as steam engines became practical, sails were quickly phased out.

If you say "that doesn't apply to Boomers", you appear to be wrong.

It DOESN'T apply to boomers, because the "slow boat" system has exactly the same market share as the faster ships. This is not true of air freight and you know better than to imply that it does.

Because wind can't be trusted, but far more importantly because wind is horrendously expensive (you have to pay the people to operate the sails). Yet grain moves no faster today than it did a century ago

Bullshit.
In 1916, the United States exported 287 million bushels of wheat.
In 2016, the United States exported 1.02 billion (that's with a B) bushels of wheat.

This with such a worldwide market saturation that most of that wheat isn't even being used for FOOD, and is actually being consumed for alcohol production. Our capacity to ship grain in bulk has increased more than tenfold in the last century while travel times have ALSO been reduced.

You stopped just short of implying that sailing ships are just as good as steam powered ones at moving grain in bulk. This is also incorrect. Trans-atlantic crossings during the age of sail could take as much as three months, during which time ships were far more vulnerable to foul weather and navigation errors. The invention of steam power reduced this to a matter of weeks while also increasing the size of the ships that could be used; today, a SINGLE grain ship can move up to ten thousand bushels of wheat across the Atlantic Ocean in as little as ten days; it would take the 60 of the largest windjammers ever built a little over a month to move that same amount of grain.

So indeed, "grain moves no faster today than it did a century ago" is, in fact, bullshit.

Tell what? That she should start hauling ore?

What makes you think she doesn't?

Really, what's with this "there can only exist one profession in the universe" business? Bakers and welders can coexist...

Blacksmiths and industrial machining, not so much. The latter is an industrial process that has replaced blacksmithing with better technology, better materials and better products; the former has been reduced to more of a do-it-yourselfer's hobby, though it's still used in poor countries that can't afford more modern industrial manufacturing.

That should tell you something about the Cargo Service right there: the slower-than-molasses commercial shipping is not something anyone continues to do if they really have a choice. Earth didn't have a choice, and probably neither does anyone who still does it.

An ignorant person might think that today.

And he'd be right. Bulk cargo ships do not actually use less fuel at lower speeds, and CERTAINLY not less fuel while traveling at speeds comparable to sailing ships. Most of them have a efficient "best" speed to travel, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 15 knots, where their fuel efficiency is at peak. This is still more than twice as fast as their wind-powered counterparts of the 19th century, AND their cargo capacity is 50 times greater.

More usually, you create an all-new market.

No, you don't. It's an improved technology introduced to the same market. The result is the market EXPANDS, and the effect on pricing can be catastrophic for those who don't expand with it.

Something did stall the development of speed in a certain category of freighter in Star Trek.

Yes. It was called "poverty." Both financial and technological. Simply put: Earth cargo ships didn't have access to that technology, and the only place they could have gotten it was from spinoff programs pioneered (evidently) by Starfleet. If they COULD have purchased warp three engines independently, they would have done so decades before Enterprise ever left Earth.

But for that matter, so could Starfleet. As pissed off as they were about the Vulcans "holding things back" from them, they have absolutely NO EXCUSE for not asking help from anyone else. They therefore have the same problem as the cargo service: they couldn't afford the asking price and had to come with a new engine on their own.

And that's her luggage in those cargo nets?

No, that's cargo. Stuff they're planning to trade wherever it is they're going. Seeing how they are, you know, merchants.

I thought you were alluding to the fact that Valkris chartered a small merchant ship rather than a bulk carrier for her rendezvouz with Kruge? I don't understand your point then: why the hell would she charter a ship that big just to deliver a stolen cassette tape?

There are market niches for all sorts of freighter

Of course. Just not for obsolete freighters that can't compete in the same market. Those warp-two ships that can't be adapted to more normal commercial warp speeds will have to either shift to a less competitive market (or a small niche of the same market) or innovate to stay competitive. The windjammers actually tried to do the latter, but were still out-performed by steam engines to the point that it no longer made economic sense to use wind power for international commerce and the practice was discontinued. The same is true of the cargo service: they need warp three engines now, because if they don't get them, they'll be forced out of the market by those who do.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You and I can be wrong because we don't have access to the pertinent pseudo-facts. Janeway is either right or lying.

Or she's just wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. She wouldn't even be the first person in history to make a statement that is completely counterfactual.

Hell, she wouldn't even the first person in this THREAD.

Nonsense. They're in a position to claim a whole planet to themselves, so why wouldn't they?

