Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
At the low end, basically us, courier.
Or smuggling, under the guise of courier.
Or ride sharing.
Or smuggling, under the guise of courier.
Or ride sharing.
Does removing modules allow longer jumps
- Thread starter Sageryne
- Start date
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
Seems to Me that you need a mix of the time requirements of maritime trade, with the direct cargo delivery of air cargo systems. Once things are delivered by air (Starship) to the local airport (Starport), the cargo rarely leaves that city. (System). From the airport (Starport), the cargo is loaded onto trucks (spaceships) for the local deliveries.
Cargo shipping, when done right should be a downright boring job, literally bouncing back and forth between two Starports, only stopping in the middle to refuel, not to transfer cargo. That makes the turn around in system only a day or two instead of a week. This would make more sense, but unfortunately Canon states that most commercial ships spend a week in system trading and a week in jumpspace twice a month. This only makes sense if these ships are trading at every port, which My model doesn't allow for as being economically viable.
Pretty much everything written about trade is written at the scale of a small tramp freighter on the spot market. They might reasonably spend a week in port. A small ship is going to need to look for passengers and cargo. It's not going to already be arranged. It probably doesn't have the crew to both handle the trade and maintenance while also giving R&R, because it doesn't have multiple watches worth of crew. Crew also likely requires more R&R off the ship because there's less facilities for on ship recreation than a big freighter could afford. Tramp freighters are also going to be at the low end of the port priority and also may be expected to travel directly to the downport if streamlined.
Large freighters are not "trading" and they would not want to spend time in harbor. They certainly wouldn't spend days docked because that would cost a lot of money, as the port most likely has other ships that'll want that space. The port is more likely the bottleneck than the ship in most high volume trading environments. I would expect large commercial freighters to spend a day or two in system at most unless you have some rule saying that jumpspace is more crew morale damaging than the same time spent stuck on a ship at sea.
If space is as infrastructure poor as a literal reading of the rules suggests, they may not even have a port they use (because highports are surprisingly rare) and have lighters or cargo modules they exchange or some kind of in space cargo transfer (unrep) while refueling and just leave again.
Large freighters are not "trading" and they would not want to spend time in harbor. They certainly wouldn't spend days docked because that would cost a lot of money, as the port most likely has other ships that'll want that space. The port is more likely the bottleneck than the ship in most high volume trading environments. I would expect large commercial freighters to spend a day or two in system at most unless you have some rule saying that jumpspace is more crew morale damaging than the same time spent stuck on a ship at sea.
If space is as infrastructure poor as a literal reading of the rules suggests, they may not even have a port they use (because highports are surprisingly rare) and have lighters or cargo modules they exchange or some kind of in space cargo transfer (unrep) while refueling and just leave again.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
I do not know if any or all of that was intended by the writers, but I do know what I read in the various books. They state clearly that normal commercial shipping uses the 2 weeks in jumpspace and two weeks in system space. There will obviously be exceptions, but in general, it will be 2 and 2. Some specificity would be nice in that from a Referee's viewpoint. I tend to agree with you that larger freighters would be more like 3 weeks in jumpspace and 1 week in system space per month only doing refueling and such.
I suspect that it is the same thing that leads village priests in D&D worlds to be clerics. The basic rules in the LBBs were written as player facing material describing player style activities and, since that's all that existed in the rules, it was just upscaled to the entirely different lives of other types of people. Your average village priest is not going to be a trained warrior-caster and your average scheduled commercial freighter is not going to behave like a tramp freighter. If someone was tramping in a 2000 ton ship, they would be doing the stuff described in game (and going broke fast). But they wouldn't be.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
Then I will have to find a new game where worldbuilding isn't impossible without rewriting the whole game, or wait another 40 years for the game to evolve into something that is internally consistent.
GURPS had it's share of problems, but helping to detail the economic aspects of the game wasn't one of them. They did a good job with Far Trader, but it could have used a rewrite to clean it up a bit. Geir did this to some extent in his World Builder's book.
Also, in D&D all rules apply to everyone. They do not have different rulesets for each class, or one for nobles and anther for commoners. They all use the same rules. Rules for businesses are by and large lacking, but D&D has never been an economic game, Traveller has been from the get-go.
That's not actually true. At least it wasn't originally. I haven't played the last several editions. AD&D character classes were explicitly adventurer classes. And there were NPC classes here and there, as well as 0 level humans. But that's a different issue.
I'm not sure why you think worldbuilding requires rebuilding the entire game. Traveller is NOT an economic game and it has never, outside of GURPS, had much to say about how normal people live or how big businesses operate. It only cares about the player characters and others doing the same sorts of things.
