Mating Airlocks to Cargo Hatches

[Vormaerin]

Yeah, that was basically the trope for the Polesotechnic League stories of John Falkayn and Nicholas Van Rijn, too. Rijn himself was already successful at that point in the stories, but he'd sometimes be called on to risk life and limb proving how he got that way. Falkayn was literally going places in the edge of nowhere to try to make it into something profitable before someone else figured out how.

It was a really big trope "back in the day". Don't see it as much in science fiction being written recently. Nowadays the "explore for great fortune" is usually overwritten with "for the evil corp that's gonna hose you big time."

Which is also a good Traveller genre. Hostile, which is Cepheus derived system, does it quite well.

 

[Sigtrygg]

The mail contract requires an armed ship with gunner, and 5t set aside for mail. The idea of an actual "vault" was fanon made canon around T4 time.

1. PC free traders are not in an active career, the trade rules apply to their shenanigans
2. the 200t "free trader" is more like the Amazon delivery van of the 57th century
3. the trade game everyone calls for would be very boring, megacorporations and sector wide trade lines shipping raw materials, consumables, agricultural products, machinery, manufactured goods... all in bulk. The PC scale is moving the stuff that slips through the cracks, falls off the back of a tender, or is a "small package" requiring delivery elsewhere. I still want to see it though...
4. the CT type A is an accident waiting to happen, stick to type A and B starports until you can "salvage" the engines of a scout/courier to replace yours, then you can start using unrefined fuel safely.

 

[swordtart]

Unfortunately "Back in the day" the ships and the trade rules were based on Tonnes not on DTons (See Traveller Book p104) A. A tonne of 200 shotguns per the example would not take up anywhere near 14 cubic metres. They would very likely be packed in cases of maybe 10 guns each and the tonne of guns actually would be 20 discrete cases (probably palletised, but not necessarily). 200 Vevor cases (which are individual end user cases) occupy just over 6 cubic metres. Even when palletised and shrink wrapped that is less than 1/2 a DTon. So on that basis you CT hold was half as large compared to later editions.

I also have to address the "top loading" requirement. Real world shipping container MHE is designed to be top loading as cargo ships generally don't have side doors for structural reasons. Top loading was not imposed by containerisation, even break bulk was top loaded and many tramp freighters have cranes built onto the deck for this reason. The top-loading limitation may have influenced how containers were loaded and allowed carriage above decks, but top-loading was a thing before containers existed.

We do have ships with bow doors that are more like say the Empress Marava class* in the form of roll on roll off ferries. They do carry detached trailers with shipping containers mounted on them (at least in Europe) so that all that is required to get them to their final destination is hitching them up to a locally contracted tractor unit. That removes the requirement for entire wagons and drivers to be moving between countries and having foreign drivers moving large and dangerous loads around. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a TL12 port could not have a similar arrangement where the container is on a wheeled trailer or grav sled that can be towed behind a tractor unit. A container with trailer might require a little more space than a detached container, but as freight it would be included in the DTon calculation and be the shippers problem.

If you want to say tramp cargo is not in self-contained containers for story reasons that is fine, but it is purely a preference and not imposed by any real-world analogy or any rule in the game (indeed the current rules seem to provide support for a container based model of freight movements). It may be a trop of some earlier Traveller adventures, but there are plenty of other tropes that are not really compatible with the setting as it evolved. Given the very few adventures (and how how they keep being recycled and rewritten) it is a very small sample to draw from.

Trade has been part of the game since the first edition. It is not written that every stop on a journey has to have an adventure to find a cargo. For a specific example the Traveller Adventure is the exemplar. The first few segments are railroaded to introduce some key plot elements and the availability of cargo is used to drive it. There is then a "period of wandering" where the players are free to bimble about in a conventional trade cycle. The majority of Patrons do not offer cargo opportunities and the adventure hooks focus on the week planet side between jumps and the normal trade rules are used. The normal trade rules are you roll on a table and then get that cargo. You are free to refuse any of the side adventures and sometimes there is a consequence at other times there isn't. They may need to take the adventure to offset bad luck in searching for cargos and freight, but with good skills and good rolls they don't need to. This can be compensated instead by investing is speculative cargo which can quickly become very profitable. There is no indication that finding speculative cargo requires an adventure, this would be by exception (often to ensure a valuable cargo is obtained at preferential rates).

