Shepard Quest Mk VII, Age of Revy (ME/MCU)
- Thread starter tri2
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It has an annoying habit of doing that. Hope it's for good reasons, or at least non-shitty ones.
I think that's part of the reason for buying Fortuna, which is a promising industrial site but has little in the way of things that make habitation appealing. Setting up a regular forgeworld system seems entirely reasonable there, especially how close it is to Arcturus Station.
- Location
- United states
As people pointed out probably just a ton of factories on either a planet or moon. Because, no offense, this isn't 40K.
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- Location
- Warsaw
It probably would be in the company colors with a mix of organic curves and utilitarian designs. All of it high tech. Spires rising into the sky while drones hurry about and factories churn below. Definitely defenses and shipyards circling the planet. Maybe with a moon converted into a massive shipyard after it has nothing more of use.
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- United states
That seems accurate. To be clear I nothing wrong with people thinking up our own equivalent to a forgeworld, just that it's important to remember that it would be more based on something the works/makes sense for a MCU/Mass Effect cross than full on Warhammer so it's based to temper expectations.
To give an example while we are likely going to eventually fill an entire world with enough factories that could be miles long over the entire planet it's probably not going to be for a while since we would probably try to avoid the 'all our eggs in one basket' issue by putting too much production on a planet we just bought before we can improve it's defenses enough that we would need to worry as much about an enemy doing something like launching an entire fleet to take out said forgeworld.
- Location
- cakebomb
The reapers can only do that if they physically control the citadel. The prothean survivors disabled the reapers remote access so that Sovereign can't easily wake his friends in the void between galaxies.
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So in a way we already have significantly boosted the economy. 13 billion people at 55,000cr average wage gives the Alliance a GDP of ~715 trillion credits. In 2174 we had a revenue of 5.23 trillion credits and in 2175 that is projected to grow to at least 16.4 trillion (likely more since I don't think I've factored in our factories coming online early yet). So Paragon Industries already represents between 0.73% and 2.3% of the Alliance's total GDP. Now sure a fair amount of that revenue is likely sourced from within the Alliance so it is more redistribution then growth but a lot is also sourced from the Citadel markets.
Then there is the Arc Reactor revolution. Electricity was already cheap thanks to widespread Fusion Reactors so sadly it isn't as much of a revolution as it could be. However we're still talking about going from cheap to effectively free. To provide a sense of scale Earth IRL consumed ~600 exajoules of energy in 2018 or ~19TW. If you converted all of that to Arc Reactors it would cost 950 million credits at market (250,000cr per 5GW) prices. Assuming even a very short 5 year lifespan then distributed across even 10% of Earth's population (780 million people) that translates to 0.24 credits per year in extra tax for free energy. Even assuming a massive blowout in energy consumption resulting in a 10x increase in demand despite only a 1.46x population increase then the top 10% (1,140 million people) are still only paying 1.67cr/yr for basically unlimited energy. Unlimited effectively free energy opens up a lot of otherwise extremely wasteful industrial techniques.
Plug and Play skills is a big one for increasing the commoditization of labor by removing the barrier of training time and effectively making all jobs unskilled. This should allow for otherwise underskilled workers to more easily find work. However there is still a major limiting factor; labor mobility. It is rather telling that from the codex entries life in the colonies is basically as good as the best places on Earth yet plenty of people on Earth still live in squalor. This strongly suggests that there are high barriers, almost certainly economic, to migrating from Earth to the colonies.
Given what we know the most likely source of these barriers is the cost of transportation. As previously calculated the absolute cheapest level for spacecraft transportation is looking at 30cr per day. Except such a ship is too slow for actual intersteller hops since we're talking a speed of 1 to 2 LY per day putting even Alpha Centauri basically out of range without a discharge point between the two. So scaling up slightly to a ship actually capable of interstellar voyages increases the prices to ~36cr/day, not much but still worth noting.
Travel times and distances have never really been expanding upon but if we say all the various real space travel between Primary Relays, Secondary Relays, and the colony itself amount to 4 days (~16LY all told) of travel I don't think anyone will find that unreasonable. After all we know it is 24 hours from the nearest relay to Mindoir and Relays are often in separate systems. So with 4 days of travel to the colony and 4 days back, since the ship is likely returning near empty and thus passangers also need to pay for that leg of the journey, we are looking at something like 288cr to travel out to the colonies.
288 credits isn't much; at least for people in the first world nations. Given the levels of disparity described in the codex:
I suspect the future equivalents of third world nations are probably, economically speaking, comparable to those of IRL. Possibly worse given the mention of wealth inequality continuing to rise nearly two centuries into the future. We are likely talking about months of income for people in the disadvantaged regions of Earth.
