title: 'Interstellar Trade: A Primer'

tags: []
---
https://web.archive.org/web/20200604172715/http://www.rocketpunk-
observatory.com/startrade.htm

If you ever wondered why Rigellian green-fuming brandy costs so much when you're
not even buying a top brand, now you can find out ...

Blue Band I confess to being a sucker for a type of science

fiction that is not always the most literary: space SF. At bottom this is surely
the tourist impulse. I want to look out the viewport at the Pleiades and the Orion
Nebula, or land on a habitable moon and see a giant ringed planet hanging in the
sky above forests of unearthly trees. If doing so takes zapping the odd space
pirate, I can live with that, too. Exploring cyberspace or mindspace just doesn't
have quite the same thrill.
Space SF is a bit out of critical fashion (though it still sells like hotcakes, no
small virtue to a writer). It certainly has its share of corny elements, as I admit
in more detail here. Moreover, nearly all of it is really fantasy, every bit as
much as elves & dragons. If you're going to tour the galaxy and come back to bore
your friends while they're still alive, you have to use faster-than-light drive
(FTL), i.e. effectively magic.

I like space SF anyway, and would like to do it right. This means, among other
things, making up a universe that hangs together so that it sounds believable even
if it isn't. This article started as notes to myself on the (pseudo-) economics
of interstellar trade. If I want to have Free Traders, space pirates, interstellar
battle fleets, and all that cool stuff - and I do, even if I change a few names for
good form - it's handy to know (i.e., make up) the underlying economic background.
Details like how much a University survey ship (read battlecruiser) costs, how big
it is, how long it takes to get from Seychelle to Tilmunsen, and so forth.

Fair warning: If you're just looking for the Cool Stuff, skip down to the end of
the next page. That's where I give some specs for interstellar battlecruisers and
hyper-dreadnoughts. Getting there, though, is largely a matter of estimating trade
costs and volumes - about as exciting as any other cost estimates, real or
imaginary. But the people who sign building contracts for starships are going to
know it, and you should know it too.

From jetliners to starships ...

How to figure out the cost of a starship ticket, or of shipping cargo aboard one?
I start with the premise that starships are, in a sense, the jetliners of a future
century - they go fast, carry lots of people or cargo, and embody the most advanced
technology that the society can crank out on a mass production basis. Starships go
a whole lot faster and farther, of course, but the builders have a more advanced
technology. Present-day spacecraft certainly won't do for an analogy: No one is
selling spaceflight tickets except maybe the Russians, for $10 million a pop. Not
really a viable commercial service. So we have to assume that an interstellar
civilization can build and use starships more or less the way we use jumbo jets.

As a first approximation we'll say that things balance out: In future centuries
the overall cost of a starship is equivalent (in proportion to size and cargo
capacity) to the costs of jets for us. But we can't merely assume that a starship
ticket goes for the same price as an airline ticket. Even with FTL, starships
probably take a lot more than a few hours to get where they're going. They
complete fewer trips in a year, so each ticket or cargo waybill has to cover a
larger share of the ship's expenses.

The annual cost of running a jet (as opposed to the sticker price to buy one), is
not something that gets reported regularly. I guesstimated it by working backwards
from the price of a ticket, since ultimately ticket revenue (plus airfreight) must
be enough to keep airliners flying.

Suppose that the average cost of a seat on a transcontinental jetliner is $500. (A

good deal less, to be sure, if you're willing to reserve a seat for a 3 AM red eye
on a Tuesday next month, but a lot more if you want to fly business class tomorrow
at 9 AM.)

The seating capacity for a midsize widebody jet is maybe 250 passengers; with 200
seats filled, revenue earned by the flight is $100,000. Takeoff fuel load is about
200,000 lbs or 30,000 gallons, so fuel cost is close to half the total operating
cost. (Also landing fees, taxes, etc., which we'll ignore.) Say then that the basic
operating cost of the flight, less fuel, is $50,000. This pays for plane, crew,
maintenance, etc. ... and of course the airline's profit margin. (From an economics
point of view this is just another cost: persuading someone to invest in an
airline.)

What with ground turnaround time, preflighting, etc. - and of course the usual
delays - say that the jet can make two transcontinental flights (one way) per day,
300 days/year. The annual cost of operating this jet is therefore some $30 million,
less fuel and incidentals like landing fees and taxes. The purchase price is about
$100 million, so one year's regular use of the jet costs about 1/3 of the purchase
price. A guesstimate, of course, but it should be a valid ballpark figure.

As a cargo plane, this jet could carry about 50 tons, so the purchase price is
roughly $2 million per ton of cargo capacity. A starship, however, operates
entirely in space (shuttles providing surface-to-orbit service). It has no landing
gear or heavy wing spars, and probably accelerates at well below 1 g, so it can
have a lighter hull structure in proportion to cargo and fuel. We'll say that the
starship carries twice as much cargo per deadweight ton of hull as a jet can carry.
Thus, it costs the equivalent of about $1 million per ton of cargo capacity. (We'll
simply use equivalent present-day dollars for starship costs, instead of credits or
whatever. We know what a dollar buys.) Assuming that the annual operating cost of
the starship, relative to building cost, is similar to that of a jet, it therefore
costs $300,000 per ton of cargo capacity per year to run a commercial starship.

