More random economics thoughts - Starport Docking Fees

M

MasterGwydion

Emperor Mongoose
I was building a trade route between two systems and was entering the Dock Fee into the spreadsheet and I realized that this docking fee is for berthing space for a week. (I also noticed that the fee doesn't change based on the tonnage of the vessel, which makes no sense.) Why would any ship stay for a week? The only reasons that I can think of are for non-scheduled ships or for shore leave. It seems to Me that most ships should be in and out in an hour or two. Take the Free Trader as an example. Take out one stateroom and add 4 tons of UNREP. You can now unload you cargo, refuel, and load your new cargo in 108 minutes. Why pay for a week of docking for less than a 2 hour stay? Scheduled shipping would never stay longer in port than absolutely necessary. Time is money, literally.

From the time they jump into the system at the 100D mark, they can communicate with their starport contacts. They can use this time to purchase goods that match the Trade Codes of the planet and sell goods as well. Or if they are a regular scheduled cargo shipment, they do not need to communicate with anyone, just show up, offload, refuel, reload, and depart.
 
Because the rules say it takes you a week to:
unload your cargo and passengers
conduct routine maintenance
search for speculative cargo or freight
find passengers to your destination
refuel
meet a patron and have an adventure that will pay off some of the debt.
 
Adventurers do not have a regular scheduled cargo shipment or a dedicated team of longshoremen expediting their turn-around. They do not have corporate brokers planning their cargo loadouts for them. If they did, they would still be in character generation doing a term as merchants.
Putting off that regular maintenance also means you have to do more of it at one go, which will prevent income.
 
@MasterGwydion and @Sigtrygg it looks to me like the above two approaches are two ends of a spectrum, with room for variations.

I must admit, I've only considered the more leisurely approach. Taking the "time is money" approach gives less opportunity for mixing with NPCs and could possibly lower crew morale. As @Arkathan says, maintenance could be a factor as well. Looks like there is scope for a JTAS article?

Also, I think the Third Imperium has a 52 week year. This gives you 13 4-week months but the rules seem to think there are only 12 4-week months when things like mortgages are being calculated (CRB2016, Spacecraft Operations, p142). Life Support and Supplies (p145) is on a monthly basis as well. What am I overlooking?
 
@IanBruntlett
IIRC, the required annual maintenance on starships, which lasts a month. In addition to the regular maintenance. The banks didn't penalize you for that.
I don't recall if that is an older edition or not (or just a mandella effect). So much of the weird stuff I remember was from Mega-Traveller and the run up to it, like 10% thrust at 90 degrees off the thrust plate...
 
As I've mentioned before, the rules are written to be player facing. Those berthing fees are what a PC in a normal 100 to 400 dton small ship would face. The rules don't define what the berthing fees of a 200,000k ship are because it doesn't expect players to be paying them.

Similarly, it assumes the ship is going to be that berth for a week because players are expected to be tramping, not running a scheduled route. The time from the 100d limit to the starport is like 6 hours or less at 1G. No one knows for sure when you are coming, so there's no scheduled cargo or passengers waiting for you. So you have to arrange for your freight to be warehoused or picked up because you aren't scheduled or have fixed arrangements for that sort of thing. Then you have to find cargo and passengers that couldn't be arsed to book a scheduled freighter or have an unexpected need for shipping, possibly competing with other small traders for that same market.

You also have to do maintenance, resupply, refuel, etc. And a small tramp trader isn't a priority compared to any corporate or government vessels, so unless the port is pretty slow or very efficient, none of those things will be immediate.

I don't know how much experience you have with maritime port operations. I deal with the port of Honolulu as part of my job. If my container doesn't get tagged for inspection by the Ag quarantine folks, it's typically 1-2 days between when the freighter arrives and when the container is off loaded and available. This depends on how many ships arrived that day, what size ship, etc. And that's knowing what ships are coming when because the ships can radio ahead. Which isn't the case in Traveller.

As far as spot cargo goes, it's probably not sitting in a container ready to go. That costs money. So you'll have to find the broker/shipping company that needs spot shipping, play cargo size tetris to find an assortment of these spot cargos that best fill your hold and then get the shippers to deliver to your ship. Think Firefly, where Mal was often negotiating with people directly to convince them his ship was trustworthy as a shipper.

And that's aside from R&R and other business the ship has in port.

