Interstellar Trade

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 :D (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! :D
 
Btw, my main point about ports was that, yes, in real life you match large freighters to large ports and small freighters to small ports. Honolulu doesn't bother with freighters larger than 3600 TEU because that's enough for what it needs given that it can and does handle multiple per day. The 24000 TEU ships sail right past for LA (I assume LA or LB can handle 24k ships, never checked. I know they can do 18k but that's not actually relevant :D)

In Traveller space, you can't really do that. Whether you are 400 dtons or 200,000 dtons, you have to go to whatever planet is jump 2 from where you start. That Shanghail to LA megafreighter in Traveller has to go to Manila, Guam, and Honolulu (as an example). Whether they can handle a ship that size or not. So you could just refuel and move on. Or you could design your ship to be able to soak up some of that intermediate trade as you go.

Smarter people than me (and their computers) would figure out the most profitable way to do that based on all the information we don't have. We GMs just get to make it up in a way that feels right and creates fun. :D
 
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 :D (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! :D
Refined vs. Unrefined fuel has always been a bit contradictory in Traveller. Fuel processors more than pay for themselves, so it's really just a matter of installing enough to convert your tanks into refined fuel in the average time it takes to land, begin fueling, unload, load and then travel to the 100D limit. Ships that stay in orbit or do "hot" cargo drops would not have the time to refine a full tank (especially if they are mega-freighters) so they'd take on refined fuel - but maybe at a discount or by their own fueling ships. Hard to say without any actual models to compare to. Once you get to a certain size then self-supporting supply systems become a thing where smaller ships/lines simply don't have the capital to handle such a thing. And space isn't like a terrestial waterport with limited space and essentially two-dimensional operations (one hopes to never make it to the 3D model where you have to consider being UNDER/over water... :).

Yes, container ships stack them vertically for maximum efficiency, as well as above the waterline (hence we see so many containers lost every year due to weather and oopsies over the side). Unloading of them has been made more efficient by adding more cranes that can simultaneously remove a container and drop it on a trailer. Usually it's the ground crew that drives the unloading of a ship and not the cranes themselves. Modern ports like Shanghai or LA/LB have the capability to unload a 24k TEU ship (that's roughly 12k containers for the uninitiated reading the thread - 1 TEU is equivalent to an approximate 20 ft container). Planes using containers are also quite efficient at getting cargo off. I used to work holiday air sort for UPS and we'd do the shipping containers (manually loaded and unloaded). One person can move a 4,000lb container when the floor is nothing but wheels every 10-12 inches. Plane cargo decks are the same, and when they are done loading the wheels are withdrawn into the deck and the container is now flat on the surface. It's very simple and quite efficient really.

Unloading in zero-g has advantages, as well as disadvantages. Newtons' 1st Law comes to mind as a possible bug-a-boo. The other thing is that to unload in vacuum you'd need cargo that can take vacuum (making every container airtight sounds OK, but in practice I think it would be cost inefficient unless you had some very cheap disposable liner. Airtight containers would not then be cheap like common containers are today. And while floating them to a lighter of some sort could occur, all that time and effort in zero-G vacuum could quickly add up in expenses for operation. It would be much easier to have a longer cargo ship that stored containers in a manner that would allow for automatic loading / unloading. There are a couple of different design versions possible - rotary style, or long and slim where there is a main corridor that all containers move along and are then shoved into waiting racks. A good purser would load the cargo destined to be unloaded next in the cargo corridor so no wastage of storage occurs.

Since we haven't really seen any ships and have no real equivalents to go by all we can do is speculate. History has shown us time and again that standards change as technology and innovations change. And, of course, human cleverness.

Personally I'd think most small traders would carry their cargo in 3-5 dton containers. It makes it easier to move and store on a smaller ship. While they could take bigger standard containers, they have less capability to maximize storage capacity since they typically aren't bendable. The subsidized merchant, with it's forward and aft openings and higher cargo bay could store them atop one another easily enough - that that potentially lends itself to difficult unloading. Not impossible, but you'd need some sort of long side or underbelly forks on your unloader (and it would be potentially load un-balanced since your center of gravity would be odd. Though being able to control gravity also makes something like a top-of-container drone style lifter possible, kind of like a container crane without the cables.

Unfortunately what we see in Traveller is conceptual designs for large megafreighters and warships, but everything else in the literatur is really sized for the original 5k dton ships or smaller. This is a regular thing in Traveller though - often contradictory and hand-waved. There is no reason in logic or reality to have a large merchant crew when that problem was solved quite some time ago. Automation and improvements in tech mean you don't need stokers or oilers for you fusion plant or M-drive. That's one of the more annoying things with the continued republishing of the same material that has annoyed me - if they are removing room-sized computers why not improve the crewing rules as well and take them out the early 1900s?
 
Yes, if I was writing the rules to try to simulate the future rather than to create a space operatic playground there would be a lot of things done differently. But most people are not into logistics so I don't know that it would make the game more fun :D

Personally, I prefer the small ship game anyway. I run my campaigns in a heavily customized version of the Islands subsectors so I can say "yeah, the Empire's over there with their big stuff. Over here in the middle of the rift, we play with small ships. :D I've never actually had a use for the stat blocks or floor plans of any big ships in 40+ years of playing Traveller. Literally, the only thing I ever used out of Trillion Credit Squadron in the decades that I've owned it was the couple pages of original version of the Islands subsectors in the back :D
 
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