(Again we are cheerfully ignoring details taxes, station-docking fees, and even the
cost of all-important fuel. We'll just assume that starship fuel is cheaper than
JP-4.)

We may suppose that the designed service lifetime of a merchant starship is 30

years, so the initial purchase price is only about a tenth of overall lifetime
service cost. (Closer to a fifth in practice due to interest on the purchase loan;
you have to pay the shipyard up front for the ship's ability to haul cargo years
from now.) Ships may well last longer; we'll say more on that below.

This leaves one key remaining variable: how many cargoes can a starship carry in a
year's service? That is, assuming full cargo turnover at each port of call, how
many one-way runs can she make? This will of course vary depending on route, but
let's make a quite conservative assumption - at least by SF standards, for ships
with some kind of FTL. Say that the one way trip between two nearby systems - from
departure planet orbit to FTL jump point to arrival planet orbit - takes 3 months.
(Thus, travel times are comparable to the age of sail.) Add another month for
servicing and maintenance in parking orbit, plus selling the cargo and buying cargo
for the next run. Four months then, departure-to-departure.

So ... This starship can turn over three cargoes a year, and therefore must earn
$100,000 per ton of cargo: that is, selling price at destination minus purchase
price at origin. The minimum selling price of imported goods is therefore
$100,000/ton, or $100/kg. That's if you can get them for free on the origin planet!
In practice, obviously, only goods of high intrinsic value will be shipped. Suppose
that, on average, half the retail price of interstellar imports goes to shipping
costs, so that imported goods typically cost $200/kg. For us English-unit people,
call it $100/lb, or six dollars per ounce.

For the consumer market, this obviously means luxury goods only, with very high
value per weight - things like jewelry, spices, fine liquor, designer-label
clothing. Even luxury goods won't fly if they weigh very much; the future
equivalent of an small imported sports car would cost $100 K just to import that
sucker. But very high value-to-weight industrial goods can be shipped, e.g. the
equivalent of microchips. Bulk goods obviously won't move in interstellar trade -
not at $100,000/ton.

Now, suppose that the per capita GPP - Gross Planetary Product - of a colony world
is $100,000 (about three times that of the US today.) If two percent of income goes
to imported luxuries and high-value capital goods, that's $2000 per capita, of
which half, or $1000, pays for shipping costs. For a colony planet of ten million
people, the total shipping cost of imported goods thus comes to $10 billion.

Working backwards, this means that 100,000 tons of interstellar cargo arrives
annually. The planet will have to export a similar quantity of goods; otherwise it
runs a trade deficit. Also, import prices will go up if ships can't load a cargo to
sell at the next destination; a starship with empty cargo pods costs nearly as much
to run as one with a full cargo load.

Take the simplest trade model, two planets trading with each other. Each year,
100,000 tons of cargo moves in each direction, or 200,000 tons total volume. If the
average cargo starship carries 1000 tons - much less than sea cargo ships, but much
more than cargo planes - this requires 200 annual loadings. (And an equal number of
unloadings!) Since each ship can make three one-way legs per year, she will account
for three loadings, so these two planets' combined merchant fleets should be about
65-70 ships. If each ship carries more cargo, fewer are needed. For 5000 tons,
about the load of a typical freight train, 13-14 ships will be sufficient. In
general, however, this trade economy will not favor many big ships; they have
trouble finding enough cargo to fill their pods.

All of this makes for a viable if modest-scale interstellar economy. A trade

network of a dozen colony worlds would support a few dozen to a few hundred cargo
starships, depending on the average size of the ships.

We can also say something about passenger traffic. Jetliners can carry about 4 or 5
passengers per ton of equivalent cargo capacity. But interstellar passengers can't
live in a coach seat for several months, so let's say that each passenger berth
equates to a ton of cargo capacity. This is for berth space as well as apportioned
galley/diner space, as well as food, etc., and of course the passenger plus
baggage. Cost of a starship ticket to a nearby system: $100,000. Obviously there
won't be a big tourist traffic. Passenger ships (or passenger pods carried by
general-purpose cargo starships) will carry a few rich tourists, but mostly
business or official travelers.

BUT ... alas, there is one kind of large-scale passenger traffic that is absolutely
necessary for this trade network of colonies to exist at all: Colonization. This
must also cost at least $100,000 per colonist - more likely several times as much.
The equivalent of tractors, etc. have to be shipped along with the colonists.
Moreover, because a planet just being colonized is unlikely to have anything to
export, the colonizing ships return empty, so the applicable cost is round-trip,
not one-way. Altogether it might add up to a million dollars per colonist.

