Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
In my Traveller/Cepheus Engine Universe, pretty much everything is tramp/Free Trader for interstellar commerce. There are very few dedicated commercial lines. It all depends on your universe.
This is an interesting point.The big ticket items on a civilian starship tends to be the engines, and the smallest default jump drive starts at fifteen megabux (at least in the MongoVerse).
This is an interesting point.
Why is something as common as a Jump Drive so expensive.
It's a 1000 year old technology that by now has been refined to be as efficient as practical. Patents long since expired. Basic of operations long documented and explored. Drives reversed engineered and duplicated.
Learning to work on one should be available at any trade school.
There should be hundreds of YouTube videos available on tearing them apart and putting them back together again.
Suitable test equipment should be available on eBay, Craigslist, Harbor Freight, and the local NAPA parts store.
Labor is labor. If it takes 1000 hours to build a jump drive, so be it. But in Traveller Bucks (i.e. Credits roughly equal 1980-ish dollars), $100/hr is probably a high number. So, that's only 100,000Cr.
Is it the exotic elements required to manufacture them? Where is the market for those materials? Where are the Belters, miners, geographers hunting the exotic Mano Crystals used to empower Jump Drives?
Simply, if there is some exotic element, there's never been much discussion about it.
It's not the hull grid material (Lanthum? Something like that?). That's a separate part of the Jump drive. Maybe it's part of the cost. But then you'd think that the drive and hull are correlated. And that's not the case, especially in Book 2 where a Q, E, D, X, Y, Z drive can fit in multiple hull sizes, but cost the same.
So, anyway, just where does the money go when making a Jump Drive?
In the OTU apparently, this is NOT the case. If it was, then TL would converge across systems and you wouldn't have such diversity as we see in the 2000 year old Imperium. For some reason technology does not transfer even over the span of millennium. This should probably be part of our explanation as to why J-drives remain expensive: capacity for building them is not easily duplicated.It's a 1000 year old technology... Patents long since expired. Basic of operations long documented and explored. Drives reversed engineered and duplicated.
Well, yes and no. Why can't the amount of labor involved be substantially higher? Maybe we aren't talking about assembly labor, but instead each drive requires teams of scarce scientific and engineering talent to even get it work? Perhaps each "standard" drive, is standard in output specification only, but is in fact a minor technological miracle to build in the first place.Labor is labor. If it takes 1000 hours to build a jump drive, so be it. But in Traveller Bucks (i.e. Credits roughly equal 1980-ish dollars), $100/hr is probably a high number. So, that's only 100,000Cr.
How much does a jet engine cost?
Quick google gives a cost of $12-35 million for civilian jet engines.
I would imagine a jump drive to be more expensive than a jet engine...
How much does a jet engine cost?
Quick google gives a cost of $12-35 million for civilian jet engines.
I would imagine a jump drive to be more expensive than a jet engine...
So we need advanced alloys, perfect crystals and various subassemblies, things that are expensive to make until you are in a post scarcity society (which the TL12+ cultures of the OTU would be if their economies were not being manipulated by an empire that wants to maintain its slice of the pie - gravitics, makers, fusion/fusion+ and the resources of whole systems generating wealth for the megacorporation shareholders and the nobility)
...what is effectively a thermonuclear bomb and convert it to opening a portal to the jump dimensions...
I agree with you completely.