BTW, space trading makes no sense

Started by Lightzy, December 02, 2016, 06:32:11 AM

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Lightzy

Seems not.. logical.

Why not just pay the motherfucker to transport you back home?

WTF am I trading guns for cybernetics if the goal is get the fuck off-planet?!

I think space trading should be removed/changed or at least it should be explained in-game why you can't just hitch a ride with a passing trader instead of mining the entire planet dry in order to build your own spaceship

MajorMonotone

Well I think the explanation that makes sense is that the ships trade via an automated system with no human input from the traders side, prices and items wanted are defined before hand and it is all done via an automated system.

Daman453

As I see it, is as said above, automatic traders. Or if there is a person inside the ship, they are told to ignore rimworders because they could be anyone. Even if they would accept, maybe the pods can't go back up, maybe it's a one use pof,  or it can't hold a person. Many reasons why even if you couls ask you can't go
Quote from: StorymasterQ on February 02, 2016, 08:19:52 PM
For flu, try a cock. If that doesn't work, try boobmilk. Nice.


zandadoum

has been explained several times in the past. i think there's even some quotes from Tynan himself.

it's something amongst the lines of:

trade ships are on slow long routes, they might even travel 1000y withour actually landing anywhere.
why would you want to travel with them? chances are they will never come across any planet that is better than the one you are.

plus, who tells you they wont drug and sell your sorry arse at first chance? better build your own ship, no?

Mkok

This has been a major problem since the early aplhas. If I remember correctly it is on the list to fix (somehow) in the future.

carbon

*orbital comm relay detected ...*
*establishing link ...*
*...*
*link established*
*A/V feed activated*


Colonist: "Hi There! Boy, am I glad to see you! We've been waiting months here to get off this rock."

Trader: "Hello. You're interested in transport 'eh? Standard rate is 200 sph (silver per head per parsec). Can you afford that?"

C: "Oh yeah, we've made a killing here interacting with the worlders. We can do any price."

T: "Sounds good. How many?"

C: "12 live, plus one in crypto."

T: "Got it. I'll send you the invoice. Transfer the silver to the nearest beacon and we'll get you on your way. Oh, nice hat by the way."

C: "Thanks! You should've seen him when he was alive though. Ugliest outlander you ever saw. Tasted okay though."

T: "Uhhhh...."

*link disconnected*
*re-establishing link ...*
*...*
*...*
*...*
*orbital comm relay no longer detected*

mumblemumble

I would say something along the lines of interspace law.

figure it like how immigrants are viewed : you don't know who they are, what they have done, who they hurt, or if they have anything. So taking them is a very serious risk

Pirates might not follow such a law, which is why they sell slaves, but then why take you as NOT a slave?

Not only that, but in potential intergalactic warfare, security protocols with ships involved in glitter-words, and other issues, I could see SO much red tape preventing it.

I mean, briefly imagine how much red tape goes on with SPACE TRAVEL, if theres already so much with AIRPLANE travel.
Why to people worry about following their heart? Its lodged in your chest, you won't accidentally leave it behind.

-----

Its bad because reasons, and if you don't know the reasons, you are horrible. You cannot ask what the reasons are or else you doubt it. But the reasons are irrefutable. Logic.

milon

I'm pretty certain Tynan has stated that space trading has always been a placeholder for land-based trading, which wasn't a thing for the longest time.  You know - the game IS still alpha.  ;)

Limdood

Quote from: mumblemumble on December 02, 2016, 09:08:43 AM
I would say something along the lines of interspace law.

figure it like how immigrants are viewed : you don't know who they are, what they have done, who they hurt, or if they have anything. So taking them is a very serious risk

Pirates might not follow such a law, which is why they sell slaves, but then why take you as NOT a slave?

Not only that, but in potential intergalactic warfare, security protocols with ships involved in glitter-words, and other issues, I could see SO much red tape preventing it.

I mean, briefly imagine how much red tape goes on with SPACE TRAVEL, if theres already so much with AIRPLANE travel.

Still too many problems there.

intergalactic law makes no sense.  Planets range from stone age to glitterworlds, and planet ending tragedies abound as per the rimworld lore.  FTL travel is impossible so who's going to enforce intergalactic law?  The person wouldn't even be alive by the time you got to them.  Furthermore, having the law even just enforced at destination doesn't even follow...expecting documentation for travellers that have been on a spaceship for hundreds of years doesn't follow either.  If the travellers were awake, they're long dead and their kids would have no such documentation, or no way of certifying authentic documentation.  Regulations on worlds could change anyways on the target planet, even assuming they were AWARE of space travel.

Unmanned spacecraft doesn't follow due to the fact that a pawn's social skill affects price (which i get is probably just a QOL thing, but it does debunk that idea...would be the easiest to change to make sense).

The only explanation that really works is that the colonists don't WANT to go.  For whatever reason, boarding that spacecraft is a real and imminent threat to their life, moreso than staying on the planet.  Maybe space traders are well known for just taking whatever they can get, and any person sent up would just be stripped and ejected out the airlock..

You guys are missing the BIG question though:

If timely travel or communication between planets is impossible, why does every transaction go off without a hitch?  What's to stop either party from loading up the transport pods with...nothing.  Or receiving their goods and just not sending any.  Since we know the colony has no means of attacking a spaceship, either the space traders have all the power, or both parties are incapable of harming one another. Which means the balance of power if solely in the space traders' favor as far as deciding to cheat their customers....after all, what are they going to do?

Lightzy

Err.. why would you care if it's gonna take 10000 years to get home? you get cryo'd.

Also regarding law, the way I understood it, rimworlds are kind of the wild west

Tynan

None of the traders you communicate with are interstellar traders. None of them are going anywhere you'd want to travel to, nor could they, since they don't have starships.

