Ship cost reduction as TL increases?

[phavoc]

Maybe we should look at it like this.

Building a Model T Ford the year it was built (1908) using the best TL available manufacturing process. That is the original TL-12 ship in the OP.

Now build a modern factory to turn out those exact same Model Ts. They are way cheaper to make currently (in 2025) if We used a brand new modern factory to build original Model Ts. This is the TL-15 ship with the exact same stats as the TL-12 ship.

The other option is to build a car that looks like a Model T, but has been completely redesigned to be built with 2025 technologies using the original capabilities of the Model T to determine which modern best fit with that design plan. This would not be cheaper, but the components would almost all be smaller.

I believe this to be the point of the OP. I could be wrong though.

I don't really think it's a correct analogy as I've pointed out. For the analogy to remain true one must build the Model-T with the original 1908 parts on a 2024 assembly line by people who have probably never seen the parts. It is doubtful finding a Ford production plant willing to do it.

A better analogy would be would asking if Blohm & Voss (a luxury yacht builder) would build a SS Sequoia. This yacht was first laid down in 1924 and was the Presidential yacht for quite some time, and could they build it for cheaper than the original cost? At the time it was laid down the cost was $200,000 (or $3.5million in today's dollars). Today those 1924 fittings (mahogany and teak and oak) would probably be a wee bit more expensive than fiberglass. Interior fittings would be considered quite classic and would probably cost more. As an aside, Blohm and Voss built U-boats during WW2, so one supposes they are flexible in what they will build.

This is a relatively moot argument as many have pointed out the economics of Traveller are difficult, at best, to apply logically since the economic models are designed for an RPG and not to reflect an actual econom. One can only debate on Traveller boards which view of how it might work.

 

[Arkathan]

Maybe Liberty Ships would be a better analogy than a presidential yacht, since we are going for lower cost. No fancy fittings with exorbitant markups.

 

[phavoc]

Maybe Liberty Ships would be a better analogy than a presidential yacht, since we are going for lower cost. No fancy fittings with exorbitant markups.

Yup, used that one already.

 

[Condottiere]

I'm sure you can save on life support costs by not wasting oxygen.

You limit carbon dioxide scrubbing to a limited area, pump it into a storage tank, and then fill up a portable tank with that recycled oxygen, and carry it with you.

 

[swordtart]

I'm sure you can save on life support costs by not wasting oxygen.

You limit carbon dioxide scrubbing to a limited area, pump it into a storage tank, and then fill up a portable tank with that recycled oxygen, and carry it with you.

The problem with this as a differentiating cost saving measure it that we can do it at TL8 so there is no reason for it to be any more or less standard practice for every shipyard. There is no indication that this is a requirement for TL12 ships vs TL15 ships. It may just be a thing for cheapass captains.

 

[swordtart]

In the case of no frills ships then you are already paring down to the lowest cost options anyway. The savings you can make are likely to be much lower as you are moving to the point where the raw materials are becoming your largest cost.

A finely engraved polished brass gantry rail for example need use no more material than a plain one. If it were TL6 then that filigree work might be done by hand and cost a lot of time. At TL12 however it is probably done by a robot and will be cheap. On a luxury ship they might revert to hand carving as a marketing point. This is a not a function of TL (at least once you are capable of building starships) but of design choices.

If you want cheap ships you can leverage advantages or riff off the quirks* rules. You just say that the ship is brand new, but built at a shipyard with more "flexible" work practices.

e.g. A "liberty" ship might cost 5% less and impose -1 on Steward skill checks, as well as having TL9 components.

*Personally I am a bit dubious about some of those table entries, making a ship cheaper but also better seems a bit of a double bonus, but I Rule One it.

 

[swordtart]

Some of the examples here have been wartime expediencies. They were not products of lower TL societies, but were tailored to an austerity level manufacturing technology so less strategic parts could be used and part work could be farmed out to other facilities and the production base significantly increased. In the UK for example the Hurricane and Mosquito (still very capable aircraft) were designed with wooden frames (harking back to an earlier TL) and work was farmed out to furniture manufacturers to do the work taking the strain off the aircraft manufacturers. The Wellington bomber had a metal lattice frame of some sophistication but had wooden battens attached to it soe that it could be covered easily by a cheap low tech fabric covering that was "good enough" and easy to repair. Cloth was used as it could be made in cloth mills rather than having to use metal rolling mills and you could save on the use of precious aluminium* as the covering.

This was largely possible because the designs were made to leverage traditional wood working (and cloth making) skills already in place in those manufacturers. Many were not highly mechanised and in fact mass production technology optimised for furniture manufacturing would probably have made them less capable of producing the parts for aircraft.

Those furniture factories did not make complete aircraft.

