Hauling Mass

A while ago I wrote an article talking about traveling, and now it can shape the population, which than shapes the world. However when it comes to transportation there’s another aspect: what is doing the transportation. The technology and methods of logistics are equally important as the modes of travel. There for, how to evaluate transportation options and what you can do with it.

To help chart the different modes of transpiration I like to establish three scores: Speed, Capacity, and Cost. Speed, and capacity are straight forward; how fast does get the stuff from A to B, and how much can it carry in one trip from A to B. Generally these two are inversely related, or in common terms as Speed goes up Capacity goes down. Often this is as far as the analysis goes, generally this holds. Ships are slow, but carry massive amounts of stuff, trains are faster and carry less, trucks are the fastest and carry the least. However this nice relation is ruined by airplanes. Cargo airplanes carry more than trucks (at least in the US) and are the fastest. Thus the question: Why isn’t everything shipped by air? Cost. Cost isn’t simply the cost of moving from A to B, although if one wishes one could use it that way, it is the cost of creation, maintenance, infrastructure and moving from A to B. Yes for those who want to go above and beyond the infrastructure should have creation, and maintenance, cost scores as well.

This reveals why we don’t fly everything everywhere: airports are expensive, airplanes are expensive, avgas or jet fuel is expensive, pilots are expensive, thus air transportation is expensive. Couple that with the land costs for airports; it becomes rather obvious that we won’t be delivering everything via air. Air transportation is too expensive, both in land and money to become the go to transit for most goods. Now with delivery drone tech supposedly two years away (as it was five years ago) airborne drone delivery may become a cheaper alternative to delivery drivers. Under that model speed would go up, cost would go down, while maintaining the same capacity. The same concept should be applied to everything from dragons to wormhole generators.

For example, lets say there is a world that is roughly 15% landmass 85% ocean on the surface, and double the landmass at sea level is broken up into islands that float between three and nine thousand feet. These flying islands will have a different set of rules to the Afro-Euroasia sized supercontinent. Boats don’t really work mid air, neither do trains. Yes there may be some large, flying islands that may have use of boats or trains, yet the rest may instead may have to pay for air options. Thus we come to a fork: Is the sea level landmass the old world, with the new world in the sky, for so long out of reach until the invention of powered flight, or is there no real difference between the age of the locations, meaning flight is as old to them as ships are for us?

This is also sidestepping magic. If one has magic justifying the use or absence of use in transportation will need to happen, if not in story than in the world guide one is writing from. Take Slonminma as example. With magic the ‘costs’ are too great to move things much larger than what a backpack and the backpacker could carry. Yet have the magic produce electricity or steam and it can move shiploads. This means that there are some very advanced steam powered trains, ships, airships, and planes all competing with their electric, and pure magic, powered alternatives. This provides depth to the world as there are many solutions in the space, which emulates real life.

Yet this technology question isn’t the only one to think about when inventing logistics for a new world. How the logistical system works is equally important. Which leads us to have less options then technology, there is the hub and spoke, and point to point. For those with an airline background you may recognize these as the two major airline structures. Hub and spoke is the older, more recognizable system where small airplanes fly to big airports and one connects to a larger airplane before heading off to the next location. This is contrasted with the point to point system where medium sized airplanes fly from A to B, generally with ‘hubs’ being larger airports that can support more outbound traffic and thus more flights and destinations. Otherwise there are flights from A to B as demand can support.

This system can be translated almost one to one to all logistics. The issue of ‘last mile delivery’ which postulates that the most expensive part of delivering anything is the final mile to the customer. This comes back to our speed, capacity, cost numbers in the beginning. Often final delivery is fast enough, but low capacity and high cost. The easiest way to cut the cost is to add more to the capacity yet most people aren’t ordering pallets worth of goods from Amazon to their house. This means that to get something from factory to you, it will have to go though multiple different positions to get to you. This can be shown by most tracked packages, when they go though multiple different sorting facilities along its way towards you. Different types of transportation can be used on each step, I’ve seen a package go first by plane, to get on a boat, to get on a train to then get on a truck that then brings it to my house.

This chain takes advantage of the economy of scale, or the axiom that says the higher capacity the cheaper the individual cost. That said, not all technologies scale that way. These either become specialized transportation options, armored cars would be an example, or technological dead ends, see airships. These dead ends are also important since each of the dead ends can show off either old technology, or a unique evolution of technology. Bush pilots, and the few seaplane airlines found in the tropical islands. A hundred years ago talking off and landing either from unprepared fields or the ocean was common place. Now, not so much. Both have lower costs especially with the infrastructure, yet the higher speeds, and operating costs are low enough to make them more cost effective than the more flexible options.

Now worldbuliding out of the way how does this impact the stories within the world. Much like the travel article the majority of the transportation of goods won’t have direct impact. Yet it will tint everything . The more transpiration throughput the farther flung items will come from, meaning exotic may not be as exotic. Plus as goods move things will homogenize, as things can get from one place to the other easier and the best products will have wider markets. This can lead to some interesting mercantile stores, competing for foreign markets or competing against foreign suppliers. All in all the story connections are close to that of the travel. The easier the transportation, the farther things and information can come from.

The information trade is an interesting side effect to both travel and trade. Generally across history people learned about foreign places not from travelers, since they didn’t have the time to travel, but the things traded. Thoughts like: “Persia has nice rugs they must have cold floors” may sound strange today, where we can go and look up all about the lands that made up Persia. If all we had to go off of were very nice Persian rugs, is it as far fetched? If long distance transportation is slow, expensive, or low capacity the known world will be a smaller place.

In conclusion, transportation of goods is as important as the transportation of people. Take the time to think about how different modes score up against each other, and how each one impacts the wider world. Think about how each one of these can move information, and how that affects the worldviews of the people living in the world.

See you in two weeks.