Many player traders fail and complain that they can't make a merchant ship work and the rules are broken. Usually this is because they don't bother focussing on the skills** needed to ensure those regular profits and focus on combat skills instead (in CT these were Bribery and Admin but in later editions they got quite specialised). If this is true then it tells you that they are not professional traders but murder hobos. that may shape the type of adventures that are published but it says nothing about the trade model in the game.

I am quite content that when getting from site of adventure A to site of adventure B the intervening stops are managed entirely by dice rolls and unless the players want to fix some bad rolls, they can find cargo and passengers as a simple roll on a table and move on and probably never even leave the star port. Professional tramp traders will have sufficient "un-exciting" skills that they generally get a decent final total and won't need to do anything exciting to fix it. For even semi-competent traders there will be months of uneventful trade that is just paying the bills. This gives characters time to heal, train and do the other things that allow progress in a "non-experience point" based game.

The Traveller Adventure also gives explicit information regarding the cargo handling for the March Harrier Subsidised Merchant. It has a 6 metre high hold specifically designed for "Standard Cargo Modules" (which are 3x3x6m) stacked two high. The grav plates are reversible to manoeuvre the cargo modules. The cargo bay is normally pressurised and accessible during flight. It has bow, aft and side doors for loading. I don't see a need to differentiate between how a Subbie handles cargo and how a Free Trader handles it since they are both supposed to manage the same sort of trade space. This is where I get my model of trade from and it is as old school as you like and still conforms to a logical way of operating.

*My deck plans for the Beowulf class (GURPS) also have fold down side cargo ramps that would easily allow containers being fork-lifted in and out.
** You can get round this by using starport brokers (which in CT was always a good decision). As evidenced in the earlier segments of the Traveller Adventure this would be entirely hands-off by the players and either a simple set of dice rolls or pre-set by referee fiat.

 

[Condottiere]

It comes down to what type of cargo you're likely carrying between starports, packaging, and how cargo holds are configured.

And access thereof.

Containers simplifies and speeds up the process; presumably, the space occupied by the container is chartered by a forwarding company, and it's up to them to stuff it.

 

[Vormaerin]

The mail contract requires an armed ship with gunner, and 5t set aside for mail. The idea of an actual "vault" was fanon made canon around T4 time.

1. the trade game everyone calls for would be very boring, megacorporations and sector wide trade lines shipping raw materials, consumables, agricultural products, machinery, manufactured goods... all in bulk. The PC scale is moving the stuff that slips through the cracks, falls off the back of a tender, or is a "small package" requiring delivery elsewhere. I still want to see it though...

Yeah, I don't know why anyone would want to *play* that. But some people really want to know how it works. My point was just that the trade rules were not remotely about that.

If you want to say tramp cargo is not in self-contained containers for story reasons that is fine, but it is purely a preference and not imposed by any real-world analogy or any rule in the game (indeed the current rules seem to provide support for a container based model of freight movements). It may be a trop of some earlier Traveller adventures, but there are plenty of other tropes that are not really compatible with the setting as it evolved. Given the very few adventures (and how how they keep being recycled and rewritten) it is a very small sample to draw from.

I do believe that I have said multiple times in this thread that I am giving my preferences and stating why. And that any number of other assumptions about how future trade works are equally valid, because Traveller provides extremely limited information about how anything works.

The only "hard fact" is that the trade rules are designed for "PC shenanigans" as Sigtrygg called it and not any sort of simulation of the economy. So if you want to upscale them into some sort of "how Charted Space trade actually works for commercial companies", you'll get super whacked outcomes.

The Fat Trader is, btw, by far the best designed trade ship GDW put out. It does not have any of the problems that plague the smaller ships. I'll also point out that the March Harrier specifically was under contract to serve a route (The Aramis Trace) that consisted of entirely A & B starports, which obviously would be container ports (except Reacher, which might or might not be part of its contract route as an Amber Zone. It's not listed as part of the Trace).

 

[Vormaerin]

The mail contract requires an armed ship with gunner, and 5t set aside for mail. The idea of an actual "vault" was fanon made canon around T4 time.

