dead fenris wrote:
slavery costs in housing, feeding, keeping in health and working order for said slaves.
breeding costs in the time spent on the stock not doing slave labor and breeding and rebreeding to get the traits that you want.
creating skelebots costs in labor, materials, storage, wages for workers to build them or housing and feeding for slaves or raw cash for subcontracting.
history has proven that substance wages is by far more cost effective than slavery. paying someone a very small amount, and forcing them to provide their own food and shelter costs far less than having to feed and shelter them.
on top of that, how much does it cost to build a slaver and crew it with blind warrior women? what does it eat? does it bring food with it or just hunt off the land? can a slaver repair its own damage? with what materials? it seems very unlikely that what a slaver can find in a sdc village with little to no high-end tech can be used to repair major damage on tech from atlantis. and if the warrior women die? you need to take time from slaving to go back to atlantis, pick up a new set of BWW and travel all the way back to where you were. not at all cost effective. or perhaps they just send you a six pack of BWW via magic. while this is much more efficient its still time wasted on not slaving. now that you have the slaves, how do you transport them back to splyyn? magic? i dont remember a slaver having teleport magic, so that means land and water travel back to atlantis. and how does it transport them when they actually have to travel the distance? a slaver is not that big so how many can it fit? 30 or 40 tops? not at all cost effective.
Good call! I think logistics arte something that is ignored to much in Rifts. I mean no one dose anything for free. When youm consider that an "average" human slave only sells for 2-12 thousand creds. Sploogie better have some low overhead. And, unfortunatly magic wouldn't work, for the most part. You average boi-tech creation costs hundreds of thousands to millions of creds, and with out those magic creations, Slavers, Warrior Women, Kittani, and Kydians alike don't have magic. Staves of Pacification, or Eylor don't have anything to "feed" slaves. They only can capture. So, yeah they'd have to have some sort of food for the slaves. Even if the cost to feed slaves was 1 credit a day, it would cost at least 20 mil a
day to feed all the human slaves in Atlantis. Dang. Transport is going to cost more. Moving 800 salves isn't free, that's for sure.
Then there is the question: Do Kittani, Kydians, and Slavers get paid? I would think there is some kind of compensation for these guys. I mean, they are minions, not slaves. That's gonna raise your overhead for sure.
The Splugorth Slaver Raider ship can hold 800 slaves. There is still the issue of ther Slavers carriing slaves (or leading slaves like a chain gang) back to the boat. I'm not sure there is much room for the slaves on the barge. It never give a figure for that.
It's a lot to think about. I'll skim over WB 2 & 21, and try to come up with some figures on it later today...