There's a lot of different ways space trade could be done than what is published in Traveller materials. The random generator is designed to provide a wild and woolly frontier for crazy space opera adventures, not a sensible developed region. The plethora of C and D starports makes little sense in a region of space with solid interstellar trade volumes and long histories of settlement. I can't really see how the merchant corporations don't armtwist planetary governments into building proper space ports if there's actual trade. Why is unrefined fuel for sale even a thing? Who is going to risk losing a ship to misjump or waste cargo space and idling time on refining fuel themselves when running a safe route between established tradeports? That's a thing for wild frontier trade pioneers, not massive shipping cartels.
IRL, cargo is stacked on top of the ship and you are operating in breathable atmosphere, so you are just craning stuff around and the speed is basically how many cranes you can bring to bear. (The Rotterdam report on ultra large freighters commented that an issue with ultra wide freighters is that the lack of significant additional length meant no additional cranes could be brought to bear, not crippling or anything, but an issue).
Traveller Space ships store cargo inside like an airplane, which seriously limits how much cargo you can unload at once unless you have multiple cargo doors and a docking bay that can allow access to all of them. Ideally not in an "unload in vacuum" operation that's pointlessly risky and requires more expensive spaceworthy cargo containers. I mean, its fun that traveller allows all kinds of shapes and configurations of ships. But that's a clusterscrew for port planning. Merchants and ports should have pretty quickly decided "this is what shape freighters look like and what cargo berths look like." And I'm pretty sure "sphere" is not what it would have decided
(looking at you Galika...).
And the trade rules are designed to simulate what's available on the spot market for tramps, so there's little indication of how much (or even IF) there is major freight volumes going out on fixed route liners.
And you can certainly do a lot more with virtual crew and "lean manning" than Traveller does, even with just its latest version of virtual crew rules. Capital ship freighters do save some space on crew quarters and a few other fixed size assets. But where in the fiction are the Traveller starports that can unload a 50,000 TEU spherical mega freighter and still do anything else?
Okay, trade chefs, here's your weird list of ingredients! Make a meal!
IRL, cargo is stacked on top of the ship and you are operating in breathable atmosphere, so you are just craning stuff around and the speed is basically how many cranes you can bring to bear. (The Rotterdam report on ultra large freighters commented that an issue with ultra wide freighters is that the lack of significant additional length meant no additional cranes could be brought to bear, not crippling or anything, but an issue).
Traveller Space ships store cargo inside like an airplane, which seriously limits how much cargo you can unload at once unless you have multiple cargo doors and a docking bay that can allow access to all of them. Ideally not in an "unload in vacuum" operation that's pointlessly risky and requires more expensive spaceworthy cargo containers. I mean, its fun that traveller allows all kinds of shapes and configurations of ships. But that's a clusterscrew for port planning. Merchants and ports should have pretty quickly decided "this is what shape freighters look like and what cargo berths look like." And I'm pretty sure "sphere" is not what it would have decided
(looking at you Galika...).And the trade rules are designed to simulate what's available on the spot market for tramps, so there's little indication of how much (or even IF) there is major freight volumes going out on fixed route liners.
And you can certainly do a lot more with virtual crew and "lean manning" than Traveller does, even with just its latest version of virtual crew rules. Capital ship freighters do save some space on crew quarters and a few other fixed size assets. But where in the fiction are the Traveller starports that can unload a 50,000 TEU spherical mega freighter and still do anything else?
Okay, trade chefs, here's your weird list of ingredients! Make a meal!
