I do believe every story of the light sci-fi genre that combines space trade with FTL travel has the same problem. You leave your planet for an interstellar trading trip, and when you return, after what seemed like five weeks for you, twenty years have passed in your original planet -- thus making whatever you brought back probably unneeded and most certainly obsolete.
That depends entirely on the character of the FTL travel involved though. Many are functionally instantaneous or otherwise fast enough to involve no time-dilation effects of any relevance - depending on the particular assumptions of the setting it may indeed take longer to travel far enough from the local star's gravity to engage the FTL drive with conventional engines than cross the interstellar distance itself. (This kind of gravitational sensitivity is a relatively common trope and serves useful narrative purposes by eg. preventing invasion fleets from suddenly warping into the orbit of an in-system target or cheapo planet killers made by sending any old junker loaded with rocks hurtling towards a planet at Ludicrous Speed.)
Even then interstellar commercial shipping of high-bulk low-value cargo such as unrefined raw materials is still extremely economically suspect barring "magical" very cheap and convenient interstellar travel; more thought-out scenarios tend to revolve highly processed goods, whatever Unobtaniums the setting might have and information (which physically takes up no more space than the memory banks needed to store it) instead.
There are still plausible scenarios where it might be found necessary to transport certain forms of bulk cargo - supplies to remote outposts, parts and machinery to newly established colonies that can't yet fabricate all of their necessities on the scene, the logistical tails of military operations and so on - but the crucial point is that such shipping would not be inherently commercial and profit-seeking in nature but rather analogous to establishing and maintaining those Antarctic research stations or supporting overseas military expeditions IRL. Ie. something you deem important and/or necessary (or just cool and prestigious enough, depending, cough moon shots cough) enough to merit doing with surplus resources and the acceptance that you'll be way in the red; the purview of decently major and wealthy state governements not profit-seeking private sector actors (though the latter will be only too happy to get involved in any number of aspect for profit natch, the money spent has to go somewhere after all).
None of which conditions apply here, obviously. And even more egregiously the apparent business plan of the scavenger outfit Ayame signed up on is straight up Underpants Gnome levels of lolwut.
last edited at Feb 14, 2020 3:42PM
.jpg?1489617500)
