Tom Kalbfus said:
The Avari are "space gypsies" they live in their starships, and can travel in groups of up to 1000 of these starships. The reason they don't have jump drives, is they like to stay together as a community, because if they go into jump space, each ship is isolated in its own jump space from another. As you can see, this spaceship has 8 staterooms and a shuttle plus 70 tons of cargo space. All the crew positions in the starship are filled by family members. The shuttles are not only used to make planetfall but also to travel. Note that the shuttles are of the standard design, they are capable of accelerating at 3 g for one week and can thus keep up with the fleet when moving from ship to ship. The 70 tons of spare cargo room are used differently in each ship, in some ships they are gathering halls for community get togethers. The starships actually accelerate at 29.43 m/s², for game purposes, we'll assume that the shuttles can accelerate at 30 m/s², so they can catch up with the starships that are ahead of them. Since there are 8 staterooms in each ship, the community could have 8000 members, although the spare cargo space can be configured to make additional staterooms. As for how the Avari support themselves, they make investments on each planet they visit, if they travel 2 parsecs, the journey for them takes 2 years, but for the rest of the OTU it takes about 7 years. So lets say they earn a 10% annual return on their investments, over 7 years that is a 94.87% return, for them they earn a 39.60% Annual return because the journey only takes 2 years from their point of view, they practically double their investments for every trip of 2 parsecs, a round trip takes for them 4 years but for everyone else, they are not seen again until 14 years later!, their initial investment is quadrupled from the last time they were in system, and this is all from earning a rather safe 10% annual return on their investment, they buy stocks mostly. What do you think?
There are a few problems with your investment strategy is that:
(a) if they are trying to make money on the planet/system they are travelling TOO, they would need jump drives to get ahead of the fleet to make the investments.
(b) more than likely they would wind down their investments in the system they came from over a period of time so as to not destablize or affect their overall investment value (see C below for more on this).
(c) If they had a major investment(s) they would not be able to dump all of the investment in a single sale because that would destablize prices and cause the value of their assets to drop. Also smart investors would follow what the Avari are invest in and short the stocks around the timeframe they would normally get ready to depart a system, thus also influencing pricing in the market.
(d) In order to transfer the funds from system to system they'd have to use the Imperial banking system. Which can be done easily enough, but requires more of a formal investment process and strategy.
(e) depending on the system they were travelling to/from, it may not be sufficiently wealthy to absorb their investments, and thus they could only invest, say 10% of their overall funds which would greatly reduce their returns.
(f) and finally, your method doesn't allow for any sort of losses or managing of the portfolio's. Even passive investments (like S&P or NASDAQ tracking funds) require some work to maintain at times, so you can rebalance your portfolio as circumstances warrant.
For this to work you'd need a group of people who understood investments and who could easily access the markets they were going to be working in. Most likely they would have a trail of investments, both behind them and in the direction they were travelling.
These investors would need a jump-capable ship, but rendezvousing with the fleet wouldn't be too hard (aside from matching velocities, but since Traveller doesn't do that, you can just handwave that away - or they talk via radio and never physically meet, that gets around the velocity issue). The fleet would need ready access to capital, and thus the investors would need to be able to have a percentage available upon arrival to take care of necessary repairs, then enough to resupply, then re-invest.
The other issue is that this model really is vulnerable to an economic downturn. Investing in single systems could take decades, or a lifetime even, to recover from if there was a system, or worse, sector-wide depression of the local economy. That's where it would be better to have some Imperial investments that paid dividends (not to mention steady money coming in you can more or less count on every year). Getting access to it wouldn't be a huge issue, and if you spread your investments wider than a single system you could better handle local economic dislocations (not to mention you avoid putting all your nesteggs in a single basket).
Since you are calling them Gypsies, maybe they are artists and musicians and such, and when they arrive in a system they sell handmade art and clothes. Savvy people would also have agreements with distributors so that they could sell large quantities of their work and let it spread out to keep costs high. Even some things like weaving carpets by hand or say very high-end dresses can make you a killing in the right environment. Some ships might be full of weavers, others may have silk worms to make silk, some make pottery, etc, etc. And when they get to a system they put on like a renaissance fair of sorts. If they are in system for months then people going ahead of them would be able to let other systems know about their estimated arrival and people could schedule vacations or trips to see such a thing.
