Further defining Starports

Charted Space has some weird implied assumptions that mostly come from (rightfully) focusing on player-centric content and MOARN. The default assumption is that most systems are poorly developed beyond the mainworld, so one starport is reasonable. Most systems don't have high ports (probably because you want PCs on the planet to have adventures). Most worlds are, frankly, low to mid tech and low population (so you can have those pulp space opera adventures on them). Originally, the Imperium was decrepit and aging, but that's gone by the wayside.

That suggests that interstellar travel is easier/more cost effective than interplanetary movement. You could easily find equally crappy planets to live on/extract resources from without leaving one's existing star compared to a lot of these awful "mainworlds" :D But we have Maneuver drives because that's what is best for gameplay, as rocketry is tedious for most folks :D. Jump drives are probably more cost efficient than rockets, but m-drives let you zip around the solar system pretty easily.

Interestingly, TNE is probably the version of Charted Space that most closely matches what the straight rules produce. A bunch of underdeveloped star systems with a single or no highport around the not necessarily great to live on mainworld.

For me, personally, I want a lot of ships moving in realspace. I want the ability to have pirates and lonely ship rescues and all of that. I want to have space stations and mining outposts and small colonies all over the place. I don't expect Mongoose to publish material that way...MOARN is important for author and GM sanity, if nothing else.

But I don't agree that the main trade center is the starport was ever intended to mean you could only land at the starport as a general rule or that was the only place trade happened. The Book 6 explanation was:

The major traffic center in the system is the starport; all others are called spaceports. While it is possible for spaceports to accept starships, they are
called (if only for convenience, and for terminology) spaceports.

Spaceports did map pretty much to C, D, or E starport ratings based on the ratings descriptions. Apparently refined fuel is an imperial monopoly. :D Of course, the inadequacy of the ratings descriptions is the actual point of this thread, which we've drifted way off of.
 
1. Terra was not under Imperium control when the starports were built, and were probably needed to handle the requirements of their commercial and military traffic when they fought against the Vilani.

2. The current traffic is probably too heavy for the Imperium to consolidate them into one.

3. They could, but probably the result would be too inefficient.

4. One would assume that the same policy allows multiple starports on other important systems in the Imperium.

5. You could have multiple downports, and highports acting as terminals of the same starport, but widely distributed.

6. Travelling between different terminals of the same starport would be considered still in transit, though you'd have to use the starport's shuttles.

7. Moving your spacecraft to another terminal would require a flight plan, and you'd still have to pay more fees, but likely less inspections, assuming you didn't divert, were intercepted, or did anything suspicious.

8. Spaceports are not directly administered by the Imperium, though probably distantly monitored.

9. Balkanized non Imperium worlds or systems are likely to have multiple starports, if they label them as such, but one assumes since it's Traveller's Aid Society guides, that would require them to have minimum (Imperium) standards ascribed to their status.
 
The way we play it is that after dropping out of Jump, you check in with the Mainworld Starport. It’s the center of traffic control, ship advisories and Law/S&R if necessary. Alert them of your flight plan and they log it and give you the go-ahead or perhaps a suggested route or maybe they say no, you gotta meet a patrol cutter for reasons. Doesn’t matter how developed the system is or how many ports or bases or facilities there are, you are required to check in and in nearly all instances have your transponder operating.

Vormaerin said:
For me, personally, I want a lot of ships moving in realspace. I want the ability to have pirates and lonely ship rescues and all of that. I want to have space stations and mining outposts and small colonies all over the place.
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Exactly. Same here. The arrival check-in is my hook/macguffin/push/pull to let the system feel alive, dangerous, boring or unexpected.

Not checking in is asking for trouble because they know you’ve arrived. You could have many, many hours before they could do anything about it, before they detect you even, but they will know.

It’s funny because the original and still popular gameplay loop is to hit the good ports to make the most money to pay down your ship mortgage. But the lesser ports are so much more interesting, especially if the Mainworld has something going on and then even more so if you develop the system at large just a little bit. Gas Giant mining rig or Planetoid belt or some iceball world supplying resources to a lackluster Mainworld are perfect for adventure/intrigue opportunities.
 