Paragon Industries, if maintaining the same profit margins, could drop that price significantly. Our faster ships (Repuslors + PI FTL Drives) can do a 16LY journey in 16 hours so at the slightly higher price of 37.7cr/day we'd be charging just 50 credits per person. Still likely a lot of money but that is nearly a six fold reduction. We probably can't just provide the service for free, or even at cost, without existing travel businesses crying foul (for fairly legitimate reasons arguably) about anti-competitive behavior.
l was just thinking is the plug and play opened to all species or just human?
good way to get around this is a work contract. work 2 years as either one of our employees or sign a government contract with the colony on our routes and we take you free of any credits, minimum working time at the colony required.
this lets the colony get a larger pool to recruit from and gets us more potential employees
good way to get around this is a work contract. work 2 years as either one of our employees or sign a government contract with the colony on our routes and we take you free of any credits, minimum working time at the colony required.
this lets the colony get a larger pool to recruit from and gets us more potential employees
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Honestly including free transport as a bonus to signing on isn't even worth mentioning it is such a minor cost. Even at the normal 55k wage, let alone the vastly higher rates PI pays, you are earning around 27.5cr/hr. So a normal ticket is ~10 hours work and a PI ticket ~2 hours. Barely worth mentioning. Especially when the skills from Plug and Play skills are likely significantly more expensive. Although those are likely provided as part of your company supplied work equipment.
beep
if we also trying increase the population of colonies we could (bad idea) give money grants for parents with 2+ children on top of the usual ones people get
1 more thing we can do but will rub government the wrong way is supply very low interest loans to anyone wiling to start a business on the colonys with 10+ people working for them for a min of 5 years. this would open a lot smaller factoryes, pawn shops, apprentice, family bakery and so on. basically a lot small businesses for consumers
we could also have a large science fair like we had at the start of this game where we give price money to winners and runners up on projects like mechs, cars, tanks and so on it also be held by us so there be just as much if not more people comming to this science fair than one on earth ...we at least see 10x the citadel councils races there as we more natural than earth
maybe so but don't underestimate free anything. plus l was more thinking a long the lines of the colonies main governments taking advantage of the free transport to get more workers than us transporting earthers to our factories. it opens the job market to a larger degree as well of world when someone without money just has to sign on and everything else is sorted out.
if we also trying increase the population of colonies we could (bad idea) give money grants for parents with 2+ children on top of the usual ones people get
1 more thing we can do but will rub government the wrong way is supply very low interest loans to anyone wiling to start a business on the colonys with 10+ people working for them for a min of 5 years. this would open a lot smaller factoryes, pawn shops, apprentice, family bakery and so on. basically a lot small businesses for consumers
we could also have a large science fair like we had at the start of this game where we give price money to winners and runners up on projects like mechs, cars, tanks and so on it also be held by us so there be just as much if not more people comming to this science fair than one on earth ...we at least see 10x the citadel councils races there as we more natural than earth
Could we build or buy some passenger ships and have them operate moving people to the frontier for drastically reduced fares? I imagine pretty much anyone is going to want humans to migrate to the colonies (though I imagine a fair number of people on Earth want someone else to do the moving), we could probably get the SA office in charge of colony settlement to give us a waiver, maybe have a colony subsidize the fare for certain kinds of passengers and Revy just pick up the bill for the majority of new colonists.
Or we could just pay for a study to be done on why people aren't emigrating to the colonies more and act on those findings I guess. I still think building up some nontrivial personnel transport capability seems reasonable.
The problem with just buying the ships of course is that we'd face the same profit calculations as the regular passenger lines. We certainly could run them for free since the operating cost for a starship (0.07% per year) in the 200 million mark is only 14 million or pocket change for us. The problem is that this is literally the definition of anti-competitive behavior; or more specifically predatory pricing. A large company taking advantage of its capital reserves to burn money operating at unsustainable prices to drive out competition before hiking the prices once they were the sole/dominant provider. Now sure we wouldn't be planning on following through price hike once our competitors are out of business but there is no way of actually knowing that. So legally speaking the Alliance's courts would have to treat it as if that was our intent and penalize us.
We could justify building some ships and running them for cheap, as I outlined in my post, since our superior technology allows us to operate at a fifth the price while generating an equivalent percentage return. That would protect us since we'd clearly be leveraging a technological advantage to corner the market which isn't considered anti-competitive behavior.
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- Leeds
Help me out here.
If we're in a situation where people from wealthy colonies can afford to move out to the colonies, where they continue to be wealthy. And our assertion is that allowing poorer people to migrate to new colonies will allow them to become that wealthy. Why not just let them migrate into wealthy nations, surely that must be cheaper than a spaceship?
Even given no transportation costs, its not clear that they'd have the capital available to buy the equipment needed to setup and industrialise their colonies... Why wouldn't we just get that stuff and move it to the poorer nations?
I'm also significantly less optimistic that plug and play will actually enable people to get better jobs, rather than just encouraging a race to the bottom where every job gets paid minimum wage. However I think that we went through that argument quite thoroughly in the old thread.
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Well to begin with humanity is kind of in a all your eggs in one basket situation. Of the ~13 billion humans alive ~11.5 billion live in on Earth. So 88% of the population is centralized onto one planet. So in terms of protecting humanity we want to encourage serious migration out to the colonies to provide redundancy should something (like say a Reaper attack or Batarian anti-matter bombs) devastate Earth.
