Let's say Planet Sahara needs water desperately because a colony is there to mine minerals or whatever. Planet Atlantis has plenty of fresh water. Let's say they're two jumps from each other, unless a different distance works better. Is there a way a free trader can transport enough water to make it worth the fuel and other overhead? Assume there's a limit as to how much anyone could feasibly pay for a drink, I guess, to make it worth their while as well.  Is there a way to make this economically viable in Traveller? I know we have some number crunchers on this forum who probably also know Traveller! What's the largest size the colony could be, how much water would they need, etc? We'll leave out any industrial usage and assume it's for drinking and bathing and such. Presumably they could capture and recycle a lot of it, too, if it were cost-effective...anybody for any good speculation? I wss just thinking of Ice Pirates and Dune and the scenario reared its ugly head.

Is the planet totally devoid of water?

Might be cheaper to tow comets or something in space rather than haul it from groundside to space?

Quote from: Omega;993293Is the planet totally devoid of water?

Might be cheaper to tow comets or something in space rather than haul it from groundside to space?

No water at all.

I dunno, that's why I'm wondering if hauling water would ever make any sense.

Logistically no. Dramatically yes.

Why would you take water from a planet when comets are readily available?

You would probably need some kind of subsidized merchant line to make that work.

I'd see logistically transporting fresh water as being very difficult, and only a stop gap measure in any case. It world be more useful to bring over oxygen and hydrogen, as chemical components to start mass producing it, along with a plant colony to make it viable.

There is the idea in Frank Herbert's Dune of maximising the recycling of body fluids using a still suit and the like - but I think hauling a load of water itself would be tricky.

Not very likely. The optimal solution will almost always be redirecting asteroids, if there's a belt far enough out from the primary to have ice bodies. Or if that's not viable, mining the Oort cloud for comets. But since interplanetary distances are vast, and the Oort cloud is even bigger, that's a very slow solution. Months, at the very least. And years or decades is more likely, because that way you can use smaller drives to very slowly shift orbits. If things are more pressing, jumps might be a short-term solution. But that will almost certainly be specialized cargo ships.

Stepping back a bit, the place where free traders make sense is emergencies. Even if you have short and long term solutions in place, that's a very long supply chain. What if a mass driver is sabotaged? Or a refueling point catches fire? Or there's a fungus outbreak on one of the vessels? There might be a pressing need for parts or emergency medical supplies or whatever is needed to get the ice flowing again.

People have already posted the most economical method of mining the Oort Cloud or Kuyper Belt to supply water to planet Sahara.

There is another way to make hauling ice economically viable. Lets say that a valuable world is too far away to reach in a single jump, so ships can either haul extra fuel along with cargo and do two jumps or establish a Calibration Point at the midway between the two worlds. A Calibration Point is a waystation in deep space with no other bodies around that provides fuel and basic amenities to starships traversing the rift. Say you just want to get to the other world, you haul passengers and a load of ice - selling the ice at the waystation. You won't get rich doing this, but it makes pretty good sense (and a Calibration Point is something that players can reasonably create).

The Ice Must Flow!

Heh!

No. As far as we can tell there's no reason why every solar system wouldn't have an Oort cloud. Such clouds have virtually unlimited quantities of frozen water mixed with dust, minerals and other ingredients.

Fred Pohl wrote a novel called Mining the Oort. It's about a program which sends spaceship crews out to the Oort cloud. There they attach rockets to comets and calculate trajectories which would have them crash on to Mars. Even with a dozen such teams working steadily it would take over 100 years to make much of a difference.

Now, of course, you can do what ever you want in your game. Maybe for some bizarre reason your Sahara system has no Oort cloud. Or maybe something out there is destroying intruding space ships. You can always choose some other element that is of more value. "Chemical X is much in demand because Lifeform Y depends upon it."

One area where the OPs premise is viable is in an outpost situation. The mining is temporary and reliant on supplies and just mining the ice cloud isnt viable for one reason or another.

Basically look at the fuel costs in Traveller to get from A to B. Then the cost to buy the water at source. Then the profit of selling at the outpost.

Similar thing in Star Frontiers. One unit of water costs 30k. Sells for 40k. A ship with atomic drives uses one unit of fuel per jump and each unit costs 10k. So 40k spent round trip. Youd have to carry 8 units of water just to break even for the next trip. But you would not have made any profit to buy more water.
Instead what you would do is pick up whatever they are mining. Say for example that is mercury. You pick it up for 40k a unit and sell it back at the water supplier for 75k.
Round trip = 40k
8 units of water = 240k = 80k profit - Covers cost of fuel there and back. And enough to fully refuel the ship.
8 units of mercury = 320k = 280k profit - Covers buying 8 more units of water.
Final profit is... 40k per round trip.

Do the same in Traveller.

My thoughts on this are that if you try too hard to justify interstellar trade, it tends to fall apart... So really, if you want to set up a scenario here, do it.

Is there no oxygen and hydrogen easily available in the system? If there's O2 but not hydrogen, really all you have to transport is LHyd since it's easy to oxygenate hydrogen into water (and you get energy out of it to boot... remember that the feasibility of this is such that space systems use fuel cells to generate power AND potable water...).

If the desert planet really needs water shipped in, the cost of water will be such that ships can make money doing it, so just set your own speculative cargo price for water, or if it works, assume the desert planet is willing to ship the water for 1 kcr/ton shipping cost.

One idea that comes to mind is if it is a covert mining operation that needs to covertly receive the water. The miners are posing/hiding as/in/under/near another planetary operation, and traffic in the system in monitored somewhat. So a free trader with discretion might be hired to bring in water from out of system while also bringing something else for some other purpose (personnel, tech). If they brought water from the same system, someone might observe them and it would spoil the cover story and/or violate some regulations.

Quote from: Skarg;993449One idea that comes to mind is if it is a covert mining operation that needs to covertly receive the water. The miners are posing/hiding as/in/under/near another planetary operation, and traffic in the system in monitored somewhat. So a free trader with discretion might be hired to bring in water from out of system while also bringing something else for some other purpose (personnel, tech). If they brought water from the same system, someone might observe them and it would spoil the cover story and/or violate some regulations.

I was thinking something along these lines. My thought was if you needed a short-term reason to jump water in, just make the jump with tanker faster than bringing in a comet/asteroid of water, this one time. (Water Comet X5-12R went off course and plunged into the sun. Nobody in-system can jump water in.)