This is like being in a remote fishing town in Libera and asking, "Why can't I just pay one of the fishermen $10 to take me back to Los Angeles?"

(And there's nowhere else you want to be in-system more than you already are, since you chose your landing site when the game started. There are no cities or spaceports, as you can see on the world map.)
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

mumblemumble

#11
Quote from: Lightzy on December 02, 2016, 05:04:47 PM
Also regarding law, the way I understood it, rimworlds are kind of the wild west
This is like saying why can't a guy from columbia smuggle in coke in the united states, because columbia tolerates coke production...

Columbia might, but the united states does not

In turn, the RIMWORLD might be wild west, but the glitterworlds ARE NOT. And I doubt a trader would risk business licenses, seizures from galactic military forces, being banned from places of business, or other issue for a few thousand in silver. Bureaucracy on immigration on EARTH is bad enough, do you REALLY think space immigration would be any easier?

To be completely honest btw tynan, I think my explanation makes more sense... :-X Sure these might just be trade ships, but glitter-world medicine, cybernetics, and other cool gizmos come from SOMEWHERE. Glitter-world tech might be produced from elsewhere, and imported, but I think these traders might eventually visit one.

Where as I can see the unfathomable scale of "galactic immigration" bringing extremely harsh, careful policies for protections of worlds, which leads to a percentage of people to just get "swept under the rug" like on the rimworld, outside the society of the galaxy because they no longer have paperwork, and forced to cope and start anew.

This already somewhat happens in earth, with people who become homeless, or otherwise lose documentation of themselves, and are required to take what they can get. Typically this can fix in a generation, in the case of undocumented people having documented children, but in the case of an entire SOCIETY being built outside, think about it.

If you had a remote area with people who had no documentation, no papers, no info, and were still very wild west, building a town somewhere off in the woods, how long would it take for you to RECOGNIZE THEM as a town, and actually speak to them?

Now put that on the scale of SPACE, and all the extra bureaucracy THAT brings.... And you can see that "first world" planets would want absolutely nothing to do with these people.
Why to people worry about following their heart? Its lodged in your chest, you won't accidentally leave it behind.

-----

Its bad because reasons, and if you don't know the reasons, you are horrible. You cannot ask what the reasons are or else you doubt it. But the reasons are irrefutable. Logic.

brcruchairman

I'm going to add my two cents here. Though Tynan has already spoken, and thus the Word of God (tm) is clear, here's an alternate explanation if the WoG isn't enough for you. :p

There are limited seats. Simple as that.

Assuming that they are interstellar traders (or, in other words, if we're ignoring Tynan and thus the source material altogether :p ) then one would expect them to have about as many berths as they have crew. Since there's no FTL travel, they would, as others have suggested, be in Cryo. Cryopods are expensive; without a terribly compelling reason, no point in having more than necessary, particularly as each one requires power to support it.

Could ships have extra berths? Sure. They could each be designed with HUNDREDS of extra berths. Let us suppose a shit has an arbitrary number of berths. Now let's send that same ship on a tour of rimworlds, doing trading. Each settlement they stop at asks for rescue. Further suppose that it's a paid rescue, with an arbitrarily large price tag. Sooner or later, those berths would fill up. And since we're talking some pretty unfathomable distances to the glitterworlds or urbworlds or whathave you in the core, there are hundreds, thousands of stars in the trader's path. To me, the odds seem good that, even with an arbitrarily large number of berths, it would fill up quickly.

Further note that the above is assuming the traders deliberately have many extra berths on their ship. Since they're traders, not Search & Rescue or passenger liners or whathave you, that strikes me as unlikely in the first place. More likely to me is that the traders simply wouldn't have the room; they're not going to kick out one of their own crew for some stranger. And since the distances they have to travel are vast enough to require cryosleep to survive, just hitching a ride out-of-system isn't an option.

A hole in my argument is that the traders have animals. Animals require either food, water, and air, or else some other sort of cryosleep. An argument could be made that, if animals can hitch a ride when we sell or buy them, colonists could, too. If you interpret the traders, despite Tynan's WoG, as interstellar, then the only way this could be is if the traders offload all their livestock before crossing the boundless depths of space.

Of course, all this is just food for thought; Tynan has made it clear that the orbital traders are just that, orbital, and only tour the local system which is pretty much all Rimworld. I agree with Mumble that this raises the question of where the glitterworld goods come from, but it seems that that is, canonically, a different question.

Bozobub

#13
Nicely put.  In fact, why spend the resources to keep many people alive, much less awake, except when you NEED a monkey or three in the loop?  In fact, that's a perfect justification for the small number of survivors in a typical start; hell, 3-5 people could easily fill the bill for a smallish "tramp freighter".  And even the largest ships would likely be very clannish and deucedly odd to their long-separated brethren, I can imagine, with subjective 100 to 1000-year routes (relativistic or not).

There's a good number of different (but excellent) versions of exactly this in science fiction, by the by.  It's not exactly congruent, but if you haven't yet, you should read Thomas Godwin's "The Cold Equations" (Wiki here but has spoilers, beware!), possibly the best sci-fi short story ever written.  It's been brought to video several (again, excellent) ways, as well.
Thanks, belgord!

Lightzy

Doesn't make sense, or perhaps I misunderstood the explanation.

A trader has to have an "end port" somewhere, somewhere to go with all that "profit".
As explained it's not on the player's word because there's no cities or spaceports.
So the trader must probably go somewhere BETTER after conducting some profitable trade.

So unless all traders in rimworld are automated "trade kiosk" ships with an algorithm saying "stay at this planet, make profit!", with no controller to call them home,  I still don't get why the pawns can't hitch a ride.

(BTW animals/humans are probably held in cryostasis so no resource drain really)