Scifi Space Trade and Currency.... What Is Elite Dangerous Correct and Wrong About?

[Spacescifi]

Provided a realistic setting with spaceships like Elite Dangerous, is it remotely realistic that you could buy up 20 tons of fish and sell it somewhere else and reap a good return on your investment?

I mean honestly, habital earth-like worlds have plenty of food, and if you wanted to make better profits you would could realistically find a place on the same planet you bought the fish from to sell it to someone else and reap a good return on the fish. You would not need to interstellar planet hop for mundane food items, since the greatest demand for them would be on the world you got them from, since those folks know it and use it.

I guess a case could be made for space habitats, but unless the population is huge you would be better off with profit margins if you kept food trade/shipping down to the planet of origin.

My conclusions: I am not sure it would be wise or profitable to create a company based on shipping prepared meals to various worlds that are ALREADY Earth-like and inhabited.

You could try to ship to space habitats, but they would limit trade more than a planet would due to a limited amount of storage. Chances are good they would already have food contracts with delivery companies already, and your profit margins would have to compete with that... if they even let you have a contract.

Am I correct in concluding that buying 20 tons of Earth oranges and trying to sell them by shipping them via starship to another Earth world is silly and not a way to maximize profits?

Edited March 3 by Spacescifi

[darthgently]

Maybe the coins of exchange are made of negatively charged unobtainium thus inverting bad deals into good deals through the magic of psi-symmetry.  Anything is possible if the entropy knob on the bubble helmet is zeroed out and the suspension of belief knob is cranked to 11.  It is interesting how making things easier by handwaving removes challenges for the protagonist to overcome and leads to steady state boredom. 

That said, my understanding is that Elite Dangerous has an incredibly accurate, and detailed, star map.   Probably generated directly from publicly available data, which would be easiest

[farmerben]

If normal economics were inverted propulsion would make you money rather than costing.  Maybe it's an oversized Orion ship driven by H bombs.  And for a good sci-fi reason running the drive is profitable, more profitable than any known stationary engine, for a very good reason.  Then you could justify oversized payloads and get paid twice.  Once by the shipper of oranges and once from the profit you make running this drive.

[kerbiloid]

Cargo manifest: "20 t of trout"

Reality:

Spoiler

A 20 t heavy sandtrout.

 

[KSK]

IIRC, Elite Dangerous’s map was partly based on real life data and partly on a fairly sophisticated procedural generation system based on a proper simulation.

The trading part? Unsure but probably not too crazy if you think of foodstuffs and such as luxury goods. In-game you wouldn’t trade foodstuffs between Earth-like worlds anyway since you’d almost certainly be trading between two agricultural economies dealing in much the same sort of goods. You’d be better off shipping them to some mining colony or an industrial station orbiting a mineral rich hall of rock somewhere. In which case I could see 20 tons of fresh fish being a desirable alternative to Space Rations or 3D printed burgers or whatever.

As to how realistic the whole Elite economy is, I suspect the answer is ‘not very’ but it makes a nice gameplay loop.

 

[magnemoe]

11 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Provided a realistic setting with spaceships like Elite Dangerous, is it remotely realistic that you could buy up 20 tons of fish and sell it somewhere else and reap a good return on your investment?

I mean honestly, habital earth-like worlds have plenty of food, and if you wanted to make better profits you would could realistically find a place on the same planet you bought the fish from to sell it to someone else and reap a good return on the fish. You would not need to interstellar planet hop for mundane food items, since the greatest demand for them would be on the world you got them from, since those folks know it and use it.

I guess a case could be made for space habitats, but unless the population is huge you would be better off with profit margins if you kept food trade/shipping down to the planet of origin.

My conclusions: I am not sure it would be wise or profitable to create a company based on shipping prepared meals to various worlds that are ALREADY Earth-like and inhabited.

You could try to ship to space habitats, but they would limit trade more than a planet would due to a limited amount of storage. Chances are good they would already have food contracts with delivery companies already, and your profit margins would have to compete with that... if they even let you have a contract.

Am I correct in concluding that buying 20 tons of Earth oranges and trying to sell them by shipping them via starship to another Earth world is silly and not a way to maximize profits?

I see this as very realistic, at least one cargo plane fly from Norway to Japan every day with fresh salmon. 
Spices paid for the first travel around the world many time over but you only got one of 5 ships home. 

You are not shipping basic food you are skipping luxury items. And location matter, beef would be expensive even on an kilometer sized space habitat so its expensive. 
But they sell fish to ships. 

This obviously require that cost / ton is more like 1 ton from India to Europe in one year in 1700. 
Cheap fusion and a warp drive help a lot here  
But we have cheap exotic fruit all year around today, at one time nobles would rent pineapples to display. 

And you have the natural and organic thing. Don't buy that knock off made on an space station miming the ideal condition for the plant. Buy our authentic tea grown on Pandora by Na'vi farmers. 
Note Na'vi has not developed farming as seen in movies  
 

[Nuke]

seeing as i have never been able to play that game for more than a couple hours a year, idk. fuel and life support consumables are going to be the primary commodities. orbital scrapyards are going to be a thing in the fairly near term once we get fully reusable craft and scale up orbital habitation significantly. salvage is going to be a lot cheaper than launching a new part, even with daily, even hourly launch cadences. these of course get more important the further out you get. as for monetary systems, we will probably just inherit existing earth currencies at first until the space presence is such that you start seeing entirely space borne governments emerge.

[Spacescifi]

15 hours ago, darthgently said:

Maybe the coins of exchange are made of negatively charged unobtainium thus inverting bad deals into good deals through the magic of psi-symmetry.  Anything is possible if the entropy knob on the bubble helmet is zeroed out and the suspension of belief knob is cranked to 11.  It is interesting how making things easier by handwaving removes challenges for the protagonist to overcome and leads to steady state boredom. 

That said, my understanding is that Elite Dangerous has an incredibly accurate, and detailed, star map.   Probably generated directly from publicly available data, which would be easiest

It has virtually nothing to do with chalenges a protagonist has to overcome. Not in my case. Rather, without fiction some scifi stories cannot even be told. And yet economics is at least one thing we understand well enough that we could get it right since unlike warp drives we have working economic real life examples to go off of.

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

seeing as i have never been able to play that game for more than a couple hours a year, idk. fuel and life support consumables are going to be the primary commodities. orbital scrapyards are going to be a thing in the fairly near term once we get fully reusable craft and scale up orbital habitation significantly. salvage is going to be a lot cheaper than launching a new part, even with daily, even hourly launch cadences. these of course get more important the further out you get. as for monetary systems, we will probably just inherit existing earth currencies at first until the space presence is such that you start seeing entirely space borne governments emerge.

 

Space governments would be massive space habitats.

Maybe a scifi civilization of biological immortals is solving the problem of population control by a mix of artificial reproduction (think like birthing chambers for kryptonians in Man of Steel) and space habitats for those that chose to have natural birth.

Edited March 4 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

"Lave has put Tionisla under sanctions! Market prices on the goods from Zaonce are to be corrected! Deliver them and get your prize!"