Because they're in no position to DEFEND that claim from anyone ever. All the space agency has to do is send them a final email saying "Well, fuck you guys, we're sending the next ship anyway. Feel free to try and shoot them down with all the weapons you don't actually have." They could land the second ship right on top of the first and there isn't a thing they could actually do about it. They could also be nice and land a thousand kilometers away, and it would actually be a lot more work to hike all the way over there and fight them than it would be to just ignore them and mind their own business.

Which they probably would have realized if they weren't so stupid and stubborn.

Typical colonists, then. Just read a couple of history books...

I have, which is why I'm saying these are very atypical colonists. They're not refugees, they're not laborers, they don't even seem to be investors. They appear to be some kind of zealot pilgrims who are immigrating for some kind of very specific ideological reason and it simply never occurred to them that they'd ever have to share their planet with anyone but each other. Could be they were planning on turning Terra Nova into a grand Libertarian paradise, but more likely they're the sister colony of those Masterpiece Society guys.

No mystery - they said they wanted nothing to do with Earth, and then had nothing to do with Earth.

That doesn't actually explain what happened to the second ship that (evidently) never left.

 

[Ithekro]

The robotic Warp Two ore freighters could be just a string of old converted freighters that run regular ore shipments from one processing station to a manufacturing planet. Or a ship that does a wide sweeping round of all the smaller mining planets to pick up their yearly loads. The planet in Mudd's Women seemed to only have three miners on it, so maybe it is only worth picking up once a year for those sorts of places, so a single slow robotic hauler is enough to keep everyone profitable, while the Warp Three+ manned freighters are using for trading goods.

Though that does make one wonder about the two automated freighters that Enterprise was escorting to Sherman's Planet in the Animated Series. How fast could they go?

 

[Timo]

Are you saying that you've never once slipped up and said something related to a personal interest you have a great deal of investment in that turned out to be incorrect, and didn't realize it at the time? Something you "should" have known but you just happened to remember wrong, or mixed up with something else, or something like that? That's never happened to you? Because it happens to me.

It's not even a case of whether a mistake is made or not - it's a case of a mistake having hard time "getting through". I mean, it's a date, and not a round one; it's something memorized either correctly or incorrectly. And it comes out of the mouth of Harry Kim the eternal Ensign, amidst friendly banter that is supposed to establish that the fantastic is mundane for our heroes and that the 22nd century is history to them. There are two other human heroes from Sol around, and one is a close friend of Kim's, the other his superior officer, both Besserwissers of the worst sort. Both would be highly motivated to correct Kim if he slipped.

At best we might argue that a correction takes place during the brief cut to the other heroes.

"Quite a number of" meaning "one"? Because you know good and damn well that air freight and merchant shipping aren't in the same market, and aren't even in the same ballpark. It's a meaningless comparison, and it's silly of you to have made it; it's like suggesting that Kirk's motorcycle is just as good as a starship because, well, he still drives it around, right?

Obviously they are "as good" - neither has shouldered the other out of the market.

It's your mistake to think that there should be only a single market in the universe. Trek shows diversity, and Trek shows that while Boomers won't survive the introduction of high warp, low warp will. Just like in any propulsion breakthrough in history so far. We still have trains that run as slowly as those of the Wild West, in addition to having ones that move much faster. The specific market share may have shifted, but it has not diminished or disappeared - people now take fast trains, while coal takes the slow trains and barges in canals take whatever they can get.

Air freight is NOT a competing technology with maritime shipping. Faster warp drive IS a competing technology with, well, not-as-fast warp drive.

That's a completely meaningless distinction. Air freight competes with ships, bicycles and the internet, on many fronts and not just in terms of speed. And each of those competing fields competes with segments of itself. The competition has yet to drive any segment to extinction. Heck, even those segments that come too close to others and suffer for their inferior technology can mushroom thanks to the very fact: "Our cruise ships are slower than ever - you'll spend months going round the Med!"; "Take the nostalgic steam locomotive ride, enjoy the noise and the uneven pull, sit yourself sore on the uncomfortable wooden benches, suffocate on the smell!".

It DOESN'T apply to boomers, because the "slow boat" system has exactly the same market share as the faster ships. This is not true of air freight and you know better than to imply that it does.

You won't make it happen by repeating it. We know for a fact that slow and fast warp coexist in Trek trade. So insisting that they have the same "market share" is a statement devoid of meaning - they demonstrably aren't throttling each other to death inside that "share".

