TAS Membership: High Passage

JNJ

Banded Mongoose
HI,

In Mgt 2nd rules is written about TAS Membership:

"Every two months, it pays dividends in the form of one high passage to each member."

I can't find further details.
What distance and what kind of jump does cover 1 ticket ?

Does it allow 1 passage on a ship going 1 parsec away, 2 parsecs, 3 parsecs ? Any parsecs ... or 1 ticket = 1 parsec.
(Travel prices / parsec are very different).

Example, if I am on Regina, where can I go with 1 ticket ? :

Just Hefry, Ruie and Jenghe (1 parsec) ?
Yori and Forboldn (2 parsecs) ?
Roup (3 parsecs) ?
And so on...

Thanks for your answers.
JN
 
If you book passage on a jump 1 merchant you can go 1 pc.

If you book passage on a jump 2 merchant that is going to a world 2pc away in one jump then you can use it for that instead.

If you book passage on a jump 4 liner that is going to a world 4pc away in one jump then you can us it for that instead.

A middle or high passage allows you to make one jump, choose where you want to go wisely...
 
Hi Sigtrygg,

Thanks for your answer but if you want to sell your ticket, as it is allowed, price becomes quite difficult to determine :

A high passage for 1 parsec costs 8500Cr and a 4 parsec high passage would cost 41000Cr.

How would you handle this ? Negotiation with the buyer ? Max price as it allows you to use the ticket as you want ... so if you want to go only 1 parsec away it's your problem ?

Per your answer what is now clearer to me is that if I find a ship doing the trip from Regina to Jewell, with multiple jumps it won't be ok as a ticket = 1 jump (whatever the distance) and not multiple jumps.

JNJ
 
Sadly, JNJ, it's another case of a "bug" in the MongTrav because it often defaults to "legacy code" and nobody has bothered debugging it.

In "classic" Traveller, tickets did not change price based on the distance traveled. It was some idea that came about in later editions (I suspect this one is unique to Mongoose's version, though I can't be sure). Apparently nobody ever bothered editing the benefits from TAS membership to reflect this pricing change.

While it seems to be intuitive that of course ticket prices should change according to distance traveled, if you think about how Jump Drive works ... all trips costing the same makes sense as well? Time = Money. With Jump Drive, it takes a week to go anywhere, Jump-1 or Jump-6. While it saves time to be able to, say, make a single Jump-3 trip to get from Planet A to Planet B, instead of Jump-1 from Planet A to Planet C, then another Jump-1 from Planet C to Planet B and the guy operating the Jump-3 ship might charge a premium because he knows he can take you directly there, that might not necessarily happen; the operator of the Jump-1 ship might give you a trip at a lower rate - the layover at Planet C is not worthless to the J1 merchant; he can move cargoes that only need to go from Planet A to Planet C to make money. Then pick up more cargoes from Planet C to Planet B. If you're negotiating passage, you can simply present yourself to the J3 merchant and tell him or her, "Oh well, if you're charging that much, I can take 2 weeks to get there at less than half the price you're charging."

In your case, I'd say that it only pays for a J1 high passage (I personally think that high passage tickets cost entirely too much) if converted into cash. If it is kept as a ticket, it will cover any single high passage jump regardless of distance. This abstractly represents that someone selling his or her high passage probably doesn't have a good one and is just sort of selling it to the first buyer. Meanwhile, if you keep and use it, you're looking for a good deal and so on and get a better value from it.
 
Hi Epicenter,

Thanks for your detailed answer, it seems a very good way to handle this non debugged point ! I'll keep it.

Sincerely,
JN
 
Another way to look at it is to assume the High Passage is tied to the TAS membership itself and is non-transferable. The person with the TAS membership presents their membership card (chip, whatever) and if the system shows they are entitled to a high passage, they can use it. If they use it the system is updated to reflect it has been used and the TAS membership owner would need to wait another 2 months before they could book another High Passage.

IOW, there is no ticket issued which could be sold, the creation and delivery of which would involve too much overhead anyway.
 
You could always rule that captains on longer jumps may prefer to sell passage to cash-paying passengers because they earn less from a TAS High Psg ticket than the true market value. Maybe it’s like credit cards - the store accepts a payment reduction (2%?) to draw in customers with credit cards.

I’ve been thinking that selling a High Psg ticket would be a Broker task. Most would not buy such a ticket unless it provides a discount over paying cash. The base value for the transaction would a percentage of the value for the jump distance the purchaser is planning.
 
I'm in favour of elongating voyage time more proportionate to the distance travelled.

If the portents are right, a monojump could be be about five days.

A hexajump could extend upto a fortnight.
 