This could be a fatal problem. Not many millionaires are going to want to emigrate
to the rugged life of a new colony world. Sending 10,000 people to a olony would
cost some $10 billion; even if the planet has a known potential export, this is an
awful lot of capital for private industry to raise for a fairly speculative
venture. Not even governments are likely to spend this kind of money to establish
colonies, at least not on a consistant basis. Research bases on habitable planets
might gradually develop into colonies, but the whole process would be painfully
slow and always one budget cut away from extinction.

So the price schedule offered here seems to make interstellar colonization unlikely
in the first place. (Non-FTL colonization by "slowboats" is even worse, because
then you have to pay the whole cost of the ship for a single one-way voyage.) In
trying to run some numbers for interstellar trade, instead we've killed the whole
damn thing. I hate it when this happens!

Happily, there is substantial room in the model to bring costs down, either by
making trade starships cheaper or making them faster. Since FTL is magic to start
with, we may as well also wave the wand over operating costs and/or travel time.
Let's do both.

We'll cut the annual service cost of starships to $100,000 per ton of cargo
capacity, a third of the original estimate. This perhaps is not unreasonable.
Space is a harsh environment, but harsh in a fairly steady way. Unlike jets,
starships don't have to ramp up every ounce of takeoff thrust, undergo constant
pressure changes, get thrown around by turbulence, or thump down onto a concrete
runway at 150 mph every few hours. Even the cargo pods don't have baggage handlers
tossing suitcases around inside them several times each day.

Since the starships are built for long-haul reliability, we'll say that building
cost is reduced only by half, not two-thirds. At $500,000 per ton of capacity, for
a 30-year expected service life it now accounts for a sixth of total lifetime
service cost rather than a tenth. With interest payments this may be closer to a
third; we've cut operating cost - for maintenance, crew, fuel and such - by a
factor of about 3.5 or so.

We'll also assume that a starship can make a one-way voyage and turn around for
next departure in 35 days instead of 120 days. Thus she can deliver ten cargoes in
a year's service. Given the reduced yearly operating cost, the actual transport
cost per ton or per passenger drops from our original $100,000 to a measly $10,000.

Colonization transport cost is still higher, because of supplies and provisions and
no return cargo. But now it is perhaps $100,000/colonist or less, in reach of the
middle class. (Relatives will probably have to kick in; why are they so eager to
get rid of you?) Even in poor countries, a village, church, or mosque might scrape
up the money to send off a young couple to the colonies. Large-scale interstellar
colonization is now economically viable - assuming the technology exists and that
habitable planets are out there to colonize. (What's a minor assumption or two
among friends?)

We now have an order-of-magnitude basis for estimating the conditions under which
colonization can develop. If the cost of starships is comparable, size for size,
to that of jet planes, interstellar travel times must be measured in days or a
couple of weeks, not months. (We could have reduced transport cost by the same
factor of ten by cutting turnaround time to 12 days, without reducing annual
costs.) For longer travel times, starships must be significantly cheaper to
operate than jet planes.

Given a starship technology that makes colonization viable in the first place,
subsequent interstellar trade will be more robust, because the minimum cost of
imported goods is lower. Under the revised $10,000/ton shipping cost model, the
threshhold cost of imported goods is now around $10/lb - say, $25 a fifth for a
cheap brand of that Rigellian green-fuming rotgut. A sports car will cost some
$10,000 to import (plus the factory price of the car). Bulk cargoes still won't
figure in interstellar trade, though; the shipping cost of oil, for example, would
be about $1500/barrel.

As with any freight rates, these will vary. Higher-value merchandise will support
higher shipping charges, justifying transshipment or multi-leg runs to more distant
customers. A long-term fixed contract, allowing the shipowner to depend on cargoes,
will get much better rate than a rush shipment. The cargo equivalent of "standby"
will also get a better rate; if a ship is making the run anyway, better to fill her
cargo pods.

If imports still account for just two percent of GPP, as in the earlier estimate,
the volume of goods moving in interstellar commerce would increase tenfold (but
shipping capacity only about threefold, since each starship delivers three times as
many cargoes each year). However, with shipping costs ten times lower and a much
wider range of goods now worth importing, the import-export sector can expand in
total value of goods shipped as well. Apply an inverse square-root rule and say
that reducing shipping costs by a factor of ten will increase spending on imported
goods by a factor of three. Six percent of GPP now goes to imports - undoubtedly a
high-end figure, but not wholly out of reach for a mature trading zone in which
worlds have developed their own exports. A colony of 10 million people thus has an
annual import - and export - volume of about 3 million tons per year.

Each trade starship now can pick up and deliver 10 cargoes per year, so the ships
needed to carry this volume have a net cargo capacity of 300,000 tons. For a trade
network of a dozen colonies, the combined merchant marine has a capacity of some
3.6 million tons. Most ships will still be fairly small (though still much bigger
than jumbo jets) in order to fill their cargo pods easily, but the heaviest-traffic
routes will support big ships.

