Shipping and Handling

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt"><font face="Calibri" size="3">I have been thinking about merchant work in the SF game. I know that there was some effort to nail down a standard idea on the size/mass of a Standard Cargo Unit. But now I am curious about shipping and handling costs. It is assumed that big industry (Mega Corps) are shipping manufactured goods all over the frontier. However, I think that it would be prohibitive to manufacture an item and then launch it into orbit before shipping it through the void. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt"><font face="Calibri" size="3">Can one of you smart guys come up with a cost to mass ratio to put a SCU into orbit. I imagine there should be some data out there on the space shuttle program to come up with something. I doubt that I can get a number from the yellow pages to see how much a company would charge to put a satellite in orbit for me. But some of you guys are more in the biz (and just smarter) than I am. I figure in SF it would be less expensive than today since there is a limited number of companies able to launch. If we had a base cost; a pseudo-realistic cost, we could water it down for game play. </font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt"><font face="Calibri" size="3">My thought too is that if (for instance)vehicles are so expensive to import, that most planets above outpost status would have some sort of manufacturing plant to create big ticket items. It would also cause a vast diversity in similar products. It would also be a throwback to a time when things were built to last. Items that would be locally produced (IMO) would not be built with the philosophy of Pre-Planned Obsolescence. Thus, some frontier manufactured items might become true treasure worthy of the price to transport to other systems. </font></p>