Everything economic in the game is aimed at independent tramp traders. You can apply to other tramp traders, not just PCs. You can't apply it straight to non tramp traders. Just like in real life, tramp traders and commercial container ships don't behave the same. Nor would rules about being a small cargo plane business have much to do with the rules for commercial air freight businesses.
This is like complaining that a book on tramp steamers doesn't explain how Maersk operates in the real world.
They don't have rules on how commercial freighters work because they don't expect that anyone wants to play a ship crew going back and forth on a scheduled freight run, picking up what you are told to pick up and dropping off what you are scheduled to drop off.
My point in all these shipping conversations is that there are multiple solutions to "how trade works in Charted Space" depending on the assumptions you make about the unmapped stuff. Traveller's mantra has always been what's now called MOARN. Only detail things to the level that is important to you. If it is important to you, do it the way you like. Because that flexibility is there.
I'm not sure why you think worldbuilding requires rebuilding the entire game. Traveller is NOT an economic game and it has never, outside of GURPS, had much to say about how normal people live or how big businesses operate. It only cares about the player characters and others doing the same sorts of things.
Everything economic in the game is aimed at independent tramp traders. You can apply to other tramp traders, not just PCs. You can't apply it straight to non tramp traders. Just like in real life, tramp traders and commercial container ships don't behave the same. Nor would rules about being a small cargo plane business have much to do with the rules for commercial air freight businesses.
This is like complaining that a book on tramp steamers doesn't explain how Maersk operates in the real world.
They don't have rules on how commercial freighters work because they don't expect that anyone wants to play a ship crew going back and forth on a scheduled freight run, picking up what you are told to pick up and dropping off what you are scheduled to drop off.
My point in all these shipping conversations is that there are multiple solutions to "how trade works in Charted Space" depending on the assumptions you make about the unmapped stuff. Traveller's mantra has always been what's now called MOARN. Only detail things to the level that is important to you. If it is important to you, do it the way you like. Because that flexibility is there.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
Can't map something that there are not rules for.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
The problem with actually having gods, is that worshippers expect their priests to produce miracles.
And for that, your parish priest is going to have to figure out how to level up.
And for that, your parish priest is going to have to figure out how to level up.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Then make your own for your Traveller universe, as I have done and many others have likely done also.
The metagame is mine.
I disagree with the underlying economic model the GURPS authors adopted for Far Trader, I don't think it fits the setting, it certainly doesn't fit mine.
So if Mongoose were to produce a Far Trader I would find it useless. I don't need yet another contradictory version of hoe megacorporations actually trade in the Third Imperium.
A supplement that has rules for different trade models that I can adapt to my setting is much more useful to me.
Here is an overview of how I do it:
The megafreighters are owned by megacorporations, the megacorporations use their megafreighters to ship their megacorporation products to market.
Sometimes megacorporation freighters transport raw materials exploited by megacorporation facilities to megacorporation refineries to manufacture the materials needed by the megacorporation production facilities to make the megacorporation products, which may require megafreighters to take the processed materials to the megacorporation production facility.
Then the megafreighter can take the megacorporation products to market.
The 200t free trader picks up the flotsam that remains, as freight or speculative goods.
The megacorporations already have their best price guaranteed, which is why they can buy megafreighters without a mortgage and thus just pay transportation costs, which the PC scale must match.
Can't use Traveller for a wide variety of settings if it's so detailed there's only one answer to these sorts of questions.
My question is why do you need rules for how commercial ships operate? Are you going to be playing as a commercial ship operator? Just decide what framework you like. Do you like spoke and wheel? Place the infrastructure for that when you describe things. Prefer jump ships moving sublight freighters from system to system, structure your starports to suit that. Playing in a backwater where only the reckless are flying around as traders? Have very little infrastructure at all.
There's no rules for how cities are laid out in various TLs and environments either. If only the GM needs to know how it works (and generally even they don't unless they personally are interested in that), then rules are limiting not helpful. Because how it works in the Core is likely different than how it works in the Marches and is even less like how it works outside the Imperium.
So you'd need pages and pages of rules. Core Imperium, Fringe Imperium, major worlds, backwaters, extra Imperial polities, "wilderness" regions, alien trade systems. Rules that will add nothing to most games because they aren't gonna be dealing with 10,000 dton freighters ever.
Honestly, if you want a Traveller system that has a lot of deets on trade, just use GURPS Far Trader. It's pretty well written, just need to do a minor bit of fudging with some of the numbers. And, to be honest, if Mongoose ever publishes a book on macroeconomics of the Empire, I expect that the author would draw heavily on it as a resource.