1. PC free traders are not in an active career, the trade rules apply to their shenanigans
2. the 200t "free trader" is more like the Amazon delivery van of the 57th century
3. the trade game everyone calls for would be very boring, megacorporations and sector wide trade lines shipping raw materials, consumables, agricultural products, machinery, manufactured goods... all in bulk. The PC scale is moving the stuff that slips through the cracks, falls off the back of a tender, or is a "small package" requiring delivery elsewhere. I still want to see it though...
4. the CT type A is an accident waiting to happen, stick to type A and B starports until you can "salvage" the engines of a scout/courier to replace yours, then you can start using unrefined fuel safely.

You are right about the "Vault" part. I misspoke and just meant that you had to set aside 5dtons for mail that couldn't be used for other purposes. I didn't even know there had ever been a literal vault requirement in any edition. Also, unlike in Mongoose, mail delivery was exclusively an adjunct to a subsidized route. Randos showing up didn't get to take mail to other places. The Mongoose rules are that you can get 1d6 5dton containers of mail just by asking nicely and rolling well. Your ship doesn't even have to be armed, though that's a bonus to the roll. Absolutely the first check any ship's cargomaster should make.

1. To reinforce this point, Mongoose even says these rules don't apply to commercial shipping companies. There is a sidebar about how the trade rules apply to actual shipping companies and the answer is "They don't. Just as in our world, the big boys follow different rules than the little guys."

4. I really dislike the "low end ports sell unrefined fuel". Almost as much as I dislike the retcon to give every ship an onboard fuel refinery. If the port is developed enough to do basic maintenance (aka D), it can sell refined fuel. Maybe cheaper like how berthing costs and such are cheaper because of lack of demand. It really, really undermined the whole "free traders go to the unprofitable garbage worlds" when doing so put you from no chance to misjump/breakdown to a pretty good chance.

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

4. I really dislike the "low end ports sell unrefined fuel".

If I had a exclusive trade deal with a planet I'd want to start building a port and really early (money permitting) would be:

1/ Warehouse 1 part for delivery and the other for pickup.
2/ Power plant (Cheap and reliable)
3/ Port masters house/office
4/ Fuel processor and fuel tank (UNREP) sufficient to refuel in a few hours.

I'd want my ship(s) to turn around in a day to maximize my profits.

So I can't imagine even a low end port not having refined fuel. Now I'd equip my ship to refine its own in case the planets I visit have a break down or I go somewhere that doesn't have an actual port of any type.

 

[Vormaerin]

So the Traveller rules for starports and trade are generic. They are designed to cover the third imperium and outside the third imperium. Or completely outside Charted Space and other settings. They are also designed in the 1970s, when the dominant sci fi around trade was "indie merchants out on the fringes running beneath or beyond the corporate sphere." So, it likes to create backwaters where the pros don't go. Because all of the rules are aimed at what's interesting for player character adventurers.

But what has happened is that over the decades folks have ignored the fact that these trade rules and shipping practices are explicitly aimed at indie 1 ship shows. (And first GDW uprated the Spinward Marches so they could have a big wargame and then GURPS Far Trader upscaled trade further. *shrugs*)

There are lots and lots of ways a corporate line with resources would be more efficient. Crew swapping, pre-loaded cargo pods or full-on LASH, private spaceports which may have better facilities than the public one. They should not be jumping 2/month like indies manage. And they absolutely should not be using unrefined fuel.

Obviously, the current rules allow really small on board refineries, so it is incredibly stupid not to have a refinery or to pay the refined fuel price. Originally the smallest TL12 refinery was like 60 tons or something? I would have preferred to have more expensive ruggedized engines so that there was still a clear reason to have "Refined fuel only" ships that were not designed to go off the main routes.

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

The fuel processor has a greater output per day than an equivalent tonnage of Fuel Refinery. Cheaper too.

 

[Vormaerin]

The fuel processor has a greater output per day than an equivalent tonnage of Fuel Refinery. Cheaper too.

I hate it

In Bk 2, it just said that for mysterious reasons scouts and military ships didn't suffer the penalty for unrefined fuel. Without actually defining what a ship a scout or military vessel was. When High Guard came out, it had fuel purifiers, but they were huge so only big military vessels could have them. The 2nd version of High Guard let you reduce them in size. Without actually looking it up, I think 60 dton was the smallest at TL12 and 12dtons at TL15 but I could be misremembering.

Obviously, in the current rules you can get them down to 1dton or whatever. And it is so cost effective that any ship without one is guilty of gross negligence. At this point, it should just be a feature of the engines. Just drop the concept of unrefined fuel and just have skimming/ice grinding being a thing if you have the time to spare.

