[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[Eugene Zaretskiy]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Scott Schultz <scott at cjhunter.com> wrote:
> This particular discussion has kind of left the realm of spoilers at this
> point. Vlad riding a barge down a river to the city isn't exactly spoiler
> material.
>
> My take on this is two-fold.
>
> To the left, teleport shipping on a large scale is probably impractical. One
> of the reasons that there are sorcerers who specialize in teleportation is
> that there's a mental discipline involved in fixing the location in one's
> memory to the point where it becomes indelible. A person with an eidetic
> memory might be able to teleport almost anywhere she's been before, but most
> people would draw the line at a few useful locations and call it good. The
> usefulness of certain specialists was that they had "memorized" locations
> that were out of the way but that had high value to the parties that might
> want to travel to that place. Deathsgate Falls, for instance.
>
> Even if a shipping company had a legion of sorcerers on hand to teleport to
> dozens of shipping hubs, and there was no problem sending the goods, you
> still have to distribute the goods away from the hub somehow. That means
> keeping resources on hand at the hub. In other words, despite cutting out
> some of the travel distance and time, in the end, you still have to load up
> wagons and draft animals to deliver it to the final destinations.
>
> Given that, it may simply be that it's more economical to use ordinary
> shipping and let it get there a couple of days later. Tekla cost next to
> nothing whereas trained sorcerers are rather more expensive to maintain.
>
> On the gripping hand, you also have the established commercial Houses like
> the Orca, Chreotha, and Jhegalla. These guys have all of their trade routes
> and agreements in place and stand to lose business if things suddenly change
> dramatically. You can be sure that their Imperial Representatives would be
> fighting to hold onto their commercial power and leverage the Empire's
> business as much as possible. Even if teleportation IS practical, it may
> simply be that it's politically unviable for the same reasons that we
> subsidize various kinds of industry in our own world. Self interest and a
> desire to preserve certain ways of life and ways of business.
>

Good breakdown of the earlier discussion, I think. Funny, though,
because you present another version of "the last mile problem"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_problem) which typically
applies only to telecommunications.

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-- 
Eugene Z
http://blog.eugenez.net