Earth-Standard Worlds Only

[Longboat]

Those worlds deep in a star's jump shadow are either backwaters because of the severe masking or are considered a secondary world to a world outside the shadow.

I don't think that's correct at all. If I take, say, the data for the Spinward Marches that comes in MT, the system's star type is included. If you use that to figure habitable zone, then use the star's radius, most worlds are masked by the system's star.

 

[Vormaerin]

Of course, a large number of worlds in the Spinward Marches are backwaters. Low tech, low pop, barely any trade.

I haven't calculated the habitable zones for the 400+ worlds in the Marches and whether they are shadowed enough to affect trade. So maybe Charted Space got it wrong. Or the definitions (there are actually a several proposals for what is a habitable zone around a star in circulation) was different today from what it was when the Marches were created.

Or perhaps they used a random generator and didn't care.

As I said pages ago, there's plenty of things you can do to change how things work to make sense of ships needing to spend days traveling to the "main world" if that's what the data shows nowadays. Having the starport being a deep space station is probably the most sensible. But there's a bunch of options.

 

[Longboat]

So maybe Charted Space got it wrong.

I wouldn't say it's wrong. I just think it's not a "thing" unless the Ref makes it one. I never thought of the star's 100D sphere being so large that it encompassed so many planets and the habitable zone until someone mentioned it on the TML. Book 6 provides the tools but never touches on it.

I just think it was ignored.



Thought: Maybe there's something about Jump technology that allows a ship in J-Space to ignore a star's J-Shadow, but it doesn't work on a smaller planet level. Some type of handwave to allow both to be possible--ignoring star masking but unable to change the effects of a world's diameter per the rules.

 

[Vormaerin]

Dunno. They try to make it a big thing in T5 to the point that you can fall out of jump space in the middle of nowhere because you clipped a real world object. But they don't actually make it playable. It's just a retroactive explanation for bad dice. It was actively thought to be different originally, because they made an issue of a few worlds where it was a factor.

T:NE jump rules mention actively calculating jump to be as close as possible to a world that has some element of shadowing, IIRC.

But very few worlds were treated as being far inside the shadow in any system.

I'm already fond of space LASh, so ridiculous levels of jump masking just makes that more viable

 

[Longboat]

I'm already fond of space LASh, so ridiculous levels of jump masking just makes that more viable

What is LASh? A Mongoose thing?

 

[rinku]

Obviously you should know what the world is like before your players go there. The invocation of MOARN was saying it isn't worth documenting whether it's the 100D limit of the planet or the 100D limit of the star that is causing your 6-12 hours of travel to the starport. When its 36 hours travel to the starport that matters.

As far as the "why it takes a week in system" if you want to decide that, you can do so. But that's not how it is written to work. The crew is not actually on vacation during port stops. Maybe if you are a corporate trader with established contacts at this starport, you can arrange everything by comms. But PCs generally aren't. They are itinerant traders scrounging for cargos that the big leagues don't want. They are not getting priority service at the port, because they aren't paying for it. Unless they are. No one is sitting around saving cargo for them. They are trying to track down people who can't/won't book on a real trader. Either because it's last minute or their paperwork is bad or the cargo is some annoying thing that isn't containerized or they can't afford the rates charged by real shippers or whatever.

The same thing with passengers. They are getting people on standby, people who are having trouble getting tickets on the scheduled liners.

Or they are at a some backwater port with no services and the passengers and cargo are probably scattered all over the city waiting for that once a month surprise ship to turn up.

So the assumption in the game is that it is going to take time to make all these arrangements, to do the maintenance yourself, to buy supplies, to vet these deals you are making, to herd the cats into getting whatever you managed to scrounge onto your ship. To make sure that online broker you signed up is actually legit.

You don't have to play that way. You can make the starports fawn all over the PCs and give them prompt, efficient service. But that's not the way that the default setting operates. It assumes that the players are having to actually bust their humps to scrounge up cargos and having to put up with suboptimal arrangements as a result.

Is it different for big corporations? Of course. But even with all that arranged, they don't want to spend days in real space. Its a waste of money and throws off their staffing calcuations. IRL, merchant mariners often have schedules that are like 28 days on/14 days off. Because they are on the ship for 28 days straight, then they are off for two weeks. So either their ship has 50% extra crew that rotates or they move between ships of the same company operating out of that world. Days in space count as days in space whether you are making any money or not. And an extra 4 days between ports is not making money.

You may be misunderstanding what I meant by "shore leave". That was just a shorthand for the whole picture of what a trading ship crew does in port. But the trading rules don't actually give many of the crew much to do except routine maintenance, and frankly they have been living in a spaceship for more than a week. Even getting out into a space station and looking around for a while is going to be crucial to every crewmember's mental health. Even the person searching for speculative cargo won't be doing that 24/7, will take breaks to check out the local attractions while waiting for responses or travelling to seedy dive bars to meet a contact.

