[TML] [Merchant Shipping] Some ideas I came up with to make merchant shipping more interesing

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 4/15/08 9:05 AM, "Tom B" <kaladorn at gmail.com> wrote:

> But most colonies won't start this way. And once you've built a big
> plant, you run it for a long time. So some of the power generation
> issues are determined by how things start up and how far along a
> colony is.
> 
> And what makes you think that a power grid is expensive? In Traveller,
> you may just task a single bot to go out and lay superconductor (or
> cheaper regular conductor).
> 
> In heavy urbanization, you may have a *lot* of larger plants. So the
> runs might not be that long to any particular place you'd need to
> power.
> 
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Timothy Little <tim at little-possums.net>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 04:36:32AM -0400, Tom B wrote:
>>> There are still scale efficiencies.
>> 
>>  A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the cost of
>>  maintaining a power grid between towns (or suburbs, in a larger city)
>>  would probably exceed the cost of local generation even if the larger
>>  power plant was *free*.

Another issue is loading.  The smaller the network, the more the generator
must adjust (proportionally) to the demands of the moment.  The power needs
of 1 house can fluctuate dramatically and unpredictably.  That of a
neighborhood is more stable and predictable, and over a city or region, even
more so.

And if you have a lot of small neighborhood generators, and the
neighborhoods are close by, then you've already wired up all the consumers
anyway.  It's a simple step to synchronize and wire up the neighborhoods, to
even out the demand more.  Same logic takes you right up the scale to a
continental grid.  [Assuming sufficient population density, but look at
where *we've* run wires.]