Jumping vs. FTL speeds: economic differences

I'm making the following simplifying assumptions:

• No time travel, time dilation or other temporal effects through use of those technologies (basically, the travelling works as if there were an universal absolute time).
• I ignore the cost of setting up/building drives or infrastructure, as there's no way to estimate them; of course those will also affect the economy.

OK, let's look at the relevant characteristics of the two transport modes:

Jumping (wormholes, jump ports, stargates etc):

• Provides constant-time travel independent of the distance.
• Has to start/finish at specific points in space (the wormhole opening, the jump port, the star gate, etc.), locations away from those end points will be hard to reach, unless/until a new jump port is opened there.
• Has a limited capacity (not arbitrarily many people can travel at the same time).

This will essentially lead to the galactic economy concentrating around the jump ports. Any significant distance from the next jump point will be hard to reach, as only conventional travel is available to go there. Since also conventional travel is needed to get to a new location and build a new jump port there, the civilisation will spread relatively slowly around the galaxy, however as soon as a new jump port has been established, the corresponding region will be quick to reach, and therefore there will be extended trade between the different colonization centers. However the limited capacity will increase the price of jumping, so trade between different "settlements" will be restricted to high-value goods, or goods that you cannot get at one of the places (which automatically get high-value goods at those places).

A lot of planning will go into where to build new jump ports, as the initial investment is high (a long conventional journey to the destination). This means that probably only few companies are in charge of the jump port network, or maybe it is even operated by the government.

FTL speed (Warp drives):

• Provides travel time proportional to the distance.
• Can start and finish anywhere.
• Capacity is effectively only limited by the number of available space ships (space is huge so many ships can travel at the same time).

The faster travel speed will allow to colonize the galaxy much faster; however the fact that travel time depends on the distance means that trade will be predominantly between relatively near places. The colonization will occur much more uniformly, since every point at the same distance is equally easily reached. Moreover, if you have an FTL ship, you're free to go wherever you want; you don't need to wait for someone building infrastructure at the destination.

Unless FTL ships are very expensive, there will be likely many corporations operating them, and possibly even some rich private persons; also, there are likely many companies building such ships.

A combination of both:

The optimal situation would be a combination of both modes of travel. Then very large distances could be covered by a network of jump ports, but colonization is not limited to the immediate surrounding of those jump ports, but can use the FTL space ships to reach a larger distance from the jump port in reasonable time.

posted about 9 years ago

celtschk‭

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