The lesson is that if you want to make things cheaper and quicker with parts that are of lower sophistication, you buy in those parts in freeing up your higher sophistication equipment and skills to do what you do best.

This is standard practice in industry. When I worked in a transformer factory we bought the cables and enamelled wire in from a cable factory as we couldn't make them cheaper than we could buy them in. We didn't make the discrete components, capacitors, LEDs etc, we bought them in from "high tech" companies that made them. We bought in the laminations from sheet metal stamping companies that had been in business for decades. We bought in carboard boxes and pre-cut foam cubes for packaging. Our resources were spent assembling transformers from the laminations, wire and other components and packaging them for retail.

TL8 manufacturers make TL8 power plants that are sold to shipyards of all tech levels. When you buy one you pay the standard price as that is what the market price is. It is not in the interests of a TL12 manufacturer to divert its equipment to making something it can buy in even if it might be able to make that part slightly cheaper than the TL8 manufacturer can. It can make more profit by making TL12 parts instead. Even if those parts are build with fabricators it is still more efficient to have a specialist power plant manufacturer churning out thousands (with the economy of scale that entails) to ship to the starports in the sector than each starport making their own.

Obviously the above only applies if there is trade in place. Shipyards are well placed to benefit from trade since they are on trade hubs (Class A starports usually). The 3I exists due to (and for) trade.

*Precious is a relative term in warfare. Silver (400,000 bullion bars) was used for the coil windings at Los Almos to free up copper to be used in munitions etc. according to American Scientist.

 

[Sigtrygg]

I'm sure you can save on life support costs by not wasting oxygen.

You limit carbon dioxide scrubbing to a limited area, pump it into a storage tank, and then fill up a portable tank with that recycled oxygen, and carry it with you.

And you could call it main compartment where the crew can go and engineering compartment where they can't.

I'm sure I have seen that sort of rule in Traveller somewhere...

 

[Condottiere]

Costs for startrucking can be roughly broken down to:

1. Capital outlay

2. Operating

3. Taxation

Generally speaking, you have to get an asset, which usually is either already paid for, or you take out a loan, game mechanics make that basically free.

Taxation is a cost imposed by governments, such as income, corporate, or whatever else the dungeon master wants to impose, that you can't directly attribute to operating.

Operating costs would fuel, labour, fees, tariffs, maintenance, repairs, life support, and mortgage repayments.

Fuel can be ameliorated with a fuel processor; or you run the bath water at the bed and breakfast you're staying at.

Labour, you explain to your kids, are chores.

Maintenance, repairs, and mortgages repayments are based on the cost of the startruck, so minimizing that will reduce the aforementioned.

Which leaves us with life support.

We don't know the mechanics of oxygen regeneration, or climate control, so minimizing oxygen regeneration, by going to the lowest setting for human survival, and minimizing loss seems logical.

 

[laughdad]

I didn't roll through the entire thread, but I think I caught the gist. While it was a product that needed a lot of work, one of the things I thought T5 did introduce as a valid method was tech level efficiencies. Think of the humble ICE engine when you look at the drive and power table below and it makes sense. The standard 4-banger ICE engine is more efficient in terms of power produced per unit of mass (kilos or pounds) and is more fuel efficient, and produced at a lower unit cost. But if you want, you can get the "Ultimate" (Lamborghini as an analogy) engine which is much higher performing but you're going to pay more for it.

Taking this to the starship drives: the J2 drive becomes available at TL11. If you're getting it produced at a TL15 facility you could get the ultimate version of the J2 drive, which will yield a J2.2 (not usable by itself) but, more importantly, requires 30% less displacement dedicated to fuel tankage! So, a 200-ton freighter running with the TL11 J2 drive would need 40 tons of J-fuel, but the TL15 version would only need 28 tons of fuel. What can you do with that 12 tons of savings? Similarly, the ultimate version of your 4g m-drive would give you 5Gs of acceleration (and I used the fuel efficiency as power efficiency for the m-drives).

Anyhow, I like this better than the size/power/fuel advantages in HG2.