Obviously, players don't need to play out all that stuff, but it does take time and tramp freighters have small crews that can't do all this at once.

and it is a game and wants to be sure the PCs have time for adventures without it causing them to lose their shirts. :D
 
Vormaerin said:
As I've mentioned before, the rules are written to be player facing. Those berthing fees are what a PC in a normal 100 to 400 dton small ship would face. The rules don't define what the berthing fees of a 200,000k ship are because it doesn't expect players to be paying them.

Similarly, it assumes the ship is going to be that berth for a week because players are expected to be tramping, not running a scheduled route. The time from the 100d limit to the starport is like 6 hours or less at 1G. No one knows for sure when you are coming, so there's no scheduled cargo or passengers waiting for you. So you have to arrange for your freight to be warehoused or picked up because you aren't scheduled or have fixed arrangements for that sort of thing. Then you have to find cargo and passengers that couldn't be arsed to book a scheduled freighter or have an unexpected need for shipping, possibly competing with other small traders for that same market.

You also have to do maintenance, resupply, refuel, etc. And a small tramp trader isn't a priority compared to any corporate or government vessels, so unless the port is pretty slow or very efficient, none of those things will be immediate.

I don't know how much experience you have with maritime port operations. I deal with the port of Honolulu as part of my job. If my container doesn't get tagged for inspection by the Ag quarantine folks, it's typically 1-2 days between when the freighter arrives and when the container is off loaded and available. This depends on how many ships arrived that day, what size ship, etc. And that's knowing what ships are coming when because the ships can radio ahead. Which isn't the case in Traveller.

As far as spot cargo goes, it's probably not sitting in a container ready to go. That costs money. So you'll have to find the broker/shipping company that needs spot shipping, play cargo size tetris to find an assortment of these spot cargos that best fill your hold and then get the shippers to deliver to your ship. Think Firefly, where Mal was often negotiating with people directly to convince them his ship was trustworthy as a shipper.

And that's aside from R&R and other business the ship has in port.

Obviously, players don't need to play out all that stuff, but it does take time and tramp freighters have small crews that can't do all this at once.

and it is a game and wants to be sure the PCs have time for adventures without it causing them to lose their shirts. :D
Click to expand...
I am building a trade route, so obviously it will be on a schedule. All said ship does is go back and forth between planets. One J-2 there and one J-2 back. 1,600Cr/ton there and 1,600Cr/ton back. All scheduled months in advance, and the people on the starports know when the ship will be arriving to within a 48 hour window. They could likely jump 3 times in a month, and still allow a week of shore leave per month.

It is also unlikely that the ships in your port have the capability to fully offload, refuel, and reload the whole ship in less than 2 hours. Yay for the UNREP system! lol. It may not work like that in real life. The rules say that only one ship needs an UNREP system, so the starports do not need one. This is the unrealistic part. How the station or other ship is supposed to move that stuff once it is off of the ship with the UNREP system, I have no idea, but they specifically stated that only one ship needed the system. So, it works somehow, I just have no idea how. As best as I can determine, an UNREP system doesn't even need crew to work it.
 
IanBruntlett said:
@MasterGwydion and @Sigtrygg it looks to me like the above two approaches are two ends of a spectrum, with room for variations.

I must admit, I've only considered the more leisurely approach. Taking the "time is money" approach gives less opportunity for mixing with NPCs and could possibly lower crew morale. As @Arkathan says, maintenance could be a factor as well. Looks like there is scope for a JTAS article?

Also, I think the Third Imperium has a 52 week year. This gives you 13 4-week months but the rules seem to think there are only 12 4-week months when things like mortgages are being calculated (CRB2016, Spacecraft Operations, p142). Life Support and Supplies (p145) is on a monthly basis as well. What am I overlooking?
Click to expand...
Yeah. writers can't count. The 3rd Imperium doesn't even have months, yet for some reason, months are still the default time period for salaries, maintenance, mortgages, etc. I do not divide by 240 to get the mortgage payments, I divide by 260 to represent 52 weeks as year instead of only 44.
 
MasterGwydion said:
I am building a trade route, so obviously it will be on a schedule. All said ship does is go back and forth between planets. One J-2 there and one J-2 back. 1,600Cr/ton there and 1,600Cr/ton back. All scheduled months in advance, and the people on the starports know when the ship will be arriving to within a 48 hour window. They could likely jump 3 times in a month, and still allow a week of shore leave per month.

