[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[Jon%20Lincicum]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Philip Hart" <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> 
To: dragaera at lists.dragaera.info 
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 11:37:40 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
Subject: Re: [Dragaera] Teleport Shipping 

[...] 

>On Thu, 28 Jan 2010, Ken Koester wrote: 
> 
>> It would take something for teleportation to approach the efficiency of water 
>> transport for bulk transport of goods. You'd have to get sorcerors who could 
>> pitch tons of goods for coppers, I'm betting, before it would pay off on most 
>> items. 
> 
>Could you flesh out/improve/quantize my 30*5*10 Teckla-hours labor 
>lower-bound guessestimate for the route in question? I don't even know 
>how many tons we're talking about moving via barge, how long that would 
>take to load from warehouse/unload to warehouse by hand per Teckla, etc. 
>Do we know what a Teckla makes per hour (not working in e.g. the palace)? 

I've tried to make rough estimates of an "average" income for a city-bound Teckla based on comments Vlad made in /Jhereg/ and /Taltos/ about his income when running his father's restaurant. 

>From what I can tell, he brought in 5 or 6 imperials a month in this profession. Obviously, this was not a high-end establishment, so it's possible that some Teckla may earn a significant amount more than this. To the left, however, how many Teckla can afford to own restaurants in the first place? Or have the skills to run their own business? 

As a rough guess, I would posit that Vlad's profession running the restaurant actually made him fairly well-to-do. It did, after all, allow his father to save enough to evenutally buy that Jhereg title. The impression I've always gotten is that most Teckla aren't going to afford this, even after 30 years of saving. 

Based on prices we've seen Vlad pay for meals, it seems unlikely to me that anyone could support themselves in the city on much less than 2 or 3 Orbs per day. (Which, due to the length of the Dragaeran month and the ratio of orbs to imperials means this is also 2 to 3 Imperials per month). I'm assuming an approximately 15-hour workday (which would leave 10 hours for sleep, and 5 more for "free time" each day). 

Given that what you're talking about is common manual (i.e. unskilled) labor, I'd guess toward the low end of this scale for such work. At this rate, you could probably get a gang of 9 Teckla working all day for 1 imperial total. 

Majikjon