The thing is though that even if the interstellar part is fast, the interplanetary part is slow. You have to wait two or more (possibly many more) weeks plus having to pay shipping as even efficient interstellar shipping still adds expense on goods that you could probably make on world or in system. Most bulk raw materials can be sourced in-system as Ices and Ores via Dropship Miners and transported inter-planetary by Space Station or super-large Dropship Cyclers if cost-efficiency but not transit time is a priority.
The zenith-planet part of the journey is not fast, but a couple of weeks for an overall trip is comparable to sea freight, whereas it takes many months for conventional Jumpship shipping. To put it in perspective, transporting freight across the Pacific via cargo ship typically takes 2-4 weeks.
Mass space mining seems to be... conspicuously absent? At least in the canonical Battletech setting. It's not quite zero, but there's far less of a focus in this setting than other sci-fi settings. If I were seeking an in-universe explanation, I'd suggest it's a result of both planetary labor being fairly inexpensive compared to space habitat labor and the absurd efficiency of Battletech fusion rockets that dramatically reduce the disadvantage planets have of having to overcome their gravity well to ship material out.
Labor cost arbitrage is not something I could see either like the real world. That would be a planetary or system norm meaning you could find lower labor 'locally.' If not wouldn't it be more cost-effective to build more efficient factories to satisfy local customer demand or import more people to increase demand than create a super-fast interstellar transport network?
While I wouldn't expect labor costs to be uniform on a planet, I do fully believe that "rich" worlds like New Avalon would have a much higher labor price floor than somewhere like Bassfield.
As for the question of whether it's more cost-effective to just build a factory rather than to create a command circuit, I think it's a false dichotomy. Interstellar nations have to have Jumpships to ferry passengers and goods around their owned systems in the first place: Otherwise you don't have an Interstellar nation, you have a region of some de-facto independent autarkic worlds and some formerly inhabited dead worlds. The question is then how you can most efficiently use these Jumpships. I maintain that when the Jumpship-to-Planet ratio is high, big and elaborate command circuits are most efficient, while when the Jumpship-to-Planet ratio is low, a simple and lean ring circuit to connect the most important nodes with other Jumpships operating in the traditional way (basically the Hybrid Interstellar Transport method) is more efficient than simply having all Jumpships operate in the traditional way.
If we accept this, then the question becomes "is building more efficient commodity-producing factories on-planet to satisfy local demand than importing the commodities from the interstellar transport network?" And it can be. But here's the neat thing: Command circuits help enable that too!
Assuming no command circuits and quasi-autarky (Jumpships traffic exists but is rare and inconsistent), if they need to build a factory to produce commodity X (or potentially upgrade an existing low-tech factory to higher tech to more efficiently produce commodity X), then the planet has to basically start from scratch. They have to do the basic research on their needs and develop the basic design of the product, they have to make the tools, they have to make the tools that make the tools, they have to set up any necessary supporting logistics infrastructure for the commodity, the workforce has to run through the various skills to use and maintain the commodities.
However, if you have good interstellar connections with the rest of your faction, there's almost certainly another planet somewhere that already has gone through and solved these problems. They likely already have the basic R&D done, so your planet need only apply the existing research to their own situation, perhaps with some small changes to integrate it into whatever special environment they happen to be in. They've built the tools to make the tools and they have experience of what is needed in terms of support infrastructure, so your planet could simply import the tools, hire their experts to teach your technicians, and with their expertise dodge any traps and growing pains that the other planet had to go through.
To make this argument more tangible, let's do an example.
Let's say the government of planet A has decided it is important that they build Agromechs. Planet A has some lower-tech industry: They can produce ICEs and fuel cells compatible with Agromechs and they have the metallurgy to produce the part of the mech's skeleton and commercial armoring, and they could theoretically assemble an Agromech if they had all the parts, but they can't currently build gyros, and their plastic-producing industries is not advanced enough to produce the advanced myomers Mechs need to move.
If planet A is quasi-autarkic (either by choice or by circumstance), they would have to figure out how to produce the gyros and myomers themselves, which could take years if not decades of toiling before they even get their Agromech factories spitting out useful machines.
However, if they have good connections to the interstellar transport network and they're willing to use them, planet B has produced Agromechs themselves for about a century. They can produce gyros and have the know-how to create the advanced myomer fibres. With planet B's assistance, enabled with the help of the command circuit, planet A can begin assembling Agromechs relatively rapidly, producing the components planet A can build and assembling them with components imported they can't build yet from planet B, while using planet B's knowledge on myomer and gyros to accelerate the development of planet A's subcomponent factories to eventually be able to produce their own Agromechs themselves.
Think of it as a technology transfer, but within a state's own borders instead of between two states. While HPG communication can also play a major role in this, transmitting bits cannot always replace having the physical item or person in front of you.
(My apologies, this became WAY longer than I intended)
I think we also shouldn't discount HPG bandwidth capacities. There is nothing in the fiction that limits them other than COMSTAR's wish for it to remain expensive enough that the c-bill has value. It is entirely possible that you could build two or more HPGs on world to maintain super-liminal communication for time-sensitive data within 50LY while providing small craft and jumpship pairing to speed along economically valuable but not time-sensitive or strategic sensitive data.
I agree. Evidently some of the fiction has Clan HPG-equipped jumpships transmitting information between the Inner Sphere occupation area and the Clan Homeworlds in near-real time to elect Khans, so either Comstar could have developed the ability to do similar, or they did have it and chose not to use it.
Some of Comstar's main goals during the succession wars were to prevent the Inner Sphere from rebuilding and to suppress their scientific research. I wouldn't be surprised that with Comstar's monopoly they intentionally throttled their HPGs so the Great Houses could barely get by, enough to live but not enough to truly rebuild and accelerate their research. Maybe with the occasional "bug" conveniently corrupting certain messages important to the Inner Sphere states as well.
This is a bit of a plot point in the Vela Corridor AU setting. Without a Comstar to sabotage everything, the Republic of Crossroad was able to develop their FTL communication infrastructure to a great extent and caused major socioeconomic changes in the region, a period called the "HPG Revolution" in the 2850s. Data can travel from one end of Crossroad to another near instantly, and there's now what's basically a more advanced version of the Clan Chatterweb called the Velanet. (They also developed what's basically
a mature version of Black Box technology, but that's less relevant here.)
HPG capabilities aside, a Jump Circuit does have the advantage that it provides a ready-made method to control damage in the event that the HPG grid goes down. That ability would have been very useful at certain periods of time (Blakist Whiteout, Gray Monday).
Again love your work Retry. The production of this has given me lots of stuff to think about in my own fiction. I just love continuing the discussion.
Thank you!