I like the idea that fuel skimming is risky and results in assorted problems. I don't like the idea that actual starports selling bad fuel as a routine thing (as opposed to a story event). I wish they had chosen to either make "military" engines more expensive or had some stuff about increased maintenance demands that the military can meet. Either of those (especially the latter) would be expenses that civilians would gladly avoid since they don't go to the places that might matter, but PCs could chose to do so. Or choose not to and deal with the engine damage risks (though they nerfed that out of existence too).

 

[phavoc]

There are folding containers with an integrated pallet. For the ones I am familiar with (haven't seen one in years) they would be about 9 per dton and would stack 3 high. Made from resin (based on their appearance). Folded I'd say about 1/5th the volume. They would work pretty well for a Free/Far Trader. With higher TL I'd assume you could make them fold flatter and waste less volume.

The issue with various sizes of containers not fitting the odd shapes and dimensions of smaller freighter/trader ships cargo holds has a simple solution - design ships that have the right cargo hold shapes/dimensions. Same of course for their cargo hatches. With gravity control moving even the largest should be pretty simple. Pick a maximum size container for each size of cargo hold and shape the holds to match. The ships might not be as "pretty" (not that all are) but they would make more sense.

I think its pretty clear that nobody took into account the design of cargo holds vis-a-vis transporting containerized goods when they came up with the ship designs.

Gravity inside the ship is pretty easy since you control the grav plating. But once you get outside that your are subject to local conditions. So you'd need a process that allows the cargo to flow effortlessly between the two.

 

[phavoc]

Yeah, which is part of what I've been trying to point out. The corporate freighting world is different. There ARE small ships in Traveller doing all these things people are talking about. Running containers to smaller ports and having all this stuff. That's what the Merchant 'Marine' career is.

That's not the ships the players get and not the role the players or the NPC operators of those types of ships are intended to play in the economy. Charted Space assumes there are lots of worlds that barely do any interstellar trade. A few ships a week or whatever and not enough money involved to get anyone to run the route in a professionalized fashion.

The Type R exists in the middle of that space. Bigger than most pure freelancers, but not big enough to interest the corporate shippers. Nicknamed the subby because these ignored worlds need to guarantee someone comes semi-regularly. Since they otherwise might not.

The Free Traders show up when they show up and, often, land wherever they need to land. Whether that's some deep woods lumber yard or a distant vineyard. Or some rancher's field. Or the official government-controlled patch of hardened dirt. They might parasitize some trade from the bigger ports, but they generally avoid them because of the much higher fees and increased paperwork.

"Any port worth its salt" is exactly right. These ports aren't worth their salt, not to commercial shippers. Not to anyone who cares about economies of scale and containerization processes. That's why they have to pay for a jumped up space plane that can land on basically a runway and can be unloaded without any special equipment. Because importing the special equipment isn't affordable or isn't worth it.

There probably are D ports with enough volume to have commercial grade cargo facilities that for whatever reason don't make the cut for "Class C". But that's not really the expected norm.


Now, that might not be your vision of Charted Space or whatever campaign you are running. But that was the vision that created the trade rules and the design of the "Free trader" type ships. A different vision calls for different ships, frankly.

To your points I think we are still seeing a gap here. Smaller ships to take into account the myriad of other locations and cargos not traveling in the holds of the larger ships. We'd still see corps doing it, but more along the lines of smaller corps (who may be just localized and held/controlled by the big boys). The books give us the Type-R, and then we jump to the 2k dton ship. But nothing really in-between. There's lots of 3rd party and others doing those designs though.

I don't see much issue with equipment related to cargo handling. It's pretty ubiquitous today at ports and rail yards. Railroads create basic container loading facilities for smaller markets where they have wheeled container loaders doing the loading/unloading of railcars, with the larger yards doing the major markets that use the Mi-jack or even larger/faster versions to unload dedicated Z-trains (around 300 containers/train). These smaller, more temporary rail yards would be equivalent to D class ports. And there are lots of these out there in the US. The kicker is that often they are created and managed by the smaller tertiary rail companies that handle the same sort of cargo you'd expect any D class port to do.

Once you have access to grav tech it becomes even more stupid easy to manage this through either manned or remote-controlled gear. In the army we used fixed direct controls for our truck's crane, and we also had a control box on a cable that allowed us to walk around and get a better angle. Today it would be wireless, and probably equipped with video. You see locomotives now equipped with similar controls. It would be very easy to have that same concept translated into a grav-equipped loader that fit on top of containers and lifted it up just a few cm above the deck to float the container up / out or wherever.

