Driving Forces of space merchant service (part 1)

Finally getting back to some blogging.
I see two driving forces for a space merchant marine compared to what drives a navy.

The first is economics.

The merchant marine, unlike your space navy, is going to be driven much more by economics rather than political budgets and military strategy. What does get shipped from world to world will be determined in large part by the economics. If ships are expensive and slow, then only high value items similar to spices and silk will be carried along with passengers; if transport is cheap you could be moving wheat, rice and bulk goods. There are exceptions when governments subsidize things which I'll cover later under the legal and political topic. For a writer this could mean that having an idea of what cargo the commercial ship is bringing and picking up besides just the characters.

Cost and financing

How much does it cost to build a new starship or in-system ship or to buy a used one? Are there FTL ships that are inexpensive enough too seen as large private yachts rather than freighters and passenger ships? An example of this would be Honor Harrington's yacht Tankersley. It's expensive, but within a very rich person's budget to have essentially a private jet or passenger ship. 

How are ships financed? Can the characters even consider owning a vessel, either with or without help from a bank or other means of investment capital? Are ships, even used ones, so expensive that only the government of a large stock corporation can buy one? In the US, at least a few years ago, it was possible to own at least a used coast-wise tanker on credit. As owner you probably wouldn't be in a position to be on the ship very often, but it is definitely possible for a small group of people to buy an older ship and start a new company. In early 2015, you could get a small coastal freighter for a couple of million dollars. This shows up a couple of times in the John Grimes series  by Chandler http://www.baenebooks.com/s-124-a-bertram-chandler.aspx, in Nathan Lowell's Trader's Tales series http://solarclipper.com/get-the-books/.

For the military it's never an issue, the ship belongs to the government, and the Captain / characters just have use of it. If the characters don't own the ship, what restrictions are there on their use? I'd consider it unlikely that a company owned civilian cargo / passenger ship would go wandering the fringes of settled space unless the company has a charter to explore or something.

Might ships be financed like the old New England method of each worker and supplier to the building of the ship and or the cargo got a share of the profits, if any? The share system might not be workers getting shares instead of wages, and rather that a few thousand middle class people can pool their money to build a ship rather than a public offering looking for 100s of thousands of middle class investors. Lois Bujold mentions something like this in Miles In Love with the Komarr based trading fleets although I think that was limited to investing in the cargo rather than in the building of new ships. You might become rich or go bust if you ship comes in or fails to come in.

Are the ships inexpensive enough that a small group of people, such an extended family or small group of investors or even a ship's crew can buy individual ships either outright or via credit? An example would be A Bertram Chandler's novel The Ship from Outside where the crew buys an older cargo ship to compete in an underserved part of space.

Might the ships be setup as a limited partnership, like say a law firm, and individuals have to buy their way into ownership / having a say in the broad decisions? This might work for a family owned ship even, where generations of people either buy in or choose to take their money as cash for a life of some other sort.

Does the government have to insure the construction bonds like the US did to make sure that people will buy them, fearing that a lost ship would be a loss of the value of the bond? Or might all the ships be government owned and operated such as the Soviet Union or People’s Republic of Haven.

Are ship’s armed? It seems from a very limited number of conversations, and RPGs like Traveller, that people expect merchant ships to be armed. I’d expect it to be rare, like David Weber states for the Honorverse. If it’s rare, an unknown ship would attract the official attention of system defense forces as a potential spy or pirate.

Cargo and routes

General rule, a ship is only making money if it is moving cargo. It doesn't make money sitting at the pier or anchored out loading or discharging cargo. This should apply to space merchant ships as remarked in Weber's first Honorverse novel, On Basilisk Station where the Peeps freighter that is in orbit for "repairs" raises suspicion for being idle for so long.

In general bigger is better when it comes to current world ships. The bigger the ship, the cheaper per ton of cargo carried. We see this especially in the long haul trades. Container ships that make only a few stops in the Far East and the few (or maybe only one) in the US are getting bigger and bigger. Service between ports in a region is done by smaller ships that can be more efficiently loaded for just a few ports in the region, making it easier to discharge and load cargo for a given port without having to move or unload and re-load cargo bound for other ports.

If capital is dear though, you’ll see smaller ships that spend less time waiting for close to a full load of cargo.

In a space merchant marine with ships measuring in millions of tons such as the Honorverse or the Prince Roger tunnel drive, you could see this played out with big ships dropping cargo off in central star systems and small carriers move it from there to other planets in the system or to other star systems in the quadrant.

You could also see this play out that crew members rarely get to land on the planet, or even get close to any of the planets. They'd spend their time at a space station on the edge of the solar system and leave the moving of the cargo from near the hyper limit to the planets or space stations to local ships. The docks area might also be very large, at least in regards to warehousing space.

Another plot point could be that travel to many smaller planets might entail a layover on a space station or hub planet for weeks before a ship makes the run to the more out of the way places.

If you are dealing with very small ships, such as 1st edition Traveller, this may not be the case. There likely won't be enough savings in time to off-set the need to handle the cargo at least twice – once off loading to a space station and then re-loading to another ship to bring everything to the planet.

Do the ships run on a regular route, aka a liner? Or do, or even can, the ships tramp from port to port? If there is no communications faster than ships moving between star systems, how would a tramp starship know where it can pick up a cargo? It was done in days before radio, with ships picking up a cargo in port A and bound for port B. They might advertise they are looking for more cargo for port B (whether via brokers in each port or contacts in the bars. 

In the maritime industry there is a term called "sufficient inducement". A ship on a regular run, say down the African coast will stop in smaller ports to pickup or discharge cargo if there is sufficient cargo to make it worthwhile. This might work where a ship that usually transits the edges of a star system will come further in to drop off cargo or pick up cargo when it's radioed at the edge of the system,

Ship's captains or owners might also take a gamble, as implied with the Komarr Trade Fleets, and bring a load of cargo they hope to sell at a good profit to a planet and buy what is normally a good cargo to bring to another planet.

Do cargo ships carry a dozen or so passengers like freighters used to from the 1900s to 1980s? It was an expensive trip, but the service was top notch and port stays were often quite long while the ship worked cargo. Of note, the limit of 12 passengers was a US law that required ships with more than 12 passengers to carry a medical doctor.

Are there ships that are designed as mixed with a good deal of cargo space plus a couple hundred passengers? This was common, at least for American ships, that ran to more out of the way places such as the South Pacific or Australia where there might not be enough passengers to make a regular run like to Europe but there was usually cargo that would be profitable.