03/23/2024
I was on a Dune fan page, and a guy asked why the Harkonen could hover huge battlecraft and transport ships, but the spice harvesters need to be picked up by a transport ship. Facebook, in its infinite incompetency, would not let me post this violent or insulting response... No idea what the issue was.
Here is my answer. What do you think? I am no Dune expert. I just love the story.
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M*******, maybe it's cost driven. Think about how things go nowadays. We truck something from a pier where a ship takes days/weeks to deliver it when we know an airplane could have delivered the goods in hours. Why do it that way, then? Well, the ship can carry many times more than the plane, and it's more cost-effective to move massive amounts of cargo slowly on archaic infrastructure (via ocean on cargo ships)...so we still do it. Who is to say the "advanced" civilizations of the future wouldn't do the same, versus transport new technologies and modes of transport light years across the galaxies from their home worlds every time there was some new advance? That would be expensive and impractical logistically? Maybe they're just using what was there because that is what they have? It's the same reason you can't get a new computer at work. The old one still works, and the company doesn't see a need to upgrade from the Pentium 2 they bought 25 years ago.
Economics? The Harkonen were all about the coinage. Atreides was trying to establish a similar empire with the Spice trade (albeit a more human one for the locals). In one scene, when they assume control, they even lament the equipment condition "left" to them when the Harkonen were abruptly evicted by the Emperor.