Say, then, that the trade network's merchant fleet is something like this:

75 ships of 20,000 tons capacity each = 1,500,000 tons

300 ships of 5000 tons capacity each = 1,500,000 tons
400 ships of 1500 tons capacity each = 600,000 tons
________

TOTAL: 775 trade starships, capacity = 3,600,000 tons

If there is no ansible or FTL radio (and in my SF universe there isn't), some of

the small freighters will sacrifice cargo capacity for speed. They will serve as a
sort of interstellar FedEx, delivering small parcels, mail, and paying-through-the-
nose VIP passengers, if not overnight then at least as fast as technology permits.

Passenger traffic is probably only a small fraction of cargo volume. (Unless there
is still colonization, i.e. emigration from Earth.) Someone makes a profit by
consigning freight, but passengers are pure expense, either to the passenger or
whoever pays her expense account. Perhaps they are one percent of total volume -
that still comes to an impressive 360,000 passengers each year. A few routes may
support scheduled passenger service (probably using fairly small ships), but most
passengers may ride in pods - not unlike railroad sleeping cars - carried by
freighters, or simply in spare crew quarters.

The full-load mass and physical size of all these ships depends heavily on
assumptions about fuel mass ratio, fuel bulk, etc. But a typical proportional mass
breakdown might be

Deadweight = 1
Cargo load = 2
Fuel load = 3
__

Total mass = 6 (i.e., three times cargo capacity)

Big freighters thus have a full-load mass of some 60,000 tons; the largest
individual ships in service might be up to twice as big, or 120,000 tons. For our
revised estimated building cost of $500,000 per ton of cargo capacity, the cost per
deadweight ton - i.e., the ship itself; structure, engines, etc. - is a million
dollars, and the annual cost in service is $200,000. We haven't so much made
starship hulls cheaper as allowed them to carry more cargo in proportion to their
own structural mass.

The building cost of these ships is not cheap. At $500,000 per ton of cargo
capacity, the largest giant freighter costs $20 billion to build - but she has the
cargo capacity of two hundred 747 jets, and by herself accounts for over one
percent of the whole fleet's cargo capacity. An average small freighter costs $750
million, and has seven times the cargo capacity of a 747.

Given the 30-year service life of ships, the combined yards of the trade network
turn out about 25 ships each year. In fact, the hull structures might well last
much longer than 30 years, but equipment wears out and has to be replaced. Probably
ships go back into the yards for overhaul each decade or so, but eventually the
cost of stripping everything out and replacing it exceeds the value of the ship.
Depending on overhaul costs, however, yards may well live more on rebuilding than
new construction, with some ships remaining in service for many decades. Others may
be retained as the equivalent of naval hulks or the old passenger equipment that
railroads use as work trains; every big commercial space station will have a bunch
of these old ships around its outskirts.

If modular design is taken to its limit, however,"ships" may have no permanent

existence, but be assembled out of modules and pods for each run, much as railroads
make up rolling stock into trains. In this case a ship's identity probably attaches
to a service than to physical structures, just as the Santa Fe Chief was identified
by timetable and reputation, not a particular set of locomotives and cars.

More fun with starships. How fast they go, how big they are, how many people are
drinking at a space station bar, and -- oh, yes -- just a little about space battle
fleets ...

Blue Band So far we have not said anything about how fast these
ships go (in normal space, let alone FTL). In fact, we've said nothing about their
technology except that it is for the builders what jetliner technology is for us.
My intent was to handwave the technology and focus on the cold hard cash. Trade
economics doesn't care about the actual technology - only how long cargo takes to
reach its destination and how much it costs to get it there. Your favored
technology is probably different from mine, anyway. But having gotten this far,
I'm tempted to at least glance at possible technology, and naturally I'll give into
temptation.
The following assumes reaction drives (basically fancy rockets) operating in normal
space at sublight speeds.Your FTL can be whatever you want it to be, so I'll ignore
it, but you'll obviously need it to do much star-hopping.

Given that on departure half the ship's mass is fuel (mass ratio = 2.0), we can
estimate some possible speed ranges. For any reaction drive, this mass ratio
corresponds to a delta v or potential ship speed of 0.69 times the drive engine's
exhaust velocity. Since ships have to slow down at their destination - not just
hurtle off into the void - their maximum normal-space transit speed must be about a
third of exhaust velocity (or a little less in practice, to allow a fuel reserve).
For a nuclear-ion drive this would be up to 100 kilometers per second or so; for a
fusion drive, up to a few thousand km/sec; for matter-antimatter, about a third the
speed of light or 100,000 km/sec. These normal-space speeds will of course be lower
if the ship must also use fuel to enter or travel through FTL.

We can also estimate how far these ships go in normal space before making their FTL
jump (or whatever they do). If a ship spends an average 27 days en route, all of it
in normal space - FTL transit being an instantaneous pop-through - the outbound and
inbound legs are each 13.5 days or about 1.17 million seconds. Assuming steady
acceleration and deceleration, average normal-space speed is half of maximum speed
reached. (In practice, acceleration increases as fuel is burned off, so it takes
longer to reach peak speed than to slow back down. We'll ignore this for
simplicity.)