Drive & Power Tech Level Efficiency
TL	Stage	TL	Cost	Efficiency	Fuel
Exp	Experimental	-3	x10	50%	2.0
Pro	Prototype	-2	x5	80%	1.2
Ear	Early	-1	x2	90%	1.1
Std	Standard	0	x1	100%	1.0
Bas	Basic	0	1/2	90%	1.1
Alt	Alternate	0	x1	100%	1.0
Imp	Improved	+1	x1	110%	.9
Gen	Generic	+1	1/2	90%	1.1
Mod	Modified	+2	1/2	110%	.9
Adv	Advanced	+3	x1	120%	.8
Ult	Ultimate	+4	x2	130%	.7
Armor Tech Level Stage Effects
TL	Stage	TL	Tons	Mod	Q
Exp	Experimental	-3	x3	1/2	F
Pro	Prototype	-2	x2	-4	F
Ear	Early	-1	x2	-3	F
Std	Standard	0	x1	0
Bas	Basic	0	x1	-1
Alt	Alternate	0	x1	+1
Imp	Improved	+1	x1	+2	+1
Gen	Generic	+1	1/2	-2	_1
Mod	Modified	+2	1/2	+2	+2
Adv	Advanced	+3	1/2	+3	+3
Ult	Ultimate	+4	1/2	+4	+4

 

[laughdad]

Here's the sensors/weapons stage effects. QREBS is a T5 way of instilling positive and negative attributes to differentiate like items: Quality, Reliability, Ease-of-use, Burden, and Safety.

Tech Level Stage Effects
TL	Stage	TL	Cost	Mod	Q	R	E	B	S
Exp	Experimental	-3	x10	-3	Q	-3	-3	+3	+3
Pro	Prototype	-2	x5	-2	Q	-2	-2	+2	+2
Ear	Early	-1	x2	-1	Q	-1	-1	+1	+1
Std	Standard	0	x1	0	Q	0	0	0	0
Bas	Basic	0	1/2	-1	Q	0	-1	+1
Alt	Alternate	0	x1	0	Q	Flux	Flux	Flux	Flux
Imp	Improved	+1	x1	+1	Q	+1	+2	-1	+1
Gen	Generic	+1	1/2	0	0	0	0	0	0
Mod	Modified	+2	1/2	+2	Q	+2	+2	-2	+2
Adv	Advanced	+3	x1	+3	Q	+3	+3	-3	+3
Ult	Ultimate	+4	x2	+4	Q	+4	+4	-4	+4

 

[Condottiere]

How much, and how, efficiency can you squeeze out of the fuel source.

As far as I know, there's no variance in the fuel, just how efficient it can be utilized.

For Traveller you more or less have the same results for refined and unrefined, though it's possible that hydrogen can be altered to various gradesto optimize energy extraction with some customized process in the reactor.

 

[laughdad]

How much, and how, efficiency can you squeeze out of the fuel source.

As far as I know, there's no variance in the fuel, just how efficient it can be utilized.

For Traveller you more or less have the same results for refined and unrefined, though it's possible that hydrogen can be altered to various gradesto optimize energy extraction with some customized process in the reactor.

Gasoline can, and is, made "more efficient" through refining techniques, adding specific additives, and developing new catalysts that can better control combustion reactions, ultimately leading to better fuel efficiency and reduced emissions. For fusion, deuterium is preferred over hydrogen, particularly when mixed with Tritium because it's easier to fuse with another nucleus, so it requires far less energy to get the reaction.

The other side of "fuel efficiency" is of course the engine. I'll dig back into T5 (it's been a minute and as you know, the information is a bit...scattered throughout it, save tables), but the "efficiency" for the drives was treated as a performance multiplier, similar to getting more horsepower or thrust out of 2025 engine compared to the same weight version from 1945). For the power plants, efficiency was treated as a multiplier of the output.

 

[laughdad]

Gasoline can, and is, made "more efficient" through like refining techniques, adding specific additives, and developing new catalysts that can better control combustion reactions, ultimately leading to better fuel efficiency and reduced emissions. For fusion, deuterium is preferred over hydrogen, particularly when mixed with Tritium because it's easier to fuse with another nucleus, so it requires far less energy to get the reaction.

The other side of "fuel efficiency" is of course the engine. I'll dig back into T5 (it's been a minute and as you know, the information is a bit...scattered throughout it, save tables), but the "efficiency" for the drives was treated as a performance multiplier, similar to getting more horsepower or thrust out of 2025 engine compared to the same weight version from 1945). For the power plants, efficiency was treated as a multiplier of the output.

Ah!!! Engine examples:

The Jumo engines that propelled the ME-262 each weighed between 1584 pounds and 1642 pounds (sources vary and there were variant engines) with a thrust ratio of ~1.25 or 1984 pounds of thrust. In contrast, the F/A-18 Hornet's F404-GE-402 engine weighs 2,282 pounds and has a static thrust of 17,700 pounds.

Speaking of these jets and the fuel, the J2 fuel that powered the ME-262 was very different (brown coal derivative, anyone?) from the F/A-18's kerosene based J5. Heck, look at what SpaceX is using for fuel compared to what was the conventional wisdom that came before it.

 

[Condottiere]

Assuming the jump drive is only interested in stripping off the hydrogen atoms, which seems logical if you can use water as unrefined fuel, what happens with the contaminants?

Since I certainly would be interested in harvesting the oxygen.