Orbital Manufacturing Facilities

Jakovian

Banded Mongoose
Hi,
I have a technical question. The cost of Orbital Manufacturing Facilities (Advanced) is MCr0.4 per ton (HG2023 p. 68). To produce 1 ton per day, 25 tons are needed. So, the cost of a factory producing, for example, 1 ton of Advanced Vehicles per day is MCr10. The price of 1 ton of Advanced Vehicles is MCr0.18 (CoreBook22 p. 244). So, the cost of the factory is recouped in 55 days. Let's calculate licenses, employee salaries, let it be 90 days. Can a business really be profitable within 90 days? Additionally, the factory can be set up on a planet, which would be cheaper.
 
That would be a pretty efficient business where the capital expense is more than the operating costs. You also have to ship those goods somewhere. And pay storage fees, brokerage fees, and possibly costs on your retail space if you are not selling to a middleman. But, yes, Traveller costs are wonky from a real world perspective. Advanced Vehicles wouldn't sell for that price anywhere that could set up a factory that cheaply. You'd have an oversupply in short order and prices would plummet.
 
@Vormaerin In the production range of 10-100 tons per month for a given world, the market will not collapse. A regular tractor weighs at least 500 kg, a car 1000 kg. I'm already quoting market prices, according to the manuals. Even if we halve the profit, the business pays for itself within 6 months.

@AndrewW Raw material prices - assume 75%?

@Condottiere Protectionist policy is profitable for big business. No one (presumably) would stoop to try to destroy a business producing 100 tons of vehicles per month in a world the size of China or the USA.

I understand that you have previously seen someone detailing, for example, how many raw materials are needed to produce a certain type of device? Some kind of tree with settlements?
 
Sure, but that assumes no one else has the brilliant idea of opening a wildly profitable business. Which is exactly NOT how that would work out.

The entirety of the trade and manufacture rules in Traveller are designed around the idea of making these feasible side activities of the characters that the Ref can turn into cool adventures. They are designed to be simple to implement and reasonably worthwhile for a PC to engage in so the ref can generate complications that require adventure activity (aka playing the game). If you treat them as an end in and of themself or try to extrapolate how the rest of the economy works from them, you'll get nonsense values. As you have noted in other posts as well as this one.
 
But I'm not saying that you can't create adventures, complications, or whole plots with it. I'm gently suggesting that the entire economy and economic mechanics in Traveller are hastily put together and inconsistent.

I have the impression that none of the creators are considering the scale of the economy in Traveller. On one hand, we acknowledge that if someone produces 100 tons per month, competition will take notice, but on the other hand, we ignore the gigantic interstellar transportation.

Let me give you an example - Ukraine (40 million inhabitants, a country affected by war, TL7) exports 2.75 million tons of grain annually. For exports, if you have an agricultural world, that's the amount a world with 40 million TL7 inhabitants would escort. And we're only talking about one commodity.
 
And I'm not claiming that an adventure should revolve around that. I'm simply stating that players should be aware of the massive spaceships transporting resources in space and that spaceports need to solve the issue of transporting resources to orbit, etc.

Example: 2.75 million tons equals 7,534 tons per day (!) that need to be loaded and sent. It's known that harvests occur a maximum of four times a year, so you would need to build infrastructure for storing the resources, etc.
 
There two ways that manufactured goods usage are going to go, disposable and fixable.

If it's cheap, however that's defined, labour (manpower), materials, manufacturing, marketing, availability, et cetera, it's going to be disposable.

Inventory tax is going to motivate just in time, which inclines me to think that production will be demand driven, especially if there's some trend or fashion involved.

If demand driven, cheap manufacture, and retail can be jacked up, customization.

Basically, difference between what's described and mass production is perceived value added.

Otherwise, you just flood the market, and maybe even artificially segment it.
 
But I'm not saying that you can't create adventures, complications, or whole plots with it. I'm gently suggesting that the entire economy and economic mechanics in Traveller are hastily put together and inconsistent.
Actually, that is my point. The stuff in the rules is making exactly ZERO attempt to simulate the economy. Its trying solely to make certain kinds of gameplay situations possible. Its never been a secret that it is entirely made up by game designers for the purposes of gameplay only. So you don't need to be gentle about pointing that out. That is, in fact, the intent.

If you want space economy simulator, you need an entirely different game.
 
Actually, that is my point. The stuff in the rules is making exactly ZERO attempt to simulate the economy. Its trying solely to make certain kinds of gameplay situations possible. Its never been a secret that it is entirely made up by game designers for the purposes of gameplay only. So you don't need to be gentle about pointing that out. That is, in fact, the intent.

If you want space economy simulator, you need an entirely different game.
Basic worldbuilding involves creating a very, very simplified model that has some basic sense, regardless of whether we're playing an RPG about elves, My Little Pony, or in a sci-fi setting.

In a situation where we're playing as space merchants or traders, where the whole point is flying from one starport to another, it's worth considering what a starport looks like, how many ships are flying and what kinds, why they are flying, and who operates them. These are the simplest questions that should have some logical answers.

If we don't want to reinvent the wheel, we can apply a simplified model of global trade, even from the 15th century. How many goods are being shipped, what does the trade exchange look like, how do people pay, what does the issue of piracy look like, and how is the starport protected?

If game manuals include a mechanism that allows players to earn enough for a new ship within a year, I would ask whether it's a game error or if there's something I'm not understanding.
 
If you want to dive into Trade in that kind of detail, get the GURPS Traveller book "Far Trader". It puts a lot more effort (and complexity) into Trade. The majority of the rules assume the GM is going to create the problems and complexity to taste with these mechanisms just being guidelines for generating potential adventures. That's the way it's been since the very first edition. Other than in GURPS.
 
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Traveller traders are speculative tramp ships looking to eke out a living where the big-boys either don't want to play in, or missed it somehow. Basically no little trader is going to make that kind of bank in reality - someone richer, faster, more established, etc, is going to make that profit. Now, if they had some dumb luck, say transporting a cargo of XX to a planet that just happened to have a localized change that could use XX, then yeah, they may actually make extra credits off that shipment. But as soon as word got out, bigger competitors would swoop in and snag that market.

It's no different than today - those who have the information, capital and connections will make the money before secondary or tertiary traders will. Kind of like how Wall Street works - the people with better connections, better info and the capital can make a killing and everyone else is along for the ride (except the Reddit bro's....).

Regular established cargo ships are the ones that will pick up the regular cargos and transport along the better, more profitable routes - just like liners are going to take the vast majority of passengers somewhere, whereas little tramps with extra room will pick up the indigent, the desperate and sometimes and old guy with a young kid and a couple of robots.

PC's certainly should be able to eke out a living, and sometimes strike paydirt, but being able to make enough to not only pay your bills but buy another ship within a year is some pretty amazing luck in my book.
 
Yeah, GURPS Far Trader discusses the "Law of One Price", which is basically that redonkulous profits draws competition to eliminate those profits in the absence of corrupt economic practices. And it also talks about how there are large volumes of trade, but those volumes are mostly spoken for, so tramp traders like the PCs aren't in a position to siphon much of that off.

Market competition is basically what standard Traveller never addresses. Prices are inflexible. Cargoes just exist. Modifiers don't change. So if you use the rules as written as if they were actual economies, they just go to crazyland. The game design assumes the referee is going to add the countervaling forces via story and adventure because mechanics for doing so are too complex to be fun.
 
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