Yeah, obviously a law abiding ship will notify the authorities of their presence and intentions. No one wants to be an unidentified vessel :D But actually *going* to Earthport when my destination is Mars or, worse, one of the moons of Saturn? Nah. That's days of extra stay just driving around in system, which is back breaking if your ship is trying to function as a trader and also have time for regular adventures. :D

I develop all the systems in the two subsectors that comprise my campaign (I run in a highly customized Islands subsectors, so pretty contained). But there's always space for a new space station or asteroid outpost. So there's a lot of action away from the mainworld.

I don't much like the mortgage system in the game. So if my players have a ship at all, then its either subsidized or a non merchant vessel that's paid off.
 
I to like the concept of lots of in system traffic tho I don’t see a lot of population off the habitable worlds. I more see places like mining or gas refining stations that have a small crew and lots of automation. A dozen people here 3 dozen there working months at a time makes more sense than full colony’s to operate such stations. As for why there’s not major space habitats in charted space that’s easy when interstellar travel is cheap it well cheaper to fine another habitable world than it is to build space colonies that require massive resources to build and are a constant drain on resources. Truth be told without cheap interstellar travel there’s no real push to leave a system. All the resources you need are there in abundance. So almost all sci-fi make interstellar travel easy and cheap in order to justify expansion beyond a single star system.
 
Vormaerin said:
Yeah, obviously a law abiding ship will notify the authorities of their presence and intentions. No one wants to be an unidentified vessel :D But actually *going* to Earthport when my destination is Mars or, worse, one of the moons of Saturn? Nah. That's days of extra stay just driving around in system, which is back breaking if your ship is trying to function as a trader and also have time for regular adventures. :D

I develop all the systems in the two subsectors that comprise my campaign (I run in a highly customized Islands subsectors, so pretty contained). But there's always space for a new space station or asteroid outpost. So there's a lot of action away from the mainworld.

I don't much like the mortgage system in the game. So if my players have a ship at all, then its either subsidized or a non merchant vessel that's paid off.
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See you just answered a few questions. One you don’t play in Charted Space so of course you don’t run things the same. Two I’m guessing that what ever interstellar government you have in your game has a lot more control over the member worlds than the third imperium since you don’t have any custom rules at all in your game.
 
What? The Islands Subsectors are in Charted Space. In the Great Rift? The first published version was part of Trillion Credit Squadron in 1981, which was the only part of TCS I had an actual use for. The most recent version was released in the Great Rift Box set by Mongoose. I am under the impression that a forthcoming campaign is likely to be set there as well. And there's basically no interstellar governments there. There's a few worlds with a colony in another star system. The one large polity is five star systems. When I said it is highly customized, I meant that I've fleshed out all the star systems extensively and developed the worlds beyond just the basic UWP, as any GM would reasonably expect to do.

Regardless, where I set my campaign does not determine my views of the published materials, which I have a reasonably complete collection going back to 1977.

What on earth makes you think there are no customs in my campaign? Customs exist at all ports. What I don't assume is that the Imperium, which per the books levies no tariffs and restricts almost no trade goods, needs to inspect every single ship on the off chance they are carrying nukes or slaves that the local member world's customs agents won't catch.

On the subject of cheap interstellar travel, that's one of my issues. The HG rules do NOT make interstellar shipping cheaper than interplanetary shipping, but the infrastructure set up implies it should be. If we use Heplar or, god forbid, actual rockets, then Jump would be more efficient. because the reaction mass would be equal or greater than the jump fuel demands. (Though not if you make all the jump ships go to the starport, because then you'd still have to have the interplanetary shipping and infrastructure to handle that transshipment instead of letting the freighters jump to and from the asteroid belt or wherever). But M-Drives are extremely low cost operationally, since power plant fuel is trivial. So it is vastly cheaper to ship goods from the Asteroid Belt to Earth than to bring those resources from Alpha Centauri. It's possible to square the circle, but not really necessary imho. It doesn't affect gameplay. "There's interstellar and interplanetary trade because reasons" is satisfactory to 99% of players.
 
tytalan said:
Another false argument. There are government agencies in the major governments that whole job is trying to stop white slavery which they haven’t and to track possible WMD. And I’ll bet your traveling in EU which has no boarders.
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Yet again you make statements not backed up by any fact.
The job to prevent slavery doesn't consider the colour of the people being trafficked - their job is to bring modern slavers to justice regardless of the race, religion or county of origin of the trafficking victim.
The EU now has internal borders due to the migrant crisis, despite the rules.

