How do you justify interstellar trade?

By ensuring it's neither slow, nor expensive.

>HEY! SEE THAT SHIT?
>Yeeesss...?
>I WANT IT, WANT THIS SHIT INSTEAD?
>FUCK YEAH!
>Insteller Trade Initiated
There ya go

I imagine it'd be mostly processed materials to manufacturing facilities, and manufactured goods to people without on-site manufacturing facilities. There's no way to sell raw material since everyone can just mine their own asteroid.

First rule of interstellar trade (and frankly, any sort of trade) should be that it would be cheaper to get what you want to trade from another System than it is to get it from your own, or produce it in your own.

That said, either Interstellar travel has advanced so far the cost of it has become negligible, or the goods being traded don't show up in some systems at all or are exceptionally rare.

It wouldn't be that strange that moons and planets are mined for the resources on them. I recall reading about a planet or moon with giant diamond icebergs. Perhaps there is a use for enormous chunks of industrial diamond, but they can't be synthetically made at the required size.

That, and technology. Technology that simply doesn't exist or can't be produced in the system, and the only option to obtain it is import.

If you have the power output necessary for FTL, I doubt you have any need to trade anything at all. The only thing I can think of is trading artificial micro-black holes (kugelblitz ), as efficient power sources, manufactured in Dyson Swarm systems.

Remember: economics is not a logic-based science.
People will buy things that are free because of convenience or efficient marketing.

How is one supposed to go full AdMech/Factorio/"HFY-galactic-genocide" without procuring some proper stocks of raw materials and pseudo-stolen tech?

Speak softly and carry a big arsenal - pump 'em 'n' dump 'em.

Bottled water tastes so much better than tap if you live in a shitty water area though.

i'd like to imagine that Avatar is an AU of Stargate where they never brought the gate out of storage because they thought it was just a weird monument and the unobtanium is actually naquadah

as someone who lives in nevada, if you want your liver to give out before your 50, you drink tap water. the bottled water is safer to drink than alot of water you get if you don't know how it is filtered

>clearly never visited a place where tap water tastes like shit, if even drinkable in the first place

Enjoy your diarrhea.

It's basically restricted to the elites who live for multiple galactic years and can therefore wait a century or a few to ship things from system to system. Massive corporations or networks run by these elites are the only demand and supply for most goods that are shipped this way. Goods need to enure the transit, which means most nuclear materials have to be gathered in system rather than being shipped. Certain sections of the galaxy are left unexplored due to vessels relying on various nuclear fuel sources, such as thorium breeder reactors, for long term power and the systems don't have enough nuclear resources to make traveling to and then through them economically feasible.

But, upper middle class sort of piggyback on the system by transiting themselves around the galaxy in stasis rather than simply waiting for goods to be shipped. This way they live long enough to enjoy the benefits of the goods they want without having to keep up the exorbitant prices of the modifications and the upkeep of said modifications that the elite use to keep themselves alive for extended periods of time.

Lower classes are fucked and mostly non-human servitor species that were created by humans, so they don't matter as they're technically not people.

I was going to make a case about hauling raw materials might be necessary if some industry requires a very specific mineral that isn't abundant locally.
Then I realised you might as well build up the industry wherever the material can be found, either planet-side or in orbit, if the planet itself is uninhabitable.

Interstellar shipping is incredibly economical. Space is stupid cheap to ship things across if you can even call it shipping. It's more like throwing. You just line up the shot and toss your load, then the receiving end picks it up when it gets there.

The biggest cost in shipping things through space is getting them off of planets and that cost is essentially the same whether you are shipping something to the moon or to Alpha Centauri.

>cost is essentially the same whether you are shipping something to the moon or to Alpha Centauri.

Sorry, I'm not in the mood of waiting a few thousand years to get my cargo.

The same way I justify intrastellar trade.

You also have to stop it when it gets there

I can't wait for my 1,00,000$ bottle of water from Alpha Centauri.

Aye, I get where you're coming from, once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere and all that.

That said, it depends on how the sci-fi shit works.
For intra-system shipping, mass drivers would be quite efficient. I guess they could also work on interstellar distances if speed of delivery isn't important.
For interstellar commerce, it depends on how the FTL works, and how common FTL-capable craft are.
If FTL is cheap and near instant and everyone and their cat has a ship, then interstellar shipping is barely more complicated than intra-system shipping.
However, if FTL takes 30% of the ships mass in hydrogen and 3 weeks to get to the destination, or starships are so rare that powerful governments would only own a handful, it becomes less economical to ship stuff that you can find in-system.

>Implying technology levels I did not imply
Just slap a warp drive on your giant box them. Set it to travel a certain distance and fire at a specific time, then launch it.

obviously you don't realize the scale of the construction projects.

For two distinct interstellar civilizations, the other has some resource that is more cost efficient to get from the other after travel times and shipping costs are accounted for.

youtube.com/watch?v=z9Y9aFB3iVA

and /thread.

Trade is cheaper and more efficient than outright unilateral exploitation.

If instead of having to pay every link in the chain you only get to pay the last one you're linked to then trade is better.

If it's between alien species: War is always much much more expensive than trade.

Trade of biological samples

If the cost of interstellar travel is too high, there won't be any interstellar trade. People will relay on in-system resources.

If the cost is low, then trade is feasible.

orion garlic doesnt grow on alpha centauri. thx for the conversation, OP.

>there are no subservient cultures
ok

Read Dune.

why not cast a spell while your at it?

Why not indeed. This is a topic about justifying the existence of a thing that does not exist in a manner and scope that is not defined within a setting, time period, and technology level that is not specified.

This is just going to go around and around forever.

Uhuh, come drink water from my local river, and see how well it suits you.

Pic related

t. good goyim who don't distill their own water

>3D templates

>Ultratech local limitations like robot brains are supplied by planet A so that planet B doesn't mass-produce

>Artificial scarcity

>Insightful mechanisms and samples obtained from wild goo reserves

>Amat bottles

>Genemods

>omnipenicilin

>Products of planet A culture, like a digital mind upload copy of every celebrity of the last 10 cycles, up to the "15 microseconds" ones.

>A revolutionary treatment for digital deprivation disorder which requires a, carefully coded, million terabytes of entropically-coded, truly random random noise. The local network can't develop such amount without assuring that it is free of egoware contamination.

>Several forms of memeplexes for people who don't wish to be themselves.

Is that enough?

Depending on the setting's tech level: if nanotech and nanofab is a thing, all you have to do is broadcast blueprints to your colonies, and the colony can build all the latest tech out of literal atoms.
So I crapped on quantum theory, and pretended that unbreakable encryption is possible with quantum-entangled particles, but that each pair of these particles have to be produced simultaneously in the same location (like a one-time pad).
So if planets A, B, & C want to communicate, you need to physically take half the Qbits from A to C. Then half a different set from B to C. Then again from A to B.
Voila, an expensive, high-demand physical product that needs to be shipped from everywhere to everywhere.

Came here to post this.

>doesn't wear a still suit

fucking pleeb

Only if you have shit infrastructure.

I've been to a few modern industrial countries that have had terrible tasting tap water. Not across the board, but at a few places where I've had to resort to buying water to drink because I just couldn't drink the crap that came out of the tap.

metals,minerals and water flow around everywhere in space. Also gasses. More than you can ever use.

If you have the capability to travel between various species home worlds to trade you can fucking mine the stuff yourself.