For a top service speed of 130 km/sec (exhaust velocity ~400 km/sec, typical of an
advanced ion or early fusion drive), the outbound and inbound legs are each 75
million kilometers, or half the Earth-Sun distance ("astronomical unit," or AU).
Acceleration/decleration will be a gentle 0.01 g. For an advanced fusion drive with
top service speed of 5,000 km/sec, the outbound and inbound legs are each nearly 20
AU, Sun-Uranus distance, and acceleration is 0.44 g. For a matter-antimatter drive
peaking at 0.3c, each leg is 350 AU - five times the diameter of Pluto's orbit -
and acceleration is a bone-crushing 8 g. Unless your ship has some kind of
internal null-g field, forget about it.

All of these normal-space figures will be lower if the ships spend substantial time
in FTL transit. Indeed, if they make most of the passage in FTL the normal-space
legs may be reduced to a piddly Earth-Moon distance, or even less.

Back in normal space, though, we can also estimate the rated power output of ships'
drive engines. (I won't give the calculations, just the results.) These turn out to
be impressive. Take the giant freighter of 120,000 tons full-load mass. Since
acceleration increases as fuel is burned, we'll suppose that the accelerations
given above are at two-thirds fuel load, or a mass of 100,000 tons.

For the most primitive of the three propulsion examples above - exhaust velocity a
mere 400 km/sec, and feeble acceleration of 0.011 g - rated engine power output is
somewhat more than 2000 gigawatts (2 terawatts), more or less the electric power
consumption of the United States. If you could somehow hook that ship's engines to
the California power grid, brownouts would cease to be a concern. For the advanced
fusion drive, exhaust velocity about 10,000 km/sec and acceleration of 0.44 g, the
juice flows faster. In fact, rated power output goes up by just about a factor of a
thousand, to 2 million gigawatts or 2000 terawatts. Turn on all the lights you
want; the engine-room power gauges won't even flicker. Don't fool with the
controls, though, unless you know what you're doing - one second of full-thrust
operation puts out as much energy as a 500-kiloton bomb. Push the wrong button and
you'll arrive at the Pearly Gates instead of Seychelle.

Do you even want to know the power output of the matter-antimatter drive? Well,
here it is anyway: exhaust velocity of c, the speed of light, 300,000 km/sec;
acceleration of 7.9 g; power output rather more than 10^9 gigawatts or a million
terawatts. Trip the light fantastic! (To put things in another perspective, this is
about three one-billionths of the power output of the Sun.)

From this excursion we'll now return to mundane operational issues. Having burned
all that fuel with rather spectacular results, we might - belatedly - ask where the
stuff comes from and how it gets into the tanks. (A starship's "fuel" may, in some
technologies, be two different substances: A fairly small amount of energy source -
U-235, deuterium-tritium, antimatter - the oomph of which is used to throw a whole
lot of something else out the back at high speed to produce thrust. We'll just call
it all fuel.) Presumably it is available somewhere cheaply at bulk rates, but it
probably does not appear naturally in parking orbit around habitable planets, where
starships fill their tanks.

The classic SF solution is to ship it in from somewhere else in space: the Moon, or
the icy moons of outer planets (convenient sources of stuff like deuterium). This
avoids the notoriously expensive surface-to-orbit lift. But we don't know whether
all habitable planets will have a handy moon - I hope not, because if a large moon
is required, as some theorists have suggested, habitable planets may be a good deal
less common than otherwise. As for shipping in fuel from the outer planets (or ores
from an asteroid belt, for shipbuilding), this has its own problems.

The economics of interplanetary transport are essentially the same as those of

interstellar transport using FTL. (The whole point of FTL being to make the stars
about as reachable as Solar System planets are.) If tankers are going to make a
round-trip run of Earth-Jupiter distance in a few weeks, they will have to reach
speeds on the order of 1000 km/sec. Unless your starships' normal-space technology
is right up at the high end, the tankers will be as costly to build and operate as
starships themselves. If instead the tankers move in low-energy transfer orbits
their turnaround time will be a year or more; to bring in the fuel needed by the
starship fleet they'll either have to be enormous or a large number will be needed.

Fuel delivered either way will not cheap by the time it reaches the pump. Nor is
having the starships make fueling stops at the outer planets any solution; the
extra transit legs added to every voyage will cost more than you save.

This leaves the alternative of shipping up fuel by shuttle from the habitable
planet. Why not? Most of the freight the starships carry is going from planet
surface to planet surface anyway. It's true that ideas like space mining and so on
were developed in the first place to avoid hauling stuff up to orbit, which for us
is horrendously costly - about $10 million/ton. But for people to colonize space
at all, the surface-to-orbit lift obviously has to become vastly cheaper. We have
to get up there, after all. And if a civilization can build starships, it should be
able to build a shuttle that can fly to orbit about as cheaply as a jetliner can
get to Newark.

