The Economics of Empire

[Darzoni]

So my current crop of Traveller characters are a motley bunch who are bank-rolled by the Dilettante character of the group. The Dilettante's father has basically kicked him out and said "Go make something of yourself. There's a frontier sector over there, turn it into something worthwhile." Thought I'd like to share this with the forums as it goes on.

Some campaign setting notes.
- The setting uses Warp drives, making fuel costs a non-issue.
- The 'Technology Level' of a world really means what the industrial base of a planet is capable of manufacturing locally. Items of a higher TL than the planet are more expensive/rarer because they have to be imported from elsewhere (translating to what amounts to a 5% price increase per TL of difference). Items of a lower TL than the planet are cheaper or manufactured using better technologies (translating to a 5% price decrease per TL of difference or some minor improvements to the item).
- Some items don't have a TL associated with them (most notably starship components). It is assumed that if the local industrial base is capable of manufacturing them they will make them to the highest standard possible, because the cheaper methods might be unsafe for whatever reason. Like a warp drive.
- The per parsec negative DM for Astrogation doesn't really work with Warp drives. So it is -1 DM per week of travel instead.
- 'Mis-jumps' are not catastrophic. You misplotted the course so you end up in a random parsec that's the appropriate distance from your starting point.
- There is FTL communication in the form of ansibles, though only at Class A starports. Naval bases have them, but they're not for civilian use. Creates a hub effect for mail and communication.

Summary of play to date follows...

 

[Darzoni]

My regular group isn't exactly all that... serious. I actually don't remember the character names.

The Dilettante: Spoiled, lazy, can party better than anyone else (Carouse 3, IIRC?). Source of all the money. Dad is going to disown him if he doesn't shape up (turn a profit). Not proficient with any kind of gun or hand weapon; owns a blinged-out grenade launcher and aerosol grenades filled with cocaine. The grenade launcher is named Rick James. (Did I mention how unserious this group can be?)

The Doctor: A medical guy with knowledge of biochemistry and xenobiology. Got into some trouble with ecoterrorists over a project designed to increase the reproductive rate of an endangered species. He works at Sorival's lone starport as a doctor when the series opens.

The Ensign: The 38 year old former naval Ensign. He was drafted five times in five different services due to a computer error (read as 'Referee screw-up'...) and ended up serving as an ensign for his final term. He managed to survive all the disasters in his storied career unscathed, except for the enemies he's made. Somehow ended up as the majordomo for the Dilettante... out of friendship.

The Captain: A scout who was bequeathed a 150 year old scout ship for his service to the ICS (Interstellar Cartographic Society, this setting's Scout service). The ship is named the Cold Mercy and has many minor things wrong with it as well as a nagging issue with the sensors that resists all attempts at repair. He has a storied past of failed rescues and angry people. He is on Sorival after his last mission for the Scout service.

The Pilot: Actually the former director of intelligence for a major power in a far off sector who spent a great deal of time undercover as a pirate. Pulled off some legendary heist as a pirate, likely to make sure his reputation in the criminal underworld was cemented. Works for the Captain as a co-pilot now.

The Crook: Nobody knows, in-character, why this guy is around or what he does. But he was a career criminal. We do know that he stole schematics for a gun from an arms merchant associated with an Earth-based mercenary group (the players' characters from the previous campaign). He is out in the middle of nowhere because he wants to avoid them.

 

[Darzoni]

So I don't really think the forums want to be bored with actual play, because the actual play has been less than exciting to date. Might put some of the highlights up if there's interest in 'em. So some questions/notes, I think.

- Building Costs: I literally mean the cost of making buildings. The Dilettante wanted to build an ore refinery on a planet. Didn't really have anything that was obviously built for that, so we took the Space Ship Construction rules, bent them sideways, and used them. A 100 ton hull with no drives, outfitted with 'fuel' processors, a bridge, living quarters, and such (the really interesting part is going to be figuring out how to get the thing to its destination...). Not really satisfying as a long-term solution, so is there anything I could use from Mongoose or adapt from a previous edition?

- Economics: The projected output for the above refinery, assuming everything works well, is 25 displacement tons of refined silicates per day. The base price for Refined Ores is 5k/ton, while the long-term contract ended up being 6.75k per displacement ton. Assuming that the freighters can arrive at a sufficient rate to export all of the output regularly for a 30 day period, that's 5,062,500cr a month. Not sure if I'm applying the economics system correctly, though the above example is gross, not net.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

Construction robots can help build the thing (as could some workmen). Raw materials could be either taken there and/or fabricated locally by a specialist mini-factory construction unit (i.e. another fuel-processor repurposed for the general stats, or something similar).

Taxes, import duties and red-tape can help cut that money down to any figure, you as GM like (obviously within reason as if the PCs work hard there should be some reasonable profit).

