Adventure-Class Ships

[swordtart]

If you have to take an interstellar passage because of your work, the corporation, or institution, pays.

If it's tourism, I think I'd rather let that amount of money simmer in my pension fund.

Yep, and this may well determine the going rate for passage. Many hotels and airlines set their prices on weekdays at levels higher than weekends as business users will pay if they need employees in a particular place based on the requirement for work which is generally in the working week. Weekenders will decide on where to stay based on price of the flight and hotel as they are often more flexible on where and when the trip is cost effective.

This is probably why low is so cheap as business users might balk at being shipped as cargo (and they can be expected to work in the week in jump). I can easily see them getting the most up to date information in the transit out to jump. Working up their preliminary presentations in the week in jump and then fine tuning it in transit to the main system with the most up to date local information. Anyone who has had to prep for an annual shareholders report will recognise the benefit of a week out of the loop with fixed data and no interruptions.

 

[MarcusIII]

Nothing like current air-travel...

Right. Because I can get a flight from LA to NY for ~$60 one way, not direct, if I book ahead. And, New York (NYCA) to London (LOND) $143 round trip for Dec 18th.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Could you do that in 1977? Which is the era when the statements were made...

 

[Terry Mixon]

Where are you getting these equivalents from? In your earlier post you said that KCr8 was equivalent to $40,000 but here you say Cr700 is equivalent to $10,000. Surely it would be $3,500?

I am not sure you can equate a single flight on an airline with a 2 week cruise. You also need to consider the other costs in the game. Normal monthly living costs are KCr1.5 so that mid-level passage is certainly a big price tag, but Cr700 looks far less challenging. If your journey is the typical 2 week jaunt then the low berth actually saves Cr50 over your living costs for the same period.

The chance of death in Low Berth is not a real thing anymore. In CT it was a flat chance, now it is a function of Medic skill and we have shown time and again that it is trivial to make all Low Berth travel survivable for a healthy person. By the time there is a realistic chance of it happening you are so medically vulnerable that you are as likely to die through a papercut. Referees can of course load the dice in favour of killing their players characters arbitrarily in squalid ships with inconsiderate medical staff, but that is a story choice (and in my opinion a bad one).

And MixCorp AutoBerths can eliminate even remote chances of death.

 

[Arkathan]

A cruise ship is more relevant to interstellar travel than airline flights.
Airline flights are closer to planet to moons/space stations or to the nearby planetary orbital when it is within a month or three of closest approach.

 

[MarcusIII]

A cruise ship is more relevant to interstellar travel than airline flights.

"A 7-day Caribbean cruise typically costs from around $500 to $1,300+ per person."

A low berth trip is about $5k - $6k in 2025 $. WITH a chance of death. So, interstellar travel is going to be a very rare thing indeed in the Trav universe.

 

[Sigtrygg]

That is not what the game authors said back in the day when they were describing their game.



LBB:0

and from The Traveller Book

"Welcome to the universe of Traveller! In the distant future, when humanity has made the leap to the stars, interstellar
travel will be as common as international travel is today."

There are a lot more quotes, but those two will do, especially since The Traveller Book was the first to tie the setting in with the game rules.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

"Welcome to the universe of Traveller! In the distant future, when humanity has made the leap to the stars, interstellar
travel will be as common as international travel is today."

Cool ad-blurb, but the numbers don't agree, from LBB2'77 to MgT'24...

 

[Sigtrygg]

Regardless, it was the setting concept of the game authors.

 

[MarcusIII]

A concept that never reached fruition in the setting. If they had made ships significantly cheaper it could have happened

 

[Condottiere]

I donno; I think someone forget to do the maths.

The way starships have been designed, it's pretty much the cruise ship concept.

One possibility, transcontinental railways.

 

[Arkathan]

"A 7-day Caribbean cruise typically costs from around $500 to $1,300+ per person."

A low berth trip is about $5k - $6k in 2025 $. WITH a chance of death. So, interstellar travel is going to be a very rare thing indeed in the Trav universe.

You don't spend a week minimum on a plane. Have you been paying attention to cruise ship deaths recently? Correlates nicely with old school low passage.
As Syg showed, the quote was intercontinental travel and not necessarily flight.
Prices are relative and vary by demand, as you showed with the booking in advance example.
Taking 80s LBB prices to 2025 is disingenuous, since MgT2 uses 21st century $ as the credit standard.
In the end, it doesn't matter. Space flight costs what it costs and there are enough people going from one planet to another, who are not getting on established liners, to give player ships customers.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Starship crew salaries are only a single datum point. We have no idea how much the "average" star citizen earns a month. We cannot even extrapolate from the living expenses as that presupposes that the percentage spent on that mirrors the current world. Not all nationals spend the same percentage of their income on living expenses and not all individuals in any specific nation spend even similar proportions of income on living expenses.

The number are in that region in all (the few) sources that give a number. That is roughly where the OTU is, the average citizen isn't very rich...

The comparison to international air travel was specifically pegged to the 1980's not today. Internet tells me 0.8B international passengers globally in 1980 growing to 1.2B in 1990 so across the 80's 1B sounds like a good number with a global population of 5B in round numbers. So 1 in 5 (much like the UK case in 1981).