 

[Vormaerin]

So, yes, if you make those assumptions, which is certainly reasonable. Those assumptions are not actually made by the game rules, though. Grav tech is not dirt cheap stuff any rando has at the TLs that most trade ships are operating at. Sure, at TL 15 ports or whatever, but these ships are built at TL 10 to 12. And, yeah, sometimes they say you can control the grav plates to be free TK, but other times they don't.

The current Mongoose version of the Type A has some gantries, which is why it's cargo hold is smaller. The 1e version had cargo chains and stevedore bot. Older versions didn't necessarily have even that. But in the SOP they talk about having anti gravity on garden variety crates. So *shrugs* Pick what you like.

The game just says there is cargo and brokers. The cargo and brokers are described exactly the same for a TL 0 world with a patch of bare rock for a starport and for a TL15 class A starport (you can find them faster if there's internet, though ) Ships that small will reliably fill their cargo hold at that TL0 world with a class E starport. I'm sure Ea-Nasir carefully containerized all his copper ingots.

It's not that these ships can't handle any containerized cargo at all, though their hold is disastrously designed if that's what is supposed to be doing. It's that they are not expecting to rely on it and they are expected to go places that the corporate merchants ignore. Look at how many worlds have class E starports. Those are literally a patch of grass and sign. Class D starports range from that and a tank of water for fuel to the broken down remains of a once major starport with more equipment than it can use. You are talking about infrastructure for worlds that are described as seeing maybe half a dozen starships of any kind in a week, many of which are not traders and probably none of which are big tradeships.

This is what the Traveller Adventure says about the Aramis subsector:

"At the very fringe of the Imperium, in a backwater corner of the Spinward Marches, the Aramis subsector has been an undeveloped and often ignored part of Imperial society for generations." And this is about a region that actually has a pretty high average port quality. The entire Trace is B or better and half the Towers cluster, too. Though, it's possible those are all recent upgrades since Vargr trade is causing corporate interest in the region to finally materialize as part of that storyline.

And this is what it says about Imperial trade in general: "Transport companies service trade routes to worlds that can furnish goods, ore, or products that are in demand. Other worlds must wait for the tramp freighters, the free traders, that carry goods to contracted destinations or on speculation."

I think that there is a disagreement about what free traders are. The trope of the "free trader" that was big in Sci fi when all these rules were first written consisted of stories of indie family or found family traders operating under the corporate radar, scrounging the missing bits in the corporate sector or stories of the small indie ships that pushed beyond the fringe of developed space to try to grab some wealth before the corps took that region over too combined with a few stories of small indie ships doing trade pioneering (ie going places no one has successfully traded before). And they mostly don't have good margins or the budget for fancy gear and lots of maintenance and other support.

This isn't the truck driver or the feeder ship. Free Traders are to freight liners what door dashers are to commercial truck drivers. No structure, not necessarily any licensing, dubious accountability, no one cares if they just disappear. Just used when it's not worth doing it yourself.

About 20% of the world's trade even today is "General cargo", either because it is ill suited for containerization or its origin or destination are not container ports. Another 20 to 25% is bulk cargo (mostly liquid, but some dry), and the remaining 55-60% is containerized cargo. Based on the way the published ships are designed (which, of course, can be easily modified) and the way the "ports" are described, I think that those "free traders" would be overwhelmingly in that general cargo trade.

But this is Traveller. It is designed to be able to simulate all kinds of games. So there is no reason to base your trade on those assumptions. Anti Grav can be ubiquitous. Those class E starports could have container yards and trucks and railroads leading to them. Ea-Nasir could have an imported laptop to get emails from those trade ships that do visit. More likely, the "E" or "D" starports are the public facilities and there's a much better "CorpPORT" in orbit that all the priviledged ships get to use. There's no one true way to do this and, since the trade rules are core rules not setting rules, there shouldn't be.