 

[locarno24]

Some items don't have a TL associated with them (most notably starship components). It is assumed that if the local industrial base is capable of manufacturing them they will make them to the highest standard possible, because the cheaper methods might be unsafe for whatever reason. Like a warp drive.

Actually, they do - check out the Primitive and Advanced Spacecraft section of High Guard. It tells you at what TL different rating drives and power plants are available, and how the hull strength of different TL chassis are affected.

As to building factory capacity...not sure.

Economics: The projected output for the above refinery, assuming everything works well, is 25 displacement tons of refined silicates per day. The base price for Refined Ores is 5k/ton, while the long-term contract ended up being 6.75k per displacement ton. Assuming that the freighters can arrive at a sufficient rate to export all of the output regularly for a 30 day period, that's 5,062,500cr a month. Not sure if I'm applying the economics system correctly, though the above example is gross, not net.

Problem - Basic Raw Materials make KCr 5 per dTon, but that's less the costs of acquiring the unprocessed stuff, maintenance (and crew salaries), and the shipping costs for the freighters.

If looking at colony building - try searching for some of Rust's old stuff on his campaigns. this is a good start.





If you're looking at building up a mini colony/empire/thing, may I suggest looking at the Dynasty sourcebook?

 

[Golan2072]

Starship hulls are probably highly over-priced for planetside construction, as they are built to withstand prolonged acceleration and thus must be considerably stronger than, say, a structure designed to stand for long under 1G or less. If the local planet has a significant atmosphere (even an unbreathable one), then you don't have to worry about vacuum, hard radiation and micro-meteorites, but only about weather.

 

[Golan2072]

That said, I'd love to hear more about your setting. Got a starmap and UWPs?

 

[Darzoni]

I actually have Dynasty and it's not precisely what I was looking for. I haven't read High Guard extremely closely, so I wasn't aware of the TL differences in starship components. Might be useful for 'cheaper' prefabricated buildings though.

As for the setting, warp drive has changed some stuff from the base. For one, the subsectors are much larger: 16x16 parsecs. When starships can just cruise at a constant velocity instead of taking a fixed amount of time no matter the distance, the ranging powers of the players grows considerably. A sector is only 2x2 subsectors though, only to save my sanity as a referee (in terms of parsecs covered, it is only slightly larger than a standard Traveller sector). Realistically the players are only roaming around two subsectors at those sizes.

Humans live in what is called the Solar Empire. Which is a misnomer because there is no emperor. The central government is primarily naval/military/law enforcement, much more cohesive than the Terran Confederacy that preceded it. It's actually a representative republic in structure, with all the member states sending representatives. The Empire formed as a reaction to the first Human/Shay-An War, where the weak mutual defense treaties between Confederacy members proved fairly ineffective at stopping the Shay-An advance. The height of human technology reaches TL 15, with notable exceptions in the areas of robotics and AI.

The Shay-An area TL 17 species who are deeply conservative. Their creator race tasked them with the stewardship of a great swath of terraformed worlds conducive to the evolution of sapient species; the Shay-An Protectorate sitting on the rimward borders of known space. They take this job extremely seriously, and were not happy when humans colonized a number of worlds inside the Protectorate's boundaries. Deeming humans to be dangerously short-sighted and volatile (especially compared to the functionally immortal lifespans of the Shay-An), they set about trying to wipe humans from the Galaxy for the good of the Universe. It was the Shay-An's lack of numbers that ended the first Human/Shay-An War; their technology was very dominating but they lacked the manpower and materiel to push further into human territory.

EDIT: Oops, should talk about the sector the game is taking place in.

The actual sector this game is taking place in is literally a frontier. Most of the Arvak Sector is unexplored and marked as Survey Areas by the ICS. The ICS in this area is grossly underfunded and the corporations are busy making sure they have the raw materials to stay in business. Lack of a serious population hampers growth. There are two 'settled' subsectors: Sorival and Anderson, with Anderson being the more heavily settled of the two (subsectors are named after their local capitol).

Sorival (1609-D864411-2) is the /only/ inhabited planet in its subsector. It was settled /maybe/ a decade ago. Its starport is notable for being mostly cobblestone paths and dirt fields, as well as the center for civilization for the whole planet. A few planets around it were surveyed, but nothing was really done with them.

 

[Darzoni]

Construction robots can help build the thing (as could some workmen). Raw materials could be either taken there and/or fabricated locally by a specialist mini-factory construction unit (i.e. another fuel-processor repurposed for the general stats, or something similar).

Taxes, import duties and red-tape can help cut that money down to any figure, you as GM like (obviously within reason as if the PCs work hard there should be some reasonable profit).

There's a standard construction walker design called an Operator that's supposed to be standard issue for new colonies. Though I should probably tweak the price to reflect just how ubiquitous it is. It should realistically be about the cost of a backhoe or other small earthmover.

The primary issue is that the planet is presently uninhabited and has no breathable atmosphere. It's also three parsecs from the nearest starport, seven or so from the nearest