I'm wondering what how similar the logistics and transport industries in 2063 are to those of today. If anyone has any insights as to where to find out about this or any opinions of your own, please feel free to share them with me.

a lot of traffic is handled by dogbrain autotrucks. more important cargo gets a rigger, who often runs road trains across the country--instead of one truck, they captain's chair as many as they can handle. there probably aren't anywhere near as many single-truck big rig drivers; those that remain probably supplement their income with smuggling.

Or arm wrestling. *snixx*

Riggers are still kind of expensive, both in set up of initial equipment and the maintainance of setting up vehicles with control rigs. It would be much cheeper to run a solitary driver through on a bunch of drugs so that they can perform the long haul, not to mention cheeper on vehicle maintainance.

You'd still see solitary rigs out there, but megacorps would probably use the single rigger road train instead, purely to pay one person an increased wage rather than around ten a sub standard one.

I don't know... a datajack, RC Deck, and rigger & drone adaptation, that's about 2K plus (about, I have no books with me) 10K per truck start-up cost. Four trucks is about 42K extra, but you save the salaries of 3 drivers.

Of course, its probably not as safe, as the drone pilots will be cheap (basically go on a straight line) but when did random megacorp A care about safety if they're making a net profit?

Considering that a rating 2 autonav can guide a vehicle along a pre-made route on streets with level 0 sensors and not crash, a drone pilot is almost excessive.

If the streets were safe and there were no auto wrecks, a drone would be excessive. The primary purpose of droning a truck would be to identify the types of distortion from the original path, relay the discovery to a central control, and follow the predetermined response until new instructions arrive.

This way, a drone truck has a chance to recognize "attempting theft of goods" and get the local defense contractor on site, or recognize "bridge out" and await an alternate route.

the best way to road train autotrucks is to put a higher-level drone pilot in one truck, and have it captain's chair the rest.

I have no idea where I read this... But apparently surface shipments have largely tapered off, seeing as getting from Seattle to DeeCee now involves going through a dozen ifferent Amerindian nations, each with its own laws and paperwork for importing and exporting stuff. You probably have a few corporations which make major 'contributions' to these nations in one form or another, and can transport stuff without much trouble, but otherwise expect semis and trains to be a lot less common. Up north, where UCAS is a continuous country, and down south in CAS you'll see a lot more of them again, but in Seattle you'll likely only rarely see a semi and I don't think you'd ever see a train.

Ships are going to be major, especially since trade along the western coast and with Japan has only gone up, although depending on the situation in Panama, it may be only slightly more than what you get now. From reading, I'd guess that THE prefered way of transporting stuff across the continent cheap would be zepelin; great mpg, serious carrying weight. It is my opinion that VTOLs have been developed in part for the purpose of transporting stuff quickly and easily, and cargo jets are still around (granted, that is more expensive than a jet, but hey...)

I don't see a particular reason to hire a rigger. Between autonav and cheap labor, there isn't much you'd need to run trucks, trains and maybe zepelins. You'll only see riggers when the value of the cargo justifies it.

The novel Shadowplay (my favorite BTW) has some nice descriptions of overland trucking in the mid-2050s.

Basically expert system run road trains (drone with full auto-pilot towing multiple trailors) do most of the overland stuff.