Now back to the thread.

Get a copy of GT Starports for the answer to all of this on the Lorenverse.
 
While I can see the use of a USP, I'm struggling with how to actually structure it. You will need a way to establish if there is a highport and, if so, how much of the capacity is highport vs downport. Also distinction between hangar-age and "space piers".

Where I hit the wall is that 200,000k of docking capacity might mean 200 berths for 1k ships with no ability to handle a 200k mega freighter. Probably just want "largest ship the port can handle" and some idea of how many ships. Same thing with the shipyard.

Does it need to track separate facilities? For instance, here on O'ahu, there are two commercial ports. One is general purpose and the other handles specialty ships because there isn't a coal bulk uploader or pneumatic cement pump system at the main harbor. I think it handles some of the liquid bulk tankers, too. There's also an anchorage for ships that don't fit in the harbor.

Do we need to distinguish between interstellar and interplanetary capacity? Only one of Honolulu Harbor's 5 basins allows foreign cargo vessels.

Basically, how much granularity are we looking for here? If it were just me, I'd only care about whether the shipyard can handle small craft, adventure class, fleet, or capital ships. But I don't know if folks would want an approximate capacity in tonnage?
 
Vormaerin said:
While I can see the use of a USP, I'm struggling with how to actually structure it. You will need a way to establish if there is a highport and, if so, how much of the capacity is highport vs downport. Also distinction between hangar-age and "space piers".

Where I hit the wall is that 200,000k of docking capacity might mean 200 berths for 1k ships with no ability to handle a 200k mega freighter. Probably just want "largest ship the port can handle" and some idea of how many ships. Same thing with the shipyard.

Does it need to track separate facilities? For instance, here on O'ahu, there are two commercial ports. One is general purpose and the other handles specialty ships because there isn't a coal bulk uploader or pneumatic cement pump system at the main harbor. I think it handles some of the liquid bulk tankers, too. There's also an anchorage for ships that don't fit in the harbor.

Do we need to distinguish between interstellar and interplanetary capacity? Only one of Honolulu Harbor's 5 basins allows foreign cargo vessels.

Basically, how much granularity are we looking for here? If it were just me, I'd only care about whether the shipyard can handle small craft, adventure class, fleet, or capital ships. But I don't know if folks would want an approximate capacity in tonnage?
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I was thinking that the "USP" would have a Size digit, and that digit would represent total size of the Starport. Then the Referee and/or the writers would have some flexibility as to how that size was divided up between Highport, Lowport, and subports/spaceports (if they exist). Then you have a Trade digit or a Berthing digit, which would get you a rough idea of the amount of Trade running in or through a system. Between that digit and the Size digit, it should give you a rough idea of the docking capacity. Enough to handle normal gaming, but just below what you would need if you wanted literally everything defined. I try to design Rules Systems that are specific enough, but without taking the creativity away from individual Referees and writers.

As far as your Oahu question, that sounds like a Starport and 4 Spaceports. Perhaps a Specialty Bulk Cargo port as well, likely considered Corporate-owned or as a subport of the main Starport.

I think We have already distinguished between Interstellar and Interplanetary trade, Starport and Spaceport. Someone above listed a quote from one of the books stating that most Spaceports do not accept Interstellar craft. If We use this rule then Traffic Control is handled by the SPA for the entire system (outside of the 10D or whatever that is where Imperial Space ends and planetary space begins.
 
That was my quote from CT Book 6 and it was the opposite meaning. Spaceports can accept starships just like like the starport, but they are distinguished purely for terminology purposes. There is literally no difference for docking purposes between a starship and a spaceship.

The thing is that CT spaceports were all equivalent to "Class C" or lower starports, because apparently in the CT era refined fuel was a monopoly by the Imperium (only class B and A *starports* could have it, not even the best quality spaceports did. Ship construction was also only possible at the Imperial port by the description. "Good" quality spaceports could do minor repairs like a class C starport.