It is also unlikely that the ships in your port have the capability to fully offload, refuel, and reload the whole ship in less than 2 hours. Yay for the UNREP system! lol. It may not work like that in real life. The rules say that only one ship needs an UNREP system, so the starports do not need one. This is the unrealistic part. How the station or other ship is supposed to move that stuff once it is off of the ship with the UNREP system, I have no idea, but they specifically stated that only one ship needed the system. So, it works somehow, I just have no idea how. As best as I can determine, an UNREP system doesn't even need crew to work it.
Click to expand...
If you are designing a custom trade system for your campaign, just set it however you want. The rules don't cover how large commercial ships operate. There should be a lot of ways in which they are paying less, being treated better, and generally having things more efficient than a PC's ship.

And, yes, the underway replenishment system is ridiculously efficient. So use that or have anti-grav Telekinesis to shift cargo or whatever you like. No commercial freighter wants to stay in real space longer than absolutely necessary. If they could put a starport at the 100D limit and jump directly to that, they would.
 
Vormaerin said:
If you are designing a custom trade system for your campaign, just set it however you want. The rules don't cover how large commercial ships operate. There should be a lot of ways in which they are paying less, being treated better, and generally having things more efficient than a PC's ship.

And, yes, the underway replenishment system is ridiculously efficient. So use that or have anti-grav Telekinesis to shift cargo or whatever you like. No commercial freighter wants to stay in real space longer than absolutely necessary. If they could put a starport at the 100D limit and jump directly to that, they would.
Click to expand...
It just makes it difficult to worldbuild without having to design custom systems for everything. We have WTNs. That number is all about the big boys. It tells you roughly how many of what types of ships can be found near a port of on a trade route. The rules for sure don't cover how to use a second ship to start a scheduled trade run, yet lots of adventures have ways for you to gain a second ship. Most of them operate under the assumption that you'd get rid of the old ship in favor of the new one, but why not hire a crew and pay them to run the ship on a regular trade route and you get to pocket the profits?

Isn't one of Terra's highports at one of the LaGrange points right near the 100D limit?
 
No, the downport in Australia is called LaGrange after the scientist. It is not related to the LaGrange points.

There was a topic where I asked about the feasibility of putting a starport at the 100D limit and one of the L-Grange points for Earth is about 125d from Earth. But I am not aware of any published material about anything being there except sensors and scientific instruments.

WTN doesn't tell you how many of what types of ships. Importance tells you about how many ships should be expected at any given time without any breakdown of what size or purpose they have. A major port will have about a 1000 ships a week, a truly exceptional port will have double that.
Of whatever size and shape suits your vision of the place.

I know you want hard rules to base your decisions on, but Traveller is designed to allow the GM to create the sci fi gaming environment that they want. And even if there was a "Economics of Charted Space" book, it would have problems answering those questions. Because they would be different in the Core than they would be the Extents.

I LIKE that the rules don't dictate these answers so GMs can answer the question differently without contradicting the rules.
 
Vormaerin said:
No, the downport in Australia is called LaGrange after the scientist. It is not related to the LaGrange points.

There was a topic where I asked about the feasibility of putting a starport at the 100D limit and one of the L-Grange points for Earth is about 125d from Earth. But I am not aware of any published material about anything being there except sensors and scientific instruments.

WTN doesn't tell you how many of what types of ships. Importance tells you about how many ships should be expected at any given time without any breakdown of what size or purpose they have. A major port will have about a 1000 ships a week, a truly exceptional port will have double that.
Of whatever size and shape suits your vision of the place.

I know you want hard rules to base your decisions on, but Traveller is designed to allow the GM to create the sci fi gaming environment that they want. And even if there was a "Economics of Charted Space" book, it would have problems answering those questions. Because they would be different in the Core than they would be the Extents.

I LIKE that the rules don't dictate these answers so GMs can answer the question differently without contradicting the rules.
Click to expand...
WTN is how you get BTN and BTN is how you determine Blue Line, Cyan Main Line, Green Line Intermediate, Yellow Line Feeder, etc. Those do tell you How many ships of what types ply those routes, how many ships arrive and leave port per day on average, how many Dtons of cargo and passengers move per week, etc. Importance isn't mentioned in any of those calculations. I am not a big fan of the T5 Importance system.
 