I don't know about other people, but when I come to these conversations it's to say "Hey, this is what I like, this is how I do things, and this is why I do that". Because maybe other people have the same interests and might benefit from things I thought of that they didn't. And I read other peoples' posts hoping to find ideas that they had that I didn't think of but like. I don't expect to agree with everyone else's ideas and I don't expect them to agree with all of mine. I don't feel like the existence of my ideas invalidates other peoples' ideas. It would be nice (for me, anyway) if more people posted "I do it this way because I want these outcomes and enjoy these assumptions" instead of "My ideas are better than yours" style posting. As I said in my first post in this thread, there's Sweet F-A for "facts" about trade 35 centuries in the future. There's facts about how the real world works today. There isn't about how it will work later. So there's no ideas that are better or worse than anyone else's. There's only what you enjoy or don't enjoy.

Lots of people have posted interesting ideas in this thread. I wish more of them were positive oriented "Here's how I think free traders work and what backwater ports are like, because I like these things and these assumptions." That would be fun to read.

 

[Vormaerin]

To your points I think we are still seeing a gap here. Smaller ships to take into account the myriad of other locations and cargos not traveling in the holds of the larger ships. We'd still see corps doing it, but more along the lines of smaller corps (who may be just localized and held/controlled by the big boys). The books give us the Type-R, and then we jump to the 2k dton ship. But nothing really in-between. There's lots of 3rd party and others doing those designs though.

There absolutely should be all kind so additional ships. Commercial tankers, dry bulk carriers, in system space "barges". Commercial "feeder" ships. Although GURPS Far Trader tried to do some systematization of trade, it really didn't look at it from that perspective. It really come down to the question of whether answering the "How do the NPCs do business" questions is gonna sell a book. And who out there wants to actually write it?

I'm of the school that the free traders (the archetype, not just the specific ship) are outside of that structure. I would enjoy a well written book on that topic, especially if it had multiple versions of "how it is" you could choose from. But even more I'd like a Traveller version of "Suns of Gold" about running a campaign as a group of players who want to be Free traders first and not just 'trading as an excuse to go to the next planet'. Because the rules we have don't talk about how to turn trading into fun.

 

[swordtart]

Star Trader by Zozer is focussed on trade. It is designed as a solo game, but it provides some good tools that a referee could use to their advantage.

It takes the view that you can just take the default rolls from the starport but if you go in country you can get beneficial price modifier. However in going in country you have an encounter table which fits with the idea of risk vs reward. The modifier is +2. I translate that as dealing directly with producers who are not dedicated brokers (basically you are cutting out the middle man).

Now that will generate complications like delayed delivery to the starport. Some of the cities (and their feeder settlements) are 1000's of kms from the starport (e.g. Evander on Tarsus). Planetary infrastructure often isn't up to providing fast transport for large consignments so you need to manage that yourself. but an Air Raft isn't going to cut it. A ships boat or shuttle would be better, but then you have to get permission to land away from the Star port (so you may have to negotiate to take a customs agent with you). You may have to hire a truck but they also tend to have low capacity so you are probably hiring several trucks and that probably means local drivers. There may be disputes, kickbacks, or break downs and those trucking companies also have their own dynamics with rival firms etc.

It also provides a ship availability table but if you own your own ship that might still be useful as an idea of how much competition (or maybe collaboration) you might face for other vessels arriving. It does tune the types of ship and number to the type of port, but even class A ports don't get more than 2 ships per week. It is only considering ships with cargo capacity to take freight for the player. If you flip this and consider it the ships that are looking to taking freight contracts away from the players in competition you still get a nice simple dynamic.

Goods direct from the producer might very well not be containerised (they are saving money at their end as well), so you will need to either move it to a facility to get it containerised, take your own container and load it, or just take the goods as they are presented ex-works and load break bulk..

Some of the encounter table results are little side jobs, and while these don't pay much I tend to assume they are a condition of sale. Even if the specific encounters are not to your taste it provides a spring board for your own ideas and encounters tables are fun to expand anyway. Once you have had an encounter you can always replace it with a new one to keep the game fresh.

It also covers the ebb and flow in interpersonal relationship during transit between worlds. Again this might not be relevant if you are running a game where the players are the entire crew, but it can be used for passenger interactions or temporary hires. A good role-playing group might however still go with the referee throwing in a relationship hiccup between two player characters. People cooped up in small places for weeks on end might get fractious.

Plenty of grist in there.

 

[Vormaerin]

Yeah, Zoser has produced a lot of interesting products. I'm not particularly a horror RPG fan, but there's really good stuff in the Hostile game system even outside of that. Crew Expendable is really good. Roughnecks and Explorers are cool also. His latest, Solo, incorporates a lot of that material into a single book, though the individual books have more flavor.