Personally, I hope that if they publish a book on traders, its focused on the player level with practical advice for GMs on how to make space trucking lead into adventures, how to make smuggling fun and workable, how to make the speculation chart actually challenging and adventure laden instead of a perpetual money machine. How to make subsidized merchant campaigns work in a fun way, etc.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
That is not how the descriptions of the megacorps are written. A megacorp that builds robots doesn't also have a shipping fleet. The shipping fleet belongs to a shipping corp, not a production corp. Just like in today's world. You do not expect FedEx or DHL to be building cars. No. All they do is ship. Megacorps have some overlap in that, but most corps do not. That is how it works in Our world and that is how all of the descriptions that I have been able to find for corps have been written for Traveller.
What I try and do is take all of the published information that has been created by others and try and use that to build a trade model that takes all of the into account. For a generalized book on corporate trade, I would agree that several different trade models would need to be explained and explored, but for Charted Space, only the model that is actually in use is of use to Me and I doubt that would take more than a page or two of text. In the GURPS Far Trader, about the only parts I use are the large-scale system trade rules. Not the ones for tramp traders. A lot of the stuff in there is way to complicated for most gameplay, but I also love the chart for differing value of currencies from one system to another, as well as the abilities of defined trade routes.
What you seem to be describing above where one megacorp effectively does farm to table seems more like Shadowrun. If you have only one megacorp in an area and they make all of the goods, then I can see them also shipping in their own ships. In territory that is used by multiple corporations, it makes more financial sense to have a shipping corp that produces nothing, but ships most everything everyone else produces.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
No, I am very much describing how megacorporations have been described in canon.
Notice how different we think the setting is.
What use would your shipping rules be to me? I do not want Mongoose to say "this is how it works" that was the great failing of GT IMHO, too much detail, and not all of it canonically correct.
Notice how different we think the setting is.
What use would your shipping rules be to me? I do not want Mongoose to say "this is how it works" that was the great failing of GT IMHO, too much detail, and not all of it canonically correct.
AndrewW
Emperor Mongoose
I don't expect them to build cars but you never know. Take Amazon as an example where they now do some of their own shipping.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
Amazon is by far the exception, proving the rule, and even Amazon does not ship at nearly the scale the DHL, FedEx, and those big boys do.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
Where is this written? I would very much like to go and read it and learn something new. Is it in the fiction or is it in the rulebooks?
Goes all the way back to Classic Traveller. While Tukera is the only one for whom freight is the main focus, they all do it. Here is the description in Merchant Prince (Bk 7).
Megacorporations: The long-haul transportation companies of the star lanes are the megacorporations. Only megacorporations, with their support bases and establishments spread over great distances, can provide long-distance passenger and freight service. Megacorporations, with their large capitalization and their great manpower, can and do have ships with luxurious appointments and high jump capabilities. Travellers can book passage for great distances on one ship; they are relieved of the need to change ships or to make travel arrangements for themselves. Megacorporations are naturally favored by the government; they receive the majority of the lucrative mail contracts and most of the military equipment shipment franchises; they carry diplomatic personnel. Megacorporations use their own equipment and available space to transport corporate personnel, often on a space available basis. Megacorporations may strike convenient reciprocal arrangements with other ,
megacorporations for service to areas they do not serve.
Megacorporations: The long-haul transportation companies of the star lanes are the megacorporations. Only megacorporations, with their support bases and establishments spread over great distances, can provide long-distance passenger and freight service. Megacorporations, with their large capitalization and their great manpower, can and do have ships with luxurious appointments and high jump capabilities. Travellers can book passage for great distances on one ship; they are relieved of the need to change ships or to make travel arrangements for themselves. Megacorporations are naturally favored by the government; they receive the majority of the lucrative mail contracts and most of the military equipment shipment franchises; they carry diplomatic personnel. Megacorporations use their own equipment and available space to transport corporate personnel, often on a space available basis. Megacorporations may strike convenient reciprocal arrangements with other ,
megacorporations for service to areas they do not serve.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Yup, megacorporations may specialise in certain areas but to qualify as a megacorporation there are a few key features:
operations in every sector and often beyond
able to influence world governments (in some cases actually running whole worlds)
pay the Emperor and local nobles their cut - sorry share dividends.
operations in every sector and often beyond
able to influence world governments (in some cases actually running whole worlds)
pay the Emperor and local nobles their cut - sorry share dividends.
Most megacorps ship their own stuff and do all the long hauling. The difference between Tukera and the other megas is that Tukera heavily invests in the businesses of shipping other peoples' stuff, whereas most of the rest of the megas primarily ship their own stuff and are taking other peoples' stuff mainly where they are taking their own stuff already.
