A Few Questions

[robkelk]

(Bob)

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Grover's Corners
Supply: Produce ... Demand: Non-vegetable foodstuffs ...

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Stellvia would like to enter into a long-term contract with Grover's Corners regarding the exchange of cloned vat-grown beef and pork (which has the texture and consistency of ground meat) and fresh fruits. Please contact Noah Scott at his published Interwave address if you wish to explore this opportunity. (hand-written PS: Folks, got any fresh apples? Leda likes them... -Noah)

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... one (1) bulldozer

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Unless you plan to use it quite a bit, why not just rent the one that Hephaestus owns?
(Shinkaze)

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The kind of ship I was thinking of was a container ship with RoRo (roll on roll off) capability (mostly because I was wandering through wikipedia after reading some fenspace stories, and when I came across the RoRo page the first thing that came to mind was hangar bay ).

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I like... One concern, though: unless you modify the ship's hull, it can't set down on Luna, Venus or Mars. This isn't a big problem on Venus (simply keep the engines running and dock to a Crystal City instead of landing in it), but it'll limit your Mars traffic to Port Phobos, and make Luna traffic impossible. On the flip side, if you do modify the hull, you might have trouble setting down on Earth...
Would somebody with better engineering skills than mine care to comment?

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with the level of automation I'm imagining, it could reasonably be crewed by five or six people (I don't think I could create a much bigger crew)

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I believe modern container ships have crews of about a dozen, and that's without a friendly AI on board to handle the minor details. (Most of the heavy work is done in port, and the port supplies the personnel for that.) "Five or six people" sounds right to me.

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I did remember one of the other questions I had (though its kind of stupid). In broad terms, what kind of money does the shipping industry in fenspace make (mostly because I'm not really sure what's considered a significant amount of money in fenspace).

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It's not a stupid question, trust me. Speaking as the primary writer of "the richest SOB in Fenspace"... Fen businesses make as much money as they need to for plot purposes. If you want the business to take off, then the terraforming project on Mars and Venus will pay top dollar for "pre-enjoyed biomass" (which is realistic at this stage of the terraforming process for Mars) as soon as you advertise your existance, and Earth-side water treatment plants will be happy to sell it to you. If you want the company to be struggling, then people aren't going to trust a newcomer until they've proven themselves and you can't prove yourselves until somebody trusts you, so you're stuck shipping a single container of consumer electronics from Earth to Stellvia each quarter... I suspect you'd want something between those extremes.
And if you really want to have fun with money, worry about tracking the exchange rate between the Solar Credit and the Australian Dollar... (I don't bother.)

-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012