But you don't have a bunch of pages and text and additional terminology that amounts to "draw the ones you think make sense"
 
MasterGwydion said:
I am building a trade route, so obviously it will be on a schedule. All said ship does is go back and forth between planets. One J-2 there and one J-2 back. 1,600Cr/ton there and 1,600Cr/ton back. All scheduled months in advance, and the people on the starports know when the ship will be arriving to within a 48 hour window. They could likely jump 3 times in a month, and still allow a week of shore leave per month.

It is also unlikely that the ships in your port have the capability to fully offload, refuel, and reload the whole ship in less than 2 hours. Yay for the UNREP system! lol. It may not work like that in real life. The rules say that only one ship needs an UNREP system, so the starports do not need one. This is the unrealistic part. How the station or other ship is supposed to move that stuff once it is off of the ship with the UNREP system, I have no idea, but they specifically stated that only one ship needed the system. So, it works somehow, I just have no idea how. As best as I can determine, an UNREP system doesn't even need crew to work it.
Click to expand...
Well, the UNREP system should only work in space since it's predicated upon that environment. A similar system could work on a planet, however UNREP is meant to be balls-to-the-wall to quickly transfer cargo and planetary ports probably won't operate at such work velocity as a rule of thumb. For regularly scheduled cargo runs you'd expect to have the cargo unloaded and then placed on a transport to get it away from the landing pad to it's ultimate destination - could be a cargo stack, a warehouse, or a trailer (any of these could be intermediate, but they are away from ship and you are done with that part for this question).

Once your cargo is unloaded is when I'd expect the loads to show up to start getting loaded onboard. The UNREP idea is a bit of a edge case here since it's original concept is to transfer to a ship with waiting empty space for cargo. It's not meant really to be a fully sustainable cargo shuttling system (at least that's not how I see it to be - it's meant to be a space-analog of what wet navies do today).

A ships schedule would have to include arrival, and then making it to it's destination (orbital or planet), and at some point clearing customs - which could be protracted or not. With the right infrastructure you certainly should be able to unload a ship pretty fast - but your port has to be structured and staffed to work at those levels too. Modern ports don't always get to operate at max capacity due to other constraints like a shortage of trailers to load on to, or the port is backed up with containers and there are no close places to store them, or the rail lines are congested and movements are slow. All those equivalents could affect your clockwork schedules. Just look at some of the major ports around the world and how, at times, they had ships waiting week(s) or more for things to clear up to dock and unload.

A ship with just 48hrs in port probably won't see much liberty - they will be too busy with other things to get ready to depart again. As a scheduled freighter they won't have to solicit any cargo as they should have a port factor doing all that for them. Crew just has to work with dock to load it (and load it right). Doesn't leave a lot of crew with free time.

It's entirely possible to have very brief, high-energy port visits, but I'd say Murphy should visit often and screw up their perfect scheduling - though some help could be added to making that schedule by having them visit corporate-dedicated terminals to ensure they will have proper and adequate support and not have to share with others.
 
Schedules would have to have some slack in them in Traveller, especially since Jump time is pretty variable as written, so ships could arrive earlier or later than expected pretty regularly. That will definitely cause bottlenecks from time to time. If Monday's ship arrives on Tuesday, Tuesday's ship arrives on Tuesday, and Wednesday's ship arrives on Tuesday....

Large freighters are going to the highport, which has the disadvantage of not being a railhead. So, best case, you are transferring those containers to a vehicle taking it directly to the vessels going to their final destination. More likely, it'll have to go to storage, then loaded to those other vessels when they are ready.

And if there's no highport at all, large freighters are going to have to transfer cargo in space to landing shuttles.

In every logistics system I'm aware of, the port (sea or air) is the chokepoint. Space seems likely to be as bad or worse. On Earth, something like 80% of maritime cargo unloaded goes onto a train or truck and off it goes. The rest gets loaded onto barges or smaller freighters to be shifted to a smaller port. In a high port, 100% of the cargo is going onto interplanetary ships or shuttles down to the surface. In other words, vessels that need berths at the highport.

This is one of the reasons I think streamlined small traders like the PCs operate would almost always be sent to the downport.
 
Ubderway replenishment is basically directly exchanging cargo while in motion, without colliding.

You could come to a dead stop.
 
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