It's 1D6 days to locate a speculative cargo supplier (or 1D6 hours on a TL8+ world). No time is specified for freight or passengers, but we can assume whoever is making the rolls is busy with that job and it takes non-zero time that is less than searching for a broker. Any other crewmembers left over are more or less at loose ends, especially if they're NOT technical types. But it does depend on the actual crew.

Freight handlers will have time to kill between offloading and onloading. Gunners can only check the calibration on the turrets so many times. Astrogators will run out of local asteroids to track. Pilots will get bored.

But those are likely to be the ones that pick up the side missions and interesting plot hooks.

 

[Vormaerin]

What is LASh? A Mongoose thing?

Lighter-Aboard-Ship. It was a historical shipping strategy of carrying barges on sea going ships. It didn't make economical sense in nautical shipping because the competition from railways and other methods of shipping to small ports made it uneconomical.

There are some ships in the Mongoose books that are large jump vessels carrying smaller non jump cargo vessels, with the idea being that the jump ship arrives in system, sends off the in system craft to various destinations while loading up the outgoing "lighters" and then jumping on. Maximizes the time the jump ships engage in jump travel and not lollygagging about in system.

Whether it would make more sense in Charted Space than it did on Earth's oceans depends on all kinds of factors we don't have the ability to analyze. But long in system travel to the starport would definitely lean in its favor.

 

[NOLATrav]

The wiki gives you a system’s star(s) as well as the Habitable Zone Orbit AND the star’s Jump Shadow Orbit. Easy enough.

Are those numbers reliable/realistic? Not really, but it works in a pinch.

 

[Vormaerin]

You may be misunderstanding what I meant by "shore leave". That was just a shorthand for the whole picture of what a trading ship crew does in port. But the trading rules don't actually give many of the crew much to do except routine maintenance, and frankly they have been living in a spaceship for more than a week. Even getting out into a space station and looking around for a while is going to be crucial to every crewmember's mental health. Even the person searching for speculative cargo won't be doing that 24/7, will take breaks to check out the local attractions while waiting for responses or travelling to seedy dive bars to meet a contact.

It's 1D6 days to locate a speculative cargo supplier (or 1D6 hours on a TL8+ world). No time is specified for freight or passengers, but we can assume whoever is making the rolls is busy with that job and it takes non-zero time that is less than searching for a broker. Any other crewmembers left over are more or less at loose ends, especially if they're NOT technical types. But it does depend on the actual crew.

Freight handlers will have time to kill between offloading and onloading. Gunners can only check the calibration on the turrets so many times. Astrogators will run out of local asteroids to track. Pilots will get bored.

But those are likely to be the ones that pick up the side missions and interesting plot hooks.

That does not match my experience with ships. Obviously there is shore leave, but there is ALWAYS work to be done. And most small freighters have the crew doubling as stevedores and maintenance staff because you aren't carrying specialists in those areas on 400 ton or less ships.

As for whether gathering the cargo and whatnot is more or less difficult than finding a broker to sell speculative cargo is unclear. I tend to think it is actually a lot of work, but that's my bias form working in shipping/logistics near a port.

 

[MasterGwydion]

I tend to figure that if people are trying to sell things, then making themselves hard to find might not be the best policy. The description of the Merchant Broker career says that you work in a planetside brokerage or at the starport. I can't imagine they are hard to find as that would be a horrible way to make money.

 

[rinku]

That does not match my experience with ships. Obviously there is shore leave, but there is ALWAYS work to be done. And most small freighters have the crew doubling as stevedores and maintenance staff because you aren't carrying specialists in those areas on 400 ton or less ships.

As for whether gathering the cargo and whatnot is more or less difficult than finding a broker to sell speculative cargo is unclear. I tend to think it is actually a lot of work, but that's my bias form working in shipping/logistics near a port.

Right. And I'm certainly not going to throw game rules and speculation at anyone's relevant real world experience.

I guess my main point in all this is that there's no one size fits all rule that applies to every system and every planet.

Sometimes (i.e. Asteroid belts) you arrive from jump close enough that even with space internet the broker probably won't have time to work on cargo stuff before the ship docks. Other times they might choose to take extra time on the task because of the two day flight from jump exit to inner system world. Many times (TL7 or less) they can't even start on that job until planetfall. I would point out that even without space internet, Any level of starport would usually be aware that a ship had arrived, and what sort. So local travel agents, shipping companies and the like are probably taking some initiative as far as organising customers for the ship. Finding special cargo can take a while, but regular freight and mail IS probably waiting for the next suitable ship.

Traveller traditionally has one week in system one week in jump. That provides time for travel to and from the jump point and to arrange passengers, freight and cargo, and a variable time for other matters (usually a few days).

I take the "two jumps per month" thing as probably a work right, adopted so that greedy captains don't work their crews to death and everyone gets some regular shore time. Others might go with too much time in jump space having known effects to be avoided. Or maybe you ignore it and account for every hour of play. That's up to the individual Referee to run with. We all know it exists because Marc Miller probably liked week long campaign blocks as time keeping units, but you don't have to match that if you don't want.

 

[Vormaerin]

Everything is vastly more complicated than any game simulation. Even when that game is The Campaign for North Africa.

