Real world stateroom

[sideranautae]

Amtrak is partially subsidized, by the feds and states. In 2013 they received about $1.3B in subsidies. But the airlines receive subsidies, as do the freight railroads.

US airlines only receive subsidies for a few small plane flights to some remote, rural communities. None of the airlines general business is subsidized by the gov. AMTRAK is at least 50% subsidized and has NEVER been in the Black. Most routes outside of the NE corridor are almost wholly subsidized. The freight subsidies account for a couple % of their total cost, if that. The freight rail companies would be wildly profitable without them.

Thus, AMTRAK can't be used for a private business model.

 

[phavoc]

US airlines only receive subsidies for a few small plane flights to some remote, rural communities. None of the airlines general business is subsidized by the gov. AMTRAK is at least 50% subsidized and has NEVER been in the Black. Most routes outside of the NE corridor are almost wholly subsidized. The freight subsidies account for a couple % of their total cost, if that. The freight rail companies would be wildly profitable without them.

Thus, AMTRAK can't be used for a private business model.

Amtrak received $1.3 billion in 2013 in subsidies, and earned $2.9 billion in revenue. It's actually come a long way from total subsidization. Most public rail services are subsidized around the world. Their focus is on transport and not profit.

Airlines DO get federal subsidies. Ticket taxes only covered about 70% of the FAA's operating budget in 2013. And fees only covered about 1/3rd of the TSA's budget (though it's a horrible agency, but the expenses are still there).

Population density in the US makes it improbable for coast-to-coast high-speed rail. Only certain city pairs/links makes sense, and the eastern corridor for the US. Amtrak is sitting on a lot of deferred maintenance expense in the Northeastern Corridor. Plus it will have to invest billions in track upgrades to get the speed up near the 200mph mark. The ridership is their in a lot of places, but the will to invest is not. Europeans heavily use their rail system, and they invest in it as well.

It would take political will (that is not present) in the US to privatize the NE corridor and make it a for-profit railroad. It's probably the only section that can stand on it's own without public subsidy. However, none of the other transportation systems (air, road, ship) exist without contributions from the public purse. Private railroads in the US are the most efficient (capital and otherwise) freight system in the world. But the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) provides grants and subsidized funds to the railroads for trackage realignments, research and development and in other ways.

Please find me a transport system that doesn't have public money flowing into it somehow.

 

[Condottiere]

1. The problem is, the stateroom costs appear to be drawn out of a hat.

2. If you look at airline economics, it more or less costs the same to transport one person from point A to B, the difference being as to how much it's worth to each passenger for the service.

3. In exchange for an inordinate amount of pampering and a larger luggage allowance, the rich are willing to pay through their nose for more comfort, privacy and legroom, a compromised variant for business class, and the rest of us stuffed into economy.

4. Business class used to pay for the flight, first class were profit and economy was going after every last possible dollar.

Adding seats to an aircraft increases its ability to generate revenue at a low marginal cost. However, an aircraft’s optimal seat configuration depends on the operator’s marketing strategy. If an airline is targeting price-sensitive consumers, such as leisure travelers, an airline will seek to maximize the number of seats to keep prices as low as possible. On the other hand, a carrier that is targeting service-oriented business clientele may opt for a less dense seat configuration with either a larger premium cabin and/or an economy cabin with greater seat pitch (the distance between the rows of seats). In reality, the key for most airlines is to strike the right balance as most serve a broad mix of both business and leisure customers.

5. Without understanding what costs what on a starship, you can't do any real cost accounting.

6. A cabin is just a sectioned off area, which outside the furniture, entertainment facilities, electrical wiring and plumbing, is the same as a cargo hold.

7. What's added is the provisions, life support and stewarding.

8. The real cost factor would have to be life support, operating and capital.

9. Narrow it down to what it costs to heat some or all of the ship, and provide the correct mix of atmosphere, and how much space this equipment occupies.

 

[Condottiere]

"THE rich even get better air than the rest of us," proclaims Mother Jones's Kevin Drum, riffing off an American Prospect story on "the airlines' war on the 99%". Mr Drum is referring specifically to Lufthansa's decision to install humidifiers in its first-class cabins, ensuring that the people at the front of the plane enjoy air with 25% humidity, as opposed to 5-10% in coach. But Harold Meyerson, the author of the Prospect story, has a much longer litany of complaints:

A comparison of today’s airliners with the great fin-de-siècle passenger ships would reveal a similar disparity in their treatment of passengers—lavish accommodations for first class, and the bulk of the passengers in steerage. As a socio-economic tract, Titanic could be remade today set on an airliner.Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the changes that are sweeping the airline industry. A first-class ticket on Emirates Air from Los Angeles to Dubai entitles you to a private compartment—complete with a sliding door, a lie-flat seat and mattress, a vanity, a minibar, a flat-screen TV and luxury bathroom with shower—for a tidy $32,840. Korean Air has installed what the New York Times describes as a “spacious lounge” with fully equipped bar in the first-class sections of its planes. Delta will provide flat-beds for their first-class and business passengers on all their New York to L.A. flights starting this summer. Virgin Atlantic provides private limousine service to and from airports for their first-class passengers. Not to be outdone, Lufthansa has built an entire separate terminal for its first-classers at the Frankfurt airport, from which they are carried by limousine across the tarmac to their planes. Delta and United whisk their first-class passengers to connecting flights in Porsches and Mercedes, respectively.[...]Planes, like economies, are finite things. If more of the wealth goes to the top, less flows to the bottom. On airplanes, what travelers have experienced is the upward, or more precisely, forward redistribution of space—of leg room. When first class expands, coach contracts—not the number of coach seats, just the amount of space allotted to them.
Mr Meyerson is too clever to blame this phenomenon on the airlines themselves, which, he acknowledges, are "in no way responsible for the polarisation of income and wealth that defines our time". Instead he argues that the seating plans on today's planes "reflect that polarisation, with more and more space and amenities showered on...first-class passengers (whose fares rise accordingly), while less and less space and fewer—increasingly, no—amenities are provided to coach passengers."