So indeed, "grain moves no faster today than it did a century ago" is, in fact, bullshit.

The speed difference as regards individual ships is truly minimal. No grain hauler has opted for container ship speeds despite those being theoretically (and indeed practically, just not financially) available. If need be, grain can stay put in the hold for months. Speed is not a competitive edge in the delivery - it's something that happens because not opting for it would incur extra expenses mainly in maintenance and crew salaries.

As for the volumes being moved, why do you bring it up? Volume isn't of interest here, or in Trek; it would be a function of the number of ships, and we have no access to those figures.

What makes you think she doesn't?

Haul ore? Like the inertiuim in those blue barrels in her introductory episode? That's like saying UPS and FedEx haul ore.

We hear what she's doing clearly enough: making delivery rounds to colonies. She runs errands; she's a tramp initially, but later a government gopher. She has no known association with any mining or refining facility. We get a nice, clear look at her "market share" or segment, and we can see she's in no danger of being outmaneuvered by slow ore barges, or of outbidding those.

That should tell you something about the Cargo Service right there: the slower-than-molasses commercial shipping is not something anyone continues to do if they really have a choice. Earth didn't have a choice, and probably neither does anyone who still does it.

And since the market segment survives, we can observe that those without a choice nicely perpetuate warp two freighters.

Really, bringing "technological advancement" into this is folly, because there's none. Earth got warp five in the 2150s, but everybody else had it already. It didn't change anything, except for Earth. And even then only as far as parity was reached; apparently, anybody giving their "SS Dierdre category" freighters warp three engines or better was going against conventional galactic wisdom, and fell out of the market as the result.

And he'd be right. Bulk cargo ships do not actually use less fuel at lower speeds, and CERTAINLY not less fuel while traveling at speeds comparable to sailing ships. Most of them have a efficient "best" speed to travel, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 15 knots, where their fuel efficiency is at peak. This is still more than twice as fast as their wind-powered counterparts of the 19th century, AND their cargo capacity is 50 times greater.

The decreasing of sustained speed is again an observed fact, and done exactly because it saves in fuel costs. Yes, ships are built for a specific speed range, but hugging the lower end of the efficiency range is the thing to do today, and new ships are built to be slower.

And again, why bring capacity to the discussion? It's about speed, and speed only.

Markets certainly are multivariable problems, and the layman is bound to get them wrong; even experts generally err. But we aren't here to tackle the market problem, as we totally lack competence. We're to comment on the observed facts, and specifically on how well the real world and the Trek fiction are in agreement there. "Ships not getting faster" is a real world trend for specific market segments, while "faster ships creating all-new market segments" is another.

No, that's cargo. Stuff they're planning to trade wherever it is they're going. Seeing how they are, you know, merchants.

Exactly. So we see a small freighter. And there you are, claiming that only one type of freighter can exist, and that it needs to become bigger and faster in order to be competitive.

If you are claiming something else, please do so now.

Of course. Just not for obsolete freighters that can't compete in the same market. Those warp-two ships that can't be adapted to more normal commercial warp speeds will have to either shift to a less competitive market (or a small niche of the same market) or innovate to stay competitive.

The real point here is that you can talk till the cows mummify, but the world works differently. Sure, it sounds good and nice and logical that faster would be better. But look out the window or the starship porthole and you see yourself contradicted. Slow ships aren't going away for real, and explicitly have not gone away in Star Trek, just because faster is possible. Indeed, faster has spelled disaster ITRW for many shipping segments.

Because they're in no position to DEFEND that claim from anyone ever. All the space agency has to do is send them a final email saying "Well, fuck you guys, we're sending the next ship anyway. Feel free to try and shoot them down with all the weapons you don't actually have."

The agency is at least equally impotent: it has no assets at Terra Nova. It may bluster and threaten, but in the end, the first wave of colonists holds the planet. They don't need to shoot down starships because the agency has none. They don't even need to harm the second colony ship. They can simply kill the colonists after they have landed, with the weapons they demonstrably have.

This sort of foothold will go away as Earth gains in bullying capability. But that's for the future, and status quo is a powerful weapon in its own right.

They could land the second ship right on top of the first and there isn't a thing they could actually do about it. They could also be nice and land a thousand kilometers away, and it would actually be a lot more work to hike all the way over there and fight them than it would be to just ignore them and mind their own business.