As Sigtrygg points out, the comparison isn't air travel, but all "international travel". A day trip to Tijuana, perhaps? A few hours shopping trip from Norway to Sweden? A daily commute from southern Germany to Switzerland?

The quote about equivalency was from CT not GURPS (and CT never bothered saying where the numbers came from).

There are lots of interesting numbers about GDP/capita in CT Striker and TCS. Not perfect perhaps but suggesting starship crew is rather well paid.

It is entirely possible to have a pair of decent worlds with combined populations in the millions with a BTN of in 8-10 range with 10's to 100's of thousands of passeng...

This is not implausible as there are parallels to capital cities. Lots of people visit the capital from the provinces but most residents in the capital will have little reason to go to a smaller city routinely. ...

Yes, that is represented in Far Trader, and why I suggested 1/1000 to 1/100 capita interstellar passages with 1/100 for capitals and hubs.

 

[MarcusIII]

Taking 80s LBB prices to 2025 is disingenuous,

It's 1977 prices. And accounting for inflation isn't "disingenuous". Do you even know WHY one would compare by adjusting for inflation to the present day? ????????????

 

[Arkathan]

Ooh. Semantics on minutia. Good burn.

 

[Endie]

Starship crew salaries are only a single datum point. We have no idea how much the "average" star citizen earns a month. We cannot even extrapolate from the living expenses as that presupposes that the percentage spent on that mirrors the current world. Not all nationals spend the same percentage of their income on living expenses and not all individuals in any specific nation spend even similar proportions of income on living expenses.

The WBH lets you work out per capita GWP easily, and it's easy to make fairly safe assumptions from that as to per capita median income, since we have a lot of real world countries to use as examples. I created a spreadsheet for this using the WBH rules (and another using the Pocket Empires rules, for comparison) for my PoD campaign, with dozens of worlds as examples. The per capita GWP difference between rich and poor worlds is vast: Borite GWP/Capita stood at 576Cr while that of Vorito is just over 110KCr.

 

[Condottiere]

Recall, that Traveller passage prices may be consistent, but arbitrary.

 

[Sigtrygg]

What is the per capita income for the current Earth? (interwebs give $13,000)

What is the per capita income for the USA, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Russia?
Research gives:
United States: $89,678 Germany: $57,914 Japan: $35,611 China: $13,873 Brazil: $10,816 Russia: $15,077 India: $2,937

Now how about we look at just the USA and the demographic breakdown of "per capita"...
Turning again to online research, so take with the usual pinch of sodium chloride:
the top 10% hold ~70% of all wealth
the median individual income is closer to $40–50k, not the ~$90k.
the bottom 50% own ~2–3% of national wealth

Only the wealthy travel internationally at no risk, a great many travel internationally and risk death to do so (in point of fact the death toll among migrants is higher than the low berth percentage according to UN data that I could find)

The Imperium is not a socialist utopia with equal wealth distribution, it is a distopian capitalist authoritarian society where wealth is concentrated in the high Soc elites...
a planet with a population of billions may have a million or so very wealthy individuals, a few thousand really wealthy, and tens to hundreds of trillionaires - TL dependent of course.

The classic Traveller authors were modelling interstellar movement on their perceived realities of late'70s international travel. In that era, long‑distance travel was expensive, bureaucratic, risky, and, most importantly for the setting, strongly class‑stratified. Only the middle and upper classes routinely crossed international borders, most people never left their home country, I know people who have never left their home town, and travel involved visas, paperwork, and often real physical danger.

The game authors scaled that to their interstellar concept. High Passage mirrors first‑class travel, Middle Passage is standard economy, and Low Passage represents the dangerous, low‑cost options used by the desperate. We can argue about the actual values they picked, but then the air/raft used to cost MCr6...

Interstellar travel in Traveller is costly, regulated, unequal, and status‑linked, just as international travel was when the game was created. I would argue that the analogy remains effective today because global mobility is still uneven.

TL-DR "Traveller models the world of the 1970s, not the modern budget tourism of the privileged."

 

[MarcusIII]

I would argue that the analogy remains effective today because global mobility is still uneven.

If you factor in all of humanity that would be correct. Probably 80% of people cannot even afford travel to outside their own region/province.

 

[WHULorigan]

A cruise ship is more relevant to interstellar travel than airline flights.
Airline flights are closer to planet to moons/space stations or to the nearby planetary orbital when it is within a month or three of closest approach.

"A 7-day Caribbean cruise typically costs from around $500 to $1,300+ per person."

A low berth trip is about $5k - $6k in 2025 $. WITH a chance of death. So, interstellar travel is going to be a very rare thing indeed in the Trav universe.

But in modern travel a Sea Voyage vs. an Air Voyage is an option. In the analogy the interstellar voyage is analogous to the Sea Voyage and is the ONLY OPTION, and is not simply for a long-duration pleasure cruise but the only way of getting from A to B; there is no "fast interstellar airline" analogous option.

A Sea/Interstellar Voyage is days at least, thus requiring a cabin or stateroom and common areas of some sort; an airline/spaceboat/shuttle can get away with airline retractable seating or short term cabins as their flights are measured in hours (or a day or two for long-range shuttle flights).

Those realities will alter the costs as compared to cruise ship rates. Better to use old Ocean Liner rates and convert the cost to modern $/£/€.