The original rules said that one could sell the bimonthly High Passage for 10k Credits if they didn't use it. A simple solution would be to deem the benefit as a 10k Credit travel voucher that can be combined with other vouchers for trips that cost more than 10k Credits, or refunded for travel that costs less than 10k Credits, perhaps with a refund limit of Cr5000 or so. Selling the voucher would be up to the vagaries of the market, and likely be worth less than the full 20 Credits unless one were really good at selling the vouchers.

I think that's closest to the spirit of the original text, while also recognizing that a Jump-2 High Passage is worth more than a Jump-1 High Passage.
 
moviepass-promo-700x323.jpg


The difference would be paid by Traveller's Aid, or pocketed by them.
 
MgT2, 2022: TAS membership can be bought for 1Mcr. This membership pays out an investment dividend 6x per year of a High Passage ticket. If this is a 1 parsec ticket, the dividend is .054Mcr/year, or a 5.4% return, a bit low, but AAA safe. If you can sell each ticket as a 6 parsec ticket, the return each year is 1.26Mcr/year or a 126% return per year. This is a Burnie Madoff level of return. If you say the tickets are each 1 parsec, but can combined for one longer jump, at best, you can sell 1 combined 6 Parsec ticket every year, this would be .21Mcr/year or a 21%return. This is still a very high return. Maybe this return represents imperial corruption in favor of Nobility, so the TAS gets sweetheart investment opportunities. This would make TAS membership lucrative, but it would be known as a White Collar crime organization by the common man. If the dividend is a 2 Parsec ticket, not combinable in any one Jump passage, membership is worth .084Mcr/year, or a 8.4% return. A very healthy return for a AAA investment, but not so aggressive people think TAS is a White Collar crime organization.

All of this is in the Traveller universe where there is no inflation of the imperial credit.
 
If you want it to more closely model the CT benefit then the passage is for one typical jump - that could be anything up to jump 4 for a scheduled megacorporation liner.
The high passage 'ticket' could therefore be worth anywhere between jump 1 to jump 4,
 
There are two aspects:

1. Why would any starship captain, or transport corporation, accept any Passage ticket at face value?

2. At the other end, why wouldn't any transport corporation try to undercut the corporation by offering discounts, in any particular form that may take?
 
The same reason they accept credits - the Imperium says so.

Because the megacorporations would use their resources to drive them out of business up to and including trade war.
 
MgT2, 2022: TAS membership can be bought for 1Mcr. This membership pays out an investment dividend 6x per year of a High Passage ticket. If this is a 1 parsec ticket, the dividend is .054Mcr/year, or a 5.4% return, a bit low, but AAA safe. If you can sell each ticket as a 6 parsec ticket, the return each year is 1.26Mcr/year or a 126% return per year. This is a Burnie Madoff level of return. If you say the tickets are each 1 parsec, but can combined for one longer jump, at best, you can sell 1 combined 6 Parsec ticket every year, this would be .21Mcr/year or a 21%return. This is still a very high return. Maybe this return represents imperial corruption in favor of Nobility, so the TAS gets sweetheart investment opportunities. This would make TAS membership lucrative, but it would be known as a White Collar crime organization by the common man. If the dividend is a 2 Parsec ticket, not combinable in any one Jump passage, membership is worth .084Mcr/year, or a 8.4% return. A very healthy return for a AAA investment, but not so aggressive people think TAS is a White Collar crime organization.

All of this is in the Traveller universe where there is no inflation of the imperial credit.
Up to the GM of course but I would base reimbursement on a J1 ticket. Cash reimbursement for vouchers are rare but where it is done it is based on the lowest possible value for the voucher. Otherwise it becomes more profitable to cash in the voucher and then buy the ticket with the cash, which runs counter to the whole point of a voucher.
 
The law of unintended consequence strikes again. Messing with ticket price structure messes with mustering out benefits.

OK, another suggestion right out of CT. TAS membership grants you Cr10,000 every two months to spend on tickets, or you can cash it in for Cr9,000
 
The law of unintended consequence strikes again. Messing with ticket price structure messes with mustering out benefits.

OK, another suggestion right out of CT. TAS membership grants you Cr10,000 every two months to spend on tickets, or you can cash it in for Cr9,000
That one. Never could make it work, since the CT High/Middle/Low passage costs were for 'one jump' regardless of distance. Which also didn't make much sense. But six Cr10000 'TAS Travel Vouchers' per year with a 90% cash value makes the most sense. But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
 
6 tickets worth 9000 each is a 54000 income per year, which is a just 6000 credits short of the 60 000 credit per year Rich lifestyle SOC 12 from pg 98 of the 2022 update book (page 92 of the original Core book).

This is a good living to have and a nice investment for anyone who can afford the 1 MCr to buy a membership. A question might arise as to why someone who has that level of income is traipsing across the universe in a small ship.

Of course the profits that a good broker and trading ship can generate can be a good financial lure for travelling across the universe.
 
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