War is laborious. But the payoff is why stuff gets done. If you bother to work up the sweat to slaughter the second wave, the third will be unlikely to happen. And there you are, literally the ruler of the world. Which you wouldn't be if you played nice.

I have, which is why I'm saying these are very atypical colonists. They're not refugees, they're not laborers, they don't even seem to be investors. They appear to be some kind of zealot pilgrims who are immigrating for some kind of very specific ideological reason and it simply never occurred to them that they'd ever have to share their planet with anyone but each other.

And this makes them atypical how? That's supposedly how the Pacific, our very own inner space, was colonized: by those who disagree leaving so that they can disagree where there's nobody to talk back to them.

Certainly that's the archetypal Trek colonial party. We may speculate on the reasons: investment won't yield anything, labor is unnecessary in the automated future, a paradise won't drive out anybody by force. But those believing in a different paradise will always feel the need to leave. Speculating won't alter the observed facts, though, once again.

(Overseas colonizing on Earth by nations is a somewhat poorly applicable model here, because supposedly there are no nations involved in the late 21st century and beyond. There's only the Motherworld and the Colonies, for a different dynamic of competition.)

Could be they were planning on turning Terra Nova into a grand Libertarian paradise, but more likely they're the sister colony of those Masterpiece Society guys.

And this is a failed model how? As long as you dodge your stellar core fragments, these "Off the lawn or else" signs seem to work well enough. You get to try out your utopia, and you survive or perish by your own ideology.

That doesn't actually explain what happened to the second ship that (evidently) never left.

Great venue for speculation. Perhaps Vega was found suitable in the meantime, and the ship (supposedly still optimized for colonizing a Class M) was reassigned to establish that one?

Just as possibly, the ship was abandoned along with the mission. Until UESF decided to convert her to a Discovery class scout, that is.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

The robotic Warp Two ore freighters could be just a string of old converted freighters that run regular ore shipments from one processing station to a manufacturing planet. Or a ship that does a wide sweeping round of all the smaller mining planets to pick up their yearly loads.

That's a conflation I think is unwarranted. The warp two freighter Dierdre was not robotic, she ostensibly had a man "commanding" and telling that "they" in the convoy of at least three ships were under attack by Klingons. There were people at stake, which is what made Scotty shift his mission priorities.

We didn't learn how fast the "old ore freighter converted to automation" moved exactly. She was described as slow-moving, but the Enterprise under the control of M-5 engaged her at warp three, then warp four, while Kirk thought warp one would be a good speed for dealing with her. We're still in the ENT ore freighter ballpark, though.

The planet in Mudd's Women seemed to only have three miners on it, so maybe it is only worth picking up once a year for those sorts of places, so a single slow robotic hauler is enough to keep everyone profitable, while the Warp Three+ manned freighters are using for trading goods.

Since we don't know what the Dierdre would have been hauling, we can't easily argue on the nature of goods suited for specific speeds. Sulu for some reason finds it categorically true that "a freighter" can't go faster than warp two (even when attacked by Klingons). True, at that point he already knows they're looking for the Dierdre specifically, and she's a real ship known to Scotty so supposedly Sulu could have looked up her real specs by then. But Sulu still says "a freighter", and he's trying to comprehend why a convoy of at least three ships is completely outside sensor range, not merely why the Deirdre is not there.

Though that does make one wonder about the two automated freighters that Enterprise was escorting to Sherman's Planet in the Animated Series. How fast could they go?

Kirk broke convoy with the robots to rescue Mudd' scoutship; he did so by engaging warp eight for what looked like minutes. The Klingons then paralyzed the Enterprise, but Kirk commanded the robots to alter course and to ram the Klingons, which they nearly did, after continuous dialogue that lasted for at most a minute. So I'd actually want to credit them with warp eight or better!

The Woden, described as an old crewed freighter later automated, was identical to the robots in TOS-R, for better or worse. Warp 8 would not be slow by any standards. Perhaps turning a ship into a robot allows for higher dash speed (say, for ramping up the warp fields in a way that would kill any crew), but ships thus converted don't cruise at high speed, and possibly haven't even received any engine upgrades, just a rewriting/shredding of the safety manual. Or perhaps the TAS robots got a refit different from that of the Woden.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

I actually didn't remember the Dierdre at all. All I remembered was Woden (which I only remembered as a DY style variant). and the two freighters hauling grain to Sherman's Planet.