I am not sure the situation is as dire as Mr Meyerson makes it out to be. Flying coach may be less comfortable than it was a decade or two ago, but it is far safer and significantly cheaper. Hundreds of millions of people now have access to the freedom to fly—a privilege once afforded only to the richest.

Mr Meyerson is right to want to arrest the decline in quality of coach-class travel. (His tongue-in-cheek suggestion that "a new round of Occupy protestors might rise one day in coach and demand that the first-class hors d’oeuvres, or flat beds, or showers be made available to all," however, would end badly in today's security-conscious air-travel environment.) But his diagnosis of the cause of that decline elides a key factor: consumer choice.

Airlines are responding to market pressures—specifically, the unwillingness of air travellers to spend a little extra to fly in a bit more comfort. Most airlines would like nothing more than to charge for slightly better service and larger seats—that is what the continued segmentation of aeroplanes into Economy, Economy Plus and Economy Plus Plus is all about. But there is already an airline that offers better service and more comfortable seats. It's called Virgin America, and it lost $671 million between 2007 and 2012. Meanwhile, Spirit Airlines—the airline that draws the most customer ire in America, and is also very cheap—was doing just fine.

Until it makes business sense for airlines to treat economy-class passengers better, they won't. Mr Meyerson argues that passengers' collective decision to prioritise bargains over comfort is a reflection of the decline of the first-world middle class—i.e., Spirit succeeds because it is "an airline that the downsized working class can afford." That may well be part of the reason. But perhaps the appeal of a bargain is the same it has always been: it looks like a really good deal, and by the time you realise what a bad product you've bought, it is too late to change your mind.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2014/05/flying-first-class?zid=303&ah=27090cf03414b8c5065d64ed0dad813d

 

[phavoc]

1. The problem is, the stateroom costs appear to be drawn out of a hat.

2. If you look at airline economics, it more or less costs the same to transport one person from point A to B, the difference being as to how much it's worth to each passenger for the service.

Umm, costs for pretty much all Traveller items are drawn out of a hat. The closets analogue is going to be sea-based cabins, as opposed to aircraft. And it should be more closely compared to submarines since their environments are more closed loop like a Starship would be. Except that there aren't any passenger liner submersibles to be compared to.

Airline economics is actually more complicated. First you have your capital expense of the aircraft. If you are US airline, you don't have currency issues (or if you are European and use the Euro, you also don't have it). Anyone else has to factor in currency fluctuation costs to your cost of capital. The second biggest expense is fuel. Most airlines try to hedge that as much as possible. Airlines based in the Middle East have a huge cost advantage when flying from their home bases due to the low cost of fuel available to them that other airlines don't get. Your third biggest cost is labor (flight crews, ground crews, support and admin). Then you have all your ancillary costs (bases, supplies, vehicles, etc).

I really don't want to factor things like inflation, capital, currency fluctuations, etc, into the game. If it seems reasonable based on what kind of money would be available to people in order to pay for their travel, then I'm ok with all that.

5. Without understanding what costs what on a starship, you can't do any real cost accounting.

6. A cabin is just a sectioned off area, which outside the furniture, entertainment facilities, electrical wiring and plumbing, is the same as a cargo hold.

7. What's added is the provisions, life support and stewarding.

8. The real cost factor would have to be life support, operating and capital.

9. Narrow it down to what it costs to heat some or all of the ship, and provide the correct mix of atmosphere, and how much space this equipment occupies.

It's impossible to do a cost accounting analysis of the economics of Traveller because it's all made up. Most games try to make approximations of pricing and develop an economic model within the game to account for this. I think most designers shoot for realism, but are willing to skip corners. Much the same goes towards combat systems and what-not. I'm all for additional detail to help round-out the gaming universe and provide more background and details to enhance the flavor and storytelling. But I try to avoid spreadsheets in space-type gaming. Especially when there aren't any spreadsheets pre-built to help me out!

When I started working on the stateroom changes, I made the conscious decision to make cabins more self-sufficient in terms of life support. In the event of an emergency your cabin is essentially a self-contained unit capable of sustaining the people inside. Each passenger is also provided a plastic throw-away vac-suit in case of emergencies. I also like to add in lifeboats/pods for liner-class ships just in case they have to evacuate. While spaceships don't sink, they can still have accidents and might need to be evacuated.

For life support I've always wished that Traveller would have had a formula for how much space is required for the necessary life support machinery to support one person. Then it's just a matter of scaling that up to provide the necessary life support for the number of people you want to carry. And if you carry say 10% over, here's the consequences, 20% over, etc.. until you get to the point where you say "you have 1hr of oxygen available before everyone goes unconscious, and 3hrs before suffocation starts".