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

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 4/19/08 4:06 AM, "shadow at shadowgard.com" <shadow at shadowgard.com> wrote:

> On 16 Apr 2008 at 23:06, Jerry W Barrington wrote:
> 
>> On 4/16/08 6:32 PM, "Timothy Little" <tim at little-possums.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> Or do you just mean as targets, terrorising the neighbourhood with the
>>> threats of inconvenience and food spoilage?
>> 
>> And *that* is the biggest argument against small scale power!
> 
> Huh?
> 
>> Yes, most people, most of the time, *are* more concerned about food spoilage
>> than about terrorism.
>> 
>> You have to have a distribution network in each neighborhood, which is
>> *most* of the network expense.  Then you need connections between
>> neighborhoods, for enough redundancy when a plant *does* fail (and with
>> 100,000's to millions of them around on 1 planet, that's going to be a lot
>> of failures every day).
> 
> So? We know they are damned reliable (see starship operations).
> 
> And all those failures? Got anuy idea how many failures a day of
> furnaces or central air happen in the US?

I've suffered far more power outages than central air outages.  For my own
experience, I must conclude central air is more reliable than the power
grid.

> *That* is the level of "disaster" that a household power plant
> failure would be.

Losing the household plant is actually that plus more.  If the central
air/heat goes out, it's uncomfortable but tolerable for a few days.  If the
power goes out, so does the air.  And the refrigerator.  And the computer
and phone and TV and alarm clock and so on.  That was what I meant above
about "biggest argument against".  Having your whole house shut down for
days sucks.

> Especially since a battery backup to run the house for a week is
> equivalent to a car battery now. And likely part of the system
> anyway.