 

[Timo]

In addition to those, the crewed Huron from TAS was a "freighter". There was also the Antares, which was a "cargo vessel" or a "survey ship" or perhaps both - unseen in TOS, but in TOS-R becoming a crewed variant (original version?) of the robotic ships like Woden and the TAS ones. And then the barely glimpsed Class J "small cargo ship" flown by Mudd. A fairly small sample to go by, but indicative of some diversity already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Obviously they are "as good" - neither has shouldered the other out of the market.

They're not in the same market and are not competing technologies. It is a case where it doesn't actually MATTER if motorcycles are primitive or under-performing compared to starships: starships are not going to replace motorcycles.

What, pray tell, WOULD replace a motorcycle in that market niche? The answer to that question is "better motorcycles." Kirk's bike on Earth probably doesn't have a two cylinder combustion engine and more likely has some kind of krelide power cell or a fuel cell or some other fancy generator system. His bike probably has radar-controlled shock absorbers, navigational systems, automatic transmission (if applicable), antilock brakes and some kind of smart/adaptive traction control system. He'll be able to out-distance and out-perform any 20th century gas-powered bike pretty easily, and those older models, while still interesting for hobbyists, will largely disappear from the market. Harley Davidson will have to start selling the NEW types of bikes if they want to stay in business.

Harley Davidson will never have to build a starship. Because starships are not competitors in the same market as motorcycles.

It's your mistake to think that there should be only a single market in the universe.

No, I am 100% sure that this is your mistake. You just told me a second ago that you thought starships and motorcycles were in the same market but failed to shoulder each other out. They're not, which is why that comparison is absurd.

Trek shows diversity, and Trek shows that while Boomers won't survive the introduction of high warp, low warp will. Just like in any propulsion breakthrough in history so far. We still have trains that run as slowly as those of the Wild West, in addition to having ones that move much faster. The specific market share may have shifted, but it has not diminished or disappeared - people now take fast trains, while coal takes the slow trains and barges in canals take whatever they can get.

This would be a valid point if the "slow trains" were still being pulled by steam locomotives. For the most part, they're not; steam engines are rarely used now and when they are it's mainly for nostalgia purposes. More to the point: freight trains can't actually GO any faster without risking derailment, so their big improvement wasn't speed, but volume. A modern coal train is five times longer than it's steam-powered counterpart of a century ago, uses far less fuel, produces far less pollution and requires less maintenance.

And Union Pacific had to switch to diesel engines and gas turbines just to stay in business...

That's a completely meaningless distinction. Air freight competes with ships, bicycles and the internet

No, Mr. "There isn't only a single market in the universe," air freight does NOT compete with "the internet." They're not in the same market, they're not in the same industry... they're not even the same PRODUCT. They're not competing technologies.

We know for a fact that slow and fast warp coexist in Trek trade.

Sure. That doesn't mean they're both competing for the same market share. Even in the globalized market that Earth is rapidly becoming, a Laker isn't a direct competitor with a Bulk Carrier. In fact, even the big ocean-going ore ships aren't actually competing with oil tankers for a share of the same market. So the fact that an ore ship can move faster than an oil tanker doesn't tell you anything about how fast an oil tanker could/should be moving.

Speed is not a competitive edge in the delivery - it's something that happens because not opting for it would incur extra expenses mainly in maintenance and crew salaries.

Um... the lack of extra expenses in maintenance and crew salaries? That's called "competitive advantage."

As for the volumes being moved, why do you bring it up?

Because those larger volumes are only possible because of increased engine performance. Much like the train example, the difference in speed of shipping is relatively small because a ship can only move so fast through a body of water.

But the jump from warp two to warp three, on the other hand, is a difference in speed that cuts travel times -- already measured in months if not years -- by two-thirds or more. What's more, the new warp engine probably isn't even that much more expensive than the old one; the only reason they didn't buy one is because their only supplier -- the Earth Cargo Service -- didn't have them.

It's exactly the difference between a horse-drawn carriage and an automobile.

Haul ore? Like the inertiuim in those blue barrels in her introductory episode? That's like saying UPS and FedEx haul ore.

No, it's like saying the ECS Fortunate hauls ore.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Obviously it COULD (Travis says so) but it can and does carry other things too.

And since the market segment survives we can observe that those without a choice nicely perpetuate warp two freighters.

Again you're assuming they're competing for the same marketshare as the boomers. They're obviously NOT, which is probably why we're only seeing robot ships and short-range haulers (the equivalent of lakers) still traveling at that speed a century later. More on that below...

