[LMB] Wood, etc.

[James Nicoll]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Dorian E. Gray wrote:

> James replied to me...
>
>>  Energy seems to be cheap as beans in that universe (consider the
>> delta vees we see). It's odd nobody has glommed onto the slow frieght
>> niche.
>
> Well, okay, maybe the weight thing isn't an issue - but the bulkiness surely
> is; your raw wood or wooden items are going to take up a *lot* more cargo
> space than, say, an equivalent value of micro-chips or even fabric items.
> And your plastic (say) equivalent of whateveritis is presumably produced at
> home, so it's going to be loads cheaper than buying an imported wooden one.

 	Why? As long as it's relatively radiation resistant, there's no 
reason dead cargo can't be stored in inflatable holds (Like the LLNL 
design for a space station, Brilliant Condoms).

> (And how do we get the wood from the surface of the planet up to the 
> freight space-ships in orbit?  Even if energy for interstellar travel is 
> cheap, surely short shuttle runs out of the gravity well are rather less 
> so?)

 	The old role-playing game 2300 AD was like that: interstellar was 
cheap but getting off a planet wasn't. This ecouraged spacers not to land 
if they could avoid it.

 	The even more ancient RPG UNIVERSE was even worse: given a choice, 
no navigator would even come closer to a star than the orbit of (I think) 
Neptune.

 	I don't see any evidence of that in the Bujold books, though.