Secondly Earth itself has issues. Going by:
it seems like the wealthy nations of Earth are only just now (codex is from 2183 so a decade later) starting to transition from vast urban sprawl into sustainable arcologies. I find it extra telling that this description is in the same paragraph describing how the wealth of the colonies is flowing back to Earth. That suggests it only became economically viable with the influx of colonial resources.
I suspect, as strange as it may sound, that life out on the colonies may actually be superior to life back on Earth. From the description of Eden Prime:
it seems like the colonies benefited from having no existing infrastructure complicating the transition towards arcologies and large scale automated farming. This is probably part of the reason every member of the hyper-elite we see in Mass Effect is off world. Earth is stuck playing catch-up.
Thirdly if the opportunity for notably financial advancement was already present on Earth people would already be taking advantage of it. Why the opportunity doesn't exist doesn't really matter, unless it is capital in which case we could help, but what does matter is that there clearly is an opportunity for financial advancement out in the colonies. Especially given that Paragon Industries is dumping billions into various local markets (most notably construction) which creates even more opportunities.
Fourthly; evidance suggests that the cost of living on the colonies is lower then Earth. Arcologies provide abundant space for low prices (I have a post that has been siting half-complete for ages for the plans for a PI hyper-modular Arcology that demonstrates this) and most the colonies should have dirt cheap food (due to massive agricultural regions), electricity (fusion/Arc Reactors), and water (cheap electricity == cheap water). So even if they end up working minimum wage jobs out the colonies the migrant's lives should be financially better off. That is even before taking into account that the living conditions (such as clear air) are superior.
Oh it will certainly encourage a race to the bottom. However from a macro perspective that is actually a good thing. It certainly sounds bad but the reality is the only reason such a race can occur is because there exists people for whom a high skill but minimum wage job is an improvement over their current situation. It may be they were earning below minimum wage in another nation or they were working a job with worse labor conditions (like janitorial staff). Either way for such a race to occur there must be a transition of workers from a more disadvantaged labor pool moving up into the new general labor market.
If there isn't a pool of labor willing to work for lower wages the wages won't go down. This also ignores that so far our biology technology needs to be specifically adapted to non-humans. So for now, and probably the foreseeable future, Plug and Play skills are limited to humans. This is important because there is a galactic labor market. If local wages get too low we'll likely start to see labor migration as skilled human workers take up jobs in foreign markets. Given that humanity is just a small fraction of the galactical population such a transition would be very unlikely to have a significant effect on galactic labor prices so that sets a floor on wage decreases.
There is also the question as to what degree of social security exists within the Alliance as a whole and the various nation-states. One of the best wages to short circuit a collapse in wages is to remove the employer's greatest stick; starvation. If an unemployed citizen is guarantied all the basic necessities by the state then they have the ability to abstain from work until they find an employer willing to provide fair recompense.
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- United states
As a suggestion could we maybe just invest heavily in transportation from the poorer countries to colonies? Seems like it would avoid the issue of the anti competitive issue by just using our own money to pay other transport companies to do the work for us. I mean we do have money to spare and don't think we are even using much of it at a time.
We are currently dumping trillions into more factories but that can't, and won't, last forever. So lets run the numbers.
Earlier I estimated that under the current system a ticket from Earth to the colonies to be 288cr per person. That however is probably the low end since it assumes minimum cargo and a ship packed to the brim. So I'll be more conservative here and go with 500cr per person.
The existing colonies all have populations roughly in the single digit millions. However were are going to be dividing the migrants across multiple colonies (at least 7: Mindoir, Elysium, Benning, Demeter, Beckenstein, Terra Nova, and Eden Prime) so a target of 1 million migrants per quarter probably isn't unreasonable. That is 4 million per year and divided even just seven ways results in population growths of between 24.8% on the high end (Benning's 2.3 million) and 6.9% on the low end (Elysium's 8.3 million). Certainly high even for Eylsium but considering we are talking about skilled migrants probably not unacceptably high; plus as I said we are likely supporting migration to more colonies then just those seven.
At 500cr per person that then logically comes to 0.5 billion per quarter; or a completely and utterly insignificant figure.
That being said Dark As Silver did raise an excellent point; just because you've made it to the colonies doesn't mean anything. You still need to acquire housing, the other basic necessities, and potentially a job if you didn't have one already lined up. Since we don't know what kind of social security exists we have to assume there is no and that we have to do it ourselves. I figure three months wages should probably be sufficient since that is the minimum threshold for an emergency fund and we are talking about per person here rather then per family. Plus these families are from the low end economically speaking so can probably make the money stretch further then the average member of the middle class. At the human wide average rage of 55,000cr/yr three months wages amounts to 13,750cr.
Add in the 500cr travel fee and we are now up to 14,250cr per person. At the million migrants per quarter that amounts to 14.25 billion per quarter. More noteworthy but honestly still a tiny percentage of our budget.
Sadly despite being about as high as the colonies can reasonably handle this is still a depressingly low rate of migration. At that rate it would take a full century just to get Earth down from 11.4 billion to 11.0 billion. Sure we can likely ramp up over time as the colonies grow and absorb the migrant influx but this is definitely going to be a long term project.