There's no particular reason that we have to use the structure set up in Traveller. It is pretty arbitrary. However, the changes would affect a lot of things more than many people would think.

The idea that the starport is in orbit around the world. How often ships jump. How common civilian equivalents of battle rider tenders would be. What goods are even traded from world to world. How much in system shipping exists.

Personally, I think that Charted Space is vastly lacking in space infrastructure. Conceptually, the random generators were designed to create high adventure backwaters. That's why worlds tend to have crappy governments, dubious environments, small populations, and low tech levels. Mixed with a few worlds that are quite high pop and totally dominate the economy. And the focus was on getting the players into an adventure. So, MOARN. But I don't believe that shipping goods from one star system to the next will be cheaper than getting those goods from within the star system given how jump drives (and jump fuel) works. IRL, businesses are almost always going to choose low prices over fast delivery. So even if its two weeks to ship it from the asteroid belt, that's cheaper than the jump drive bringing sooner.

There are lots and lots and lots of ways it could be set up that make sense with the lack of info we have. Just have to decide what is important to you and your players.

 

[rinku]

Could not agree more.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Right. And I'm certainly not going to throw game rules and speculation at anyone's relevant real world experience.

I guess my main point in all this is that there's no one size fits all rule that applies to every system and every planet.

Sometimes (i.e. Asteroid belts) you arrive from jump close enough that even with space internet the broker probably won't have time to work on cargo stuff before the ship docks. Other times they might choose to take extra time on the task because of the two day flight from jump exit to inner system world. Many times (TL7 or less) they can't even start on that job until planetfall. I would point out that even without space internet, Any level of starport would usually be aware that a ship had arrived, and what sort. So local travel agents, shipping companies and the like are probably taking some initiative as far as organising customers for the ship. Finding special cargo can take a while, but regular freight and mail IS probably waiting for the next suitable ship.

Traveller traditionally has one week in system one week in jump. That provides time for travel to and from the jump point and to arrange passengers, freight and cargo, and a variable time for other matters (usually a few days).

I take the "two jumps per month" thing as probably a work right, adopted so that greedy captains don't work their crews to death and everyone gets some regular shore time. Others might go with too much time in jump space having known effects to be avoided. Or maybe you ignore it and account for every hour of play. That's up to the individual Referee to run with. We all know it exists because Marc Miller probably liked week long campaign blocks as time keeping units, but you don't have to match that if you don't want.

CRB page 157. "Commercial starships usually make two jumps per Maintenance Period."

Per Maintenance Period, not per month. They are not the same.

 

[Condottiere]

Recruit hikikomori as crew.

 

[Sigtrygg]

What is LASh? A Mongoose thing?

Originally a GURPS Traveller thing.

Jump ships not jumping are wasting money. So the jump ship carries subcraft that have the cargo, passengers and m-drives.
These are called lighters - hence lighter aboard ship.

The model is that a shipping company uses lighters to get stuff to the jump ship. When the jump ship arrives in system it unloads its lighters for this world and loads up with the lighters that have been awaiting the jump ship arrival.

Refueling is either by fuel carried by the lighters or a dedicated "oiler", and crew replacements can be made to give the crew a break on world.

Taken to the limit the jump ship could rely on drop tanks provided by the oiler so that it isn't jumping with empty space (empty fuel tanks)

Instead of one jump per two weeks you can mange one jump every eight days.

 

[Vormaerin]

Yeah, the first Traveller adaptation was in GURPS. I really like the idea, but it depends a lot on how you have your space infrastructure set up whether it makes sense or not. You can also have commercial jump tenders that move non jump free traders if you really go down this route in terms of how your infrastructure is set up in the developed systems.

It also solves the problem of making the highport absolutely vast in order to handle super freighters. You don't need to do so, because the lighters can go directly to the downports or space ports and the highport doesn't have to have the capacity to directly dock the very large ships.

Backwater worlds are not going to be set up to handle this sort of thing very easily, though if it one of those worlds on a main, one could easily establish that there is a Deep Space 9/Babylon 5 station in the system where the actual pass through trade is happening.

Otherwise, that's where the Subbies and Free Traders come in. They carry the goods to these worlds where there is no infrastructure for handling the LASh vessels.

 

[Condottiere]

It depends on how undeveloped these potential markets are.

Or, if it's a matter of charges for using the local infrastructure.

Or, you don't trust the natives with due care and handling.

 

[rinku]

CRB page 157. "Commercial starships usually make two jumps per Maintenance Period."

Per Maintenance Period, not per month. They are not the same.

Yeah, I was using the original CT wording in this case, but the same points apply regardless.
You can account for every hour of every day, round it up to "this is what you got done today" or round it up to "this is what you got done this week". Whatever style suits.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Yeah, I was using the original CT wording in this case, but the same points apply regardless.
You can account for every hour of every day, round it up to "this is what you got done today" or round it up to "this is what you got done this week". Whatever style suits.

Except your "style" means they only make 24 jumps per year. Without rounding, you get 26 jumps per year. Big difference in income.