Suppose, then, that shuttle economics are equivalent to jetliner economics today.
The round trip to low orbit and back - not counting loading and unloading time
while up there - is about two hours, considerably less than a transcontinental jet
flight. With loading/unloading, maintenance downtime and so on, allow four flights
a day. A round trip passenger ticket, then, will run $250 dollars; round trip
freight service is about $1000/ton - ten percent added on to the interstellar
transit rate.

Fuel only goes up, but the shuttles obviously have to come back down for the next
load. We can imagine that everything possible will be done to streamline the
process. High-capacity pumps at each end minimize dwell time. Fuel shuttles might
be pilotless, to save on life support and safety systems. (If a crewless shuttle
crashes, it's lost money but no grieving loved ones unless it falls on someone, and
they'll be routed over uninhabited areas. Also, it won't lead the news and trigger
public hearings by the Planetary Council.) Altogether, it might be possible to
squeeze fuel lift costs to $500/ton. If the starships carry a ton and a half of
fuel for each ton of cargo, that adds another $750/ton to interstellar shipping
costs. Total surface-to-orbit overhead is then $1750, or 17.5 percent - a nuisance,
but not enough to demolish our cost and traffic estimates.

So much for shuttles; back now to the starships. How big are they?

Take the present-day maritime tonnage rule; one registered ton = 100 cubic feet =
~3 cubic meters. Assume it applies to fuel and hull (e.g., crew quarters,
engineering spaces, etc.) as well as cargo. If the largest ship in service has a
cargo capacity of 40,000 tons - twice that of the typical big freighter - her full
load mass is 120,000 tons, and she has a total volume of 360,000 cubic meters.

A spherical ship of this size has a diameter of about 90 meters = 300 ft. If
instead the hull is more or less cigar-shaped, with a length-diameter ratio of 6:1,
this ship is 300 meters = 1000 ft long, with a diameter of 50 meters = 165 ft. At
the other end of the spectrum, a 1500-ton capacity tramp trader, if spherical, has
a diameter of about 30 meters = 100 ft. If cigar-shaped she is about 100 meters =
330 ft long. Modular ships would have dimensions in this same general range, but
somewhat larger due to being assembled out of separate component pods.

Crew requirement: This is difficult to estimate. Since crew members have about the
same berthing requirements as passengers, each represents about one ton =
$100,000/year in lost revenue capacity, so starship crews will be kept as small as
practical. The operating crew need not be very large. Say, a pilot-navigator and
engineer for each watch, plus life support specialist/medic, cargomaster, and the
ship's captain, for a total of nine. Small ships would squeeze this down to four or
five; the big ones might may double up the positions with assistants and trainees
and have an operating crew of 20 or 25.

However, with ships enroute for a month or so at a time, maintenance technicians

will be needed. Unlike aircraft, maintenance can't all be done during layovers, and
since time is money you don't want to hold off departure because station techs
haven't finished some routine servicing. Suppose, conservatively, one technician is
embarked per $100 million in construction cost (i.e., stuff that has to be
maintained). Small ships then have a maintenance crew of seven or eight, for a
total of ten or twelve; the largest ship in service might have a crew of up to 250.

The scut work - swabbing decks and peeling potatoes, etc. - will of course be done
by junior crew. Passenger-carrying ships, however, will need crew for hotel-type
services - stewards, chefs, and the like. (Except for colony ships; colonists can
do it themselves.) Coach class could make do with about one for every ten
passengers. First class may get one for every two or three passengers; the first-
class passengers also get larger cabins, and their ticket prices reflect it. If the
typical ship has one percent of load given over to passengers, the required hotel
staff would increase the crew by about a third. (Unhappily, they are likely to be
looked down on by the operating and tech crew members.) On a passenger ship the
hotel staff will vastly outnumber the rest of the crew, by some 30 to 1.

Before going on to the Cool Stuff, we can also say something about the orbital
stations these ships travel between. These stations will host a variety of
ancillary functions, but they exist primarily as starship ports and service bases.
If at a given time three-fourths of the ships are en route, with the rest "in
port," at stations orbiting one of the dozen colony worlds in the network, we might
expect to see about fifteen starships docked up to an average station. One or two
would be quite large ones, and a ship will arrive or depart about three times a
day. Orbit-to-surface traffic is heavy; if each cargo shuttle can carry the load of
a 747 jet freighter, about 100 arrive and depart each day. If starship fuel is
shuttled up from the surface, some 150 daily tanker arrivals are needed as well.
(At four daily flight for each shuttle, about 65 are required.) This is for a
typical station; the busiest in the trade network might have over twice the
traffic volume.