The original traveller books had lots of procedural elements (ship encounters, starport encounters, patron encounters, legal hassle checks, rumors, trade tables) designed to give GMs lots of ideas to spark adventures. Not that every one of those things needed to be an adventure every time, but that was what they were there for. But Traveller has never really had a proper book on how to turn those prompts into stories. Which means that it is super easy to think those are the endgame of the process.

Mongoose has massaged the numbers, so it's less "almost certainly going to go bankrupt unless you become insanely rich instead". But the trade has no story, no challenge, no risk except rolling badly. Unless the GM introduces those elements of friction like competition, corruption, deception, etc that make them into stories with an appropriate frequency. Unfortunately, no one has ever thought it important to actually talk about how often that should happen or how to make those elements fit together and come across and fun and reasonable rather than random GM dickery

Obviously, one can learn that without the rules helping you, but there have been so many times I've seen those questions come up in traveller forums or read of games abandoned because no one knew how to do that. I don't really understand why none of the various Traveller publishers have ever thought it was worth exploring.

 

[swordtart]

As a tangent, I think that solo gaming can also help develop your "fairness" acumen. When playing with others the interesting bits are in the challenges and for those to work they have to be fair challenges and allow players to choose their own risk v return level to a degree. In solo play you are both the giver and the receiver and it is useful self discipline to be fair in that situation. Once you have been at the receiving end of your own diabolical plot or have been overly generous it more obvious (if you are inciteful) what the impact of that is.

I like to run my scenarios solo before inflicting them on players as at least then I know it can be done. Having an oracle system and procedural elements helps prevent you always knowing the right answer and if you are a systematic tester you can go through all the most likely outcomes of those procedural rolls and check if the game breaks. If you are a pedant (like me) you might end up going through all of them and pruning the ones that lead to unrecoverable failure.

Solo also takes an outcome based approach and that also helps to establish your plot line. Players can come up with good ideas of how they will solve problems and that would in my games give them a boon or bane. The outcome will be based on a roll, but there should never be a "Ooops, I rolled a 2?" - "Sorry the party is dead" outcome. Trade at least avoids that as generally the worst that can happen is you lose some money.

My current game is with my 12 year old, so being scrupulously fair is paramount as she has yet to have her sense of justice crushed by experience

 

[rinku]

The Falkayn/Van Rijn stories are a good template for what they are, which are explorers looking for opportunities to set up trade deals. We actually don't SEE the operations of Solar Liquor and Spice in detail, or the ships that are used to service their business. It's all scout grade ships visiting potential customers and the adventures that ensue. Pure Traveller, but not very helpful for a discussion about container shipping.

 

[Vormaerin]

So tell me how you want your free traders to work and what gameplay you envision and why you have chosen those elements and how that makes games fun for you. I'm down for that.

There's absolutely 100% vast amounts of container shipping along the trade networks. I don't consider tiny little ships operated by indie operators to be part of those networks and I don't think those networks go planets that have type E or type D starports, because it is my opinion that if they did, someone would upgrade those facilities. That's what happens in the real world. I make a pretty significant distinction between the A/B/C ports and the D/E ports in terms of how busy and developed they are.

I think free traders are to shipping networks what gold panning is to the mining industry. Basically, swarms of randos out getting what little they can from places that aren't profitable for anyone to improve, who get booted by the industry professionals if they find something actually worth developing. I think the "space truckers" are completely different (larger) ships with very different character archetypes associated with them.

You don't have to accept any of that. You can totally decide that "Free traders" fulfill the role of long-haul truckers compared to the shipping industry and are well integrated into it. You could have some completely other vision of how Type As and equivalent tiny ships function. That's cool.

The amount of space scif fi that gives even a remote thought to space stevedoring is approximately zero, especially if you limit it to tiny ships and not stories about big ships. Firefly is a free trader and they talk about trade, but hardly ever show it. And when they do, it's goofy holds full of cows because that's amusing and unusual.

 

[rinku]

Yeah, I think we're now on the same page. There was a bit of confusion about scope earlier, especially about what was meant by containers.

Bert Chandler was a legit ship's master and had experience of all grades of mid-20th century shipping (as well as an aircraft carrier), but his stories are almost exclusively at the scout and tramp freighter end. He's about the only author I can think of that was merchant marine.