Really, bringing "technological advancement" into this is folly, because there's none. Earth got warp five in the 2150s, but everybody else had it already.

EARTH didn't, so that's irrelevant. The Boomers aren't really competing with alien freighters either. They are operating specifically in the Earth-Extrasolar import/export market. The boomers won't need to worry about competing with aliens until the advent of the Federation and the opening of more fluid interstellar commerce, but then at THAT point they will (eventually, as things stabilize) be in a better position to purchase advanced alien technology from other Federation members.

They sure as hell aren't in a position to do that in the 2150s, at a time when there is no standardized Federation currency and they're pretty much making all their trades through barter.

Exactly. So we see a small freighter. And there you are, claiming that only one type of freighter can exist...

... IN THE MARKET THE BOOMERS ARE SERVING. The slower ships won't survive in that market and they know it. As the market evolves, so must they; when it eventually expands and develops in the Federation years, it's going to change a hell of a lot more and we don't actually know if they survived that transition.

The Merchantman from TSFS, on the other hand, wouldn't have been a competitor with them in ANY century. For one thing, it isn't shipping to/from Earth. For another thing, it's not a bulk import/export carrier. They're similar markets, but the overlap -- if there even is one -- is very small.

It's not like 7/11 is a direct competitor with Walmart. Convenience shopping is a completely different market niche with big-box retail. 7/11 IS a competitor with the food marts of gas stations (BP, Shell, Thorntons, etc) however, which is why 7/11 gas stations became a thing.

The real point here is that you can talk till the cows mummify, but the world works differently. Sure, it sounds good and nice and logical that faster would be better.

It is when it comes to warp drive. That's the whole point of the warp five program.

Slow ships aren't going away for real

They are for the Terran import/export market. Maybe they'll linger on for the Vega-Denobula hematite thrift market, and almost certainly for the Bajoran import market under Cardassian rule. But again, markets change, and eventually so must the technology.

War is laborious. But the payoff is why stuff gets done.

There's no payoff in starting a war with a second group of colonists over territory you don't actually control. I could walk all the way to 53rd street and pick a fight with a homeless guy for the right to sleep under his bridge... but that would be really stupid and also a waste of time.

I'm not saying the colonists wouldn't do it. I'm actually saying that they're stupid and like to waste time.

And this makes them atypical how? That's supposedly how the Pacific, our very own inner space, was colonized: by those who disagree leaving so that they can disagree where there's nobody to talk back to them.

Far as I hear it, the islanders expanded by following the fish. But that's archeology, not history.

I'm referring to the colonization efforts of Australia, Canada, the West Indies, Florida, the Americas, Central and South America. There were a few religious zealots, the vast majority of which arrived with a charter from their home governments to inflict their zealotry on the natives. The rest were businessmen, adventurers, entrepreneurs, slaves and refugees. The colonists at Terra Nova were apparently none of the above and were basically a bunch of assholes who wanted to be lords of their own new world.

And this is a failed model how?

I never said it was a failed model. I said it's a model of people who are stupid and like to waste time.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Since we don't know what the Dierdre would have been hauling, we can't easily argue on the nature of goods suited for specific speeds. Sulu for some reason finds it categorically true that "a freighter" can't go faster than warp two (even when attacked by Klingons). True, at that point he already knows they're looking for the Dierdre specifically, and she's a real ship known to Scotty so supposedly Sulu could have looked up her real specs by then...

Don't think so. Scotty recognized the name as soon as he heard it and immediately knew it was a freighter without bothering to look it up. Since it's pretty unlikely that Scotty or anyone else on the Enterprise has memorized the names of every civilian ship in the galaxy, that means the Dierdre is probably one of several ships they ALREADY KNOW are in the system and whose presence they were briefed on as part of the mission. This is probably because this system is very close to an established Federation shipping lane and Enterprise is keeping an eye out for local traffic to avoid a costly mistake.

Seeing how they're in the system in the first place to negotiate mining rights with the Capellans, that shipping lane probably runs between various mining settlements and a conveniently located ore processing facility. That would make Deirdre a short-range vessel, probably a SMALL one at that since it's part of a convoy.

 

[Tenacity]

TWO HUNDRED of you land on a planet and suddenly you own the whole fucking thing???

A point I frequently make concerning Insurrection and the 600 Baku.

They definitely wouldn't have. A fact that only could have become known if they had actually ASKED the Vulcans to go and take a look.

Nationalism, Starfleet didn't want the Vulcan help.