I don't know if those implications were intended or not. They are 'interesting' if so.

The refined fuel thing only at starports might make sense in MgT2e because unrefined fuel only matters for jump drives, but it's pretty funny in CT because you can damage your power plant or maneuver drive with unrefined fuel in that rules set.

Regarding O'ahu, there's three ports: Honolulu Harbor, Barbour's Point, and Pearl Harbor. If Honolulu Harbor was a starport it would have 5 docking complexes. Barbour's Point would be a separate spaceport and Pearl Harbor is the Naval Base.

CT also says that Naval and Scout Bases have a significant part of their capacity attached to the starport, but can have subsidiary facilities elsewhere in the system.

Anyway, if all starships arriving in system MUST go to the starport, the starport is going to be a major source of interplanetary shipping as well, because all of that interstellar cargo has to be transshipped to its actual destination. Jump capable ships are super inefficient for real space transport and they can't afford to spend extra days in realspace. If a jump ship can't arrive directly at Marsport, it's going to want to jump its cargo at Earthport and get back into jumpspace to pay its bills and let a ship that doesn't have a large chunk of its capacity dedicated to ftl handle the slowboating. So Earthport will need substantial warehousing and dockage for sublight vessels.

There's no difference between the capacity for ftl and sublight ships. They both dock at the same berths. So it wouldn't affect that rating, but traffic rating should reflect a lot more than just starships. Which Traveller generally fails to do. There's a derth of sublight ships on the encounter tables and I believe that the WBH tables for shipping presence are intended to be the starships, not the totality of shipping. If it is totality, that dramatically cuts interstellar trade volumes :D
 
Anstett said:
A parallel conversation happening on the Traveller Reddit about the number of ships also:

https://www.reddit.com/r/traveller/comments/1dczynq/how_many_ships_are_in_space_at_any_one_time
Click to expand...

As an interesting aside semi-related to this: I once ran a calculation using the Average Traffic rules in the World Builder's Handbook and Second Survey data for all then-official sectors of Charted Space to figure out approximately how many starships must exist. I used the average weekly traffic volume (to account for the ships in-transit through jump on any given day), and in the end it came up to around 856,191 individual starships.

Chef's suggestion: add a truckload of salt to that number before consumption, as it won't account for ships that don't call at starports, starships in naval depots, starships headed to secondary worlds in-system other than the mainworld, in-system small craft, etc.
 
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A lot more than Traveller would generally credit.

At the macro scale, spacecraft are really cheap; player characters struggle to pay their mortgage, because they haven't the right backers, nor presented an attractive business plan.
 
Condottiere said:
A lot more than Traveller would generally credit.

At the macro scale, spacecraft are really cheap; player characters struggle to pay their mortgage, because they haven't the right backers, nor presented an attractive business plan.
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Player Characters struggle to pay their mortgage, because most of them can't read or figure out the Spec Trade tables...lol...
 
images


Bitionaires.
 
I took the important information for a starport as being more about services available rather than size or traffic, which I left to referee fiat. The result was https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/rules/expuwp/starports.html (written originally in 1996, so the idea goes back nearly 30 years).

So, that class-A starport on the tiny pop-3 world may be the world's sole purpose for existing, and can manage to build one free trader per year, and maybe can handle repairing a subsidized liner, whereas Regina could have a dozen or two battleships under construction at once, and could manage to do repairs on a couple of battle tenders.
 
FreeTrav said:
I took the important information for a starport as being more about services available rather than size or traffic, which I left to referee fiat. The result was https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/rules/expuwp/starports.html (written originally in 1996, so the idea goes back nearly 30 years).

So, that class-A starport on the tiny pop-3 world may be the world's sole purpose for existing, and can manage to build one free trader per year, and maybe can handle repairing a subsidized liner, whereas Regina could have a dozen or two battleships under construction at once, and could manage to do repairs on a couple of battle tenders.
Click to expand...
Yes, this article is one of the ones I quoted that got my mind whirling away at the possibilities.
 
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