[Dragaera] Teleport Shipping

[Scott Schultz]

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.