At any one time we might expect to find 200 or 300 off-duty starship crew members
in an average station; if seaport and airport experience is anything to go by, most
will be in bars. Unlike airports, however, through passenger traffic is small; only
about two hundred or so arrive or depart each day. Passenger shuttles, however,
also carry station crew, ships' crew members going downside to sightsee, etc., so
there should be a few daily passenger flights.

A station is in effect a ship without a drive engine, so its general

characteristics can be estimated much the same way. If ten percent of the overall
cost of the merchant fleet goes to support the stations (reasonable, since the
stations maintain the ships), the stations taken together will have about a tenth
of the fleet's deadweight mass, or some 180,000 tons all told. A typical station
would then have a mass of 15,000 tons - not counting cargo awaiting loading, fuel
in storage tanks, etc. Stations, however, are likely to grow by accretion over the
years and become great sprawling structures extending hundreds of meters in all
directions.

The maintenance crew of the average station, using the same estimate as for ships,
would be about 150. However, stations provide the major ship maintenance, so they
probably have about as many technicians altogether as the ships themselves do. They
alone will multiply the station population by tenfold; support staff and
miscellaneous services might double it again, so that a typical station could have
some 3000 workers. The largest might have two or three times as many. Living
quarters will be nearly as expensive as ship quarters, but frequent shuttle fares
also add up, so many people may live on board, even with their families - making
the station a small but very cosmopolitan orbiting town.

The entire spacefaring population of the trade network, ship crews and stationers,
comes to well over 50,000 people, perhaps as many as 100,000 (out of a total
population on the dozen colonies of some 120 million). The space economy as a
whole, however, employs many times more. If the merchant marine industry accounts
for three percent of the economy it will also employ some three percent of the work
force, perhaps 2 million people altogether, with a similar number employed in
import/export industries.

Guarding the Spaceways ...

Space science fiction wouldn't sell many books if people on these stellar colonies
just traded peacefully with each other. Dramatic tension calls for a ruckus. This
is not unrealistic; judging from history a ruckus can usually be counted on.

Based on the estimates for the interstellar merchant marine, we can also make some
guesses about space war fleets. People may fight each other even if they have no
trade relations at all (not even rivalries), but historically the great navies have
usually belonged to trading powers - Athens, Venice, Britain, etc. - and their
primary mission was trade protection.
The expense of a trade-protection navy is basically an insurance premium charged
against trade. Let's say that our 12-colony network is a trade federation, and its
"insurance premium" for defense is ten percent of the total value of trade. (The
setup could just as well be one planet monopolizing trade, in which case the navy
protects the franchise; we'll delicately call it a federation anyway.) Since half
the value of trade goes to support the merchant fleet - the other half being
initial purchase cost of shipped goods - the cost of the war fleet will then be
about 1/5 that of the merchant marine.

We may suppose that interstellar warships have roughly the same relationship to
cargo ships as cruisers to ocean liners or jet bombers to airliners. Instead of
cargo they carry weapons and sensors plus armor, more powerful engines, and greater
fuel capacity. Ton for full-load ton they are doubtless more expensive than trade
ships, maybe twice as much, but the cost per deadweight ton is about the same,
since the technology going into it is similar. (Some present-day warplanes have a
much higher cost-to-mass ratio than jetliners. But that is due partly to
"goldplating" of weapon systems and partly to false economies such as small orders
that reduce production efficiencies. We'll assume that our trade federation takes
a businesslike approach to its fleet.)

For a first approximation we'll simply scale down the merchant marine by a factor
of five to get the war fleet. Using the standard First World War jargon for space
warships, we'll say one battlecruiser for each five heavy freighters, one cruiser
for each five medium freighters and one light combatant - call her a corvette,
since destroyers were a specialized type for torpedo and antisubmarine warfare -
for each five small freighters.

Thus the order of battle is

15 battlecruisers
60 cruisers
80 corvettes

This may or may not be a balanced fleet, depending on actual requirements.

Substitute as needed. And in practice we'll probably have to replace some cruisers
and corvettes with auxiliaries of various types. But cargo ships can also be
requisitioned in wartime for auxiliary missions (such as, especially, tankers).
Depending on the technology and threat level, it may also be feasible to fit cargo
ships with weapon pods instead of cargo pods and use them as armed merchant
cruisers. Contrariwise, warships may be fitted with cargo pods to serve as
extremely well-armed transports.

The battlecruisers, let us say, have a full-load mass of 30,000 tons each;
cruisers, 7500 tons; corvettes, 2000 tons. This comes out pretty close to the
tonnages of naval ships c. 1916. (I swear I didn't plan that!) Because of their
heavy fuel loads, however, their "Washington Treaty" mass - with all munitions and
supplies aboard, but without fuel - would be about a third as much. A
battlecruiser will cost $10 billion (twice the cost of a present-day supercarrier);
a corvette $700 million.

Assuming these ships are of the cigar-shaped configuration (Hollywood doesn't want
fat warships), the battlecruisers are about 200 meters = 650 ft long ... about the
same size as the ones at Jutland. The little corvettes are about 75 meters = 250
ft long. This makes a corvette about the same size as a 747 or C-5, though larger
in diameter and bulkier. Put another way, a corvette is rather close in size (and
mass) to the Shuttle in launch configuration. If the corvettes have a surface-
landing module - not unreasonable, for these workhorses of interstellar gunboat
diplomacy - they might even have a fairly similar overall appearance. (The
express-mail courier ships would closely resemble corvettes, and might well be a
civil version of the same design.)

Probably the war fleet has a somewhat lower peacetime operating tempo than the
merchant marine - the warships spend about half their time docked up to stations,
instead of a quarter or so as for the merchant ships. The savings in operating
expenses allows for somewhat greater procurement, so they are replaced and retired
from active duty after 20 years rather than 30. Most then go into a mothballed
reserve force for another 20 years; hence the reserve is the same size as the
active fleet. As with cargo ships, however, warships might instead undergo top-to-
bottom overhauls and remain in service much longer.

Crews we can imagine will be larger in proportion than for cargo ships, but follow
a similar pattern. The operating crew will be augmented with offensive and
defensive weapon controllers, scan/ECM, and communications/intelligence; large
ships will also have a command staff. Interstellar warships don't need hands to
feed photons into lasers, much less shovel deuterium into the engines, but the crew
of technicians will be larger per unit cost, since they may need to repair battle
damage. Some warships may also carry a landing force of marines. Given the berthing
cost and limited space (most of the ship is fuel) there won't be many of them, but
they'll be highly trained elite troops comparable to SEALS. Overall, we might give
a battlecruiser a crew of 300 and a corvette a crew of 20; rather more if a landing
strike team is embarked.

This is not a huge force. The combined crews of all ships come to just over 10,000,
with probably a similar number on "shore duty" at any given time. Add in the
marines and the total number wearing the uniform is still no more than about 25-
30,000, with perhaps a similar number of civilian employees. Defense spending (at
least for running the fleet, by far the largest item) is a modest $72 billion, 0.6
percent of the trade federation's combined GPP. In a prolonged, major war the fleet
would expand greatly. However, it is supported by trade. If the cost of trade
protection - the "insurance premium" - approaches or even exceeds the value of
trade itself there might be a general collapse of political support, with people
dumping Rigellian green-fuming brandy out the airlocks or at least into a harbor.

Operations in a trade war will tend to be primarily in space. If large-scale

planetary landings are required, however, cargo ships can be pressed into service
as troop transports. Light infantry might be considered equivalent to civil
passengers, one ton equivalent cargo capacity per soldier. However, some heavier
equipment will doubtless be required, plus shuttles to carry troops, gear, and
provisions to the surface, and other armed shuttles for close air support. All in
all we might expect an invasion force to require perhaps three tons per soldier in
spacelift, not counting the naval escort. If a tenth of the federation's entire
merchant marine is gathered as an invasion force it can transport and land 120,000
light troops - considerably fewer, if much heavy equipment (e.g., tanks) is
required. But 120,000 troops is a quite considerable force for invading a planet of
some 10 million people.

The Star-road to Empire ...

All of the above is for a modest trade federation of a dozen colony planets,
suitable to a fairly early era in interstellar history. At a later period the scale
of things could get larger - very much larger. Suppose an interstellar empire of a
thousand worlds, each having an average population of 100 million people.
Everything above can then be multiplied by a factor of over 800. (!)

Ships would probably grow in size as well as numbers; by this time improved
technology allows long-haul main trade routes. If a typical ship is now three times
larger in linear dimensions she will be 27 times greater in mass, and the fleet can
have thirty times as many of them. Large cargo ships will then be up to 300 meters
= 1000 ft in diameter if spherical, or a kilometer long if cigar-shaped. Each has a
cargo capacity of over a million tons, with a full-load mass of up to five million
tons each. The empire's merchant marine will have about a thousand ships in this
size range (and doubtless some that are much larger). In addition the merchant
marine has perhaps fifty thousand (!) ships of 20,000-plus tons capacity each, plus
of course hundreds of thousands of smaller vessels. The great hub-route stations
are true celestial cities, with populations in the millions.

The Imperial Navy's capital ships are, let us say, also a kilometer long, with a
full load mass of three million tons each. Here we've increased size more than
numbers. Building cost of each: a cool $1 trillion, with a crew of 30,000 - as
large as the entire force of the early trade federation.. The Imperial Grand Fleet
comprises some 125 of these great dreadnoughts, and well upwards of a thousand
cruisers, averaging a mere couple of hundred thousand tons each. As with the early
trade federation this is by no means the largest force that could be afforded. The
Imperial Senate holds down annual budgets firmly in the $60 trillion range; it is
a modest, economical trade-defense fleet.

Thus, a middle-period interstellar empire. For the Galactic Empire, allow perhaps
100,000 worlds with an average population of a few billion people each. The scaling
factor this time is another 3000x or so. But I'll let you run the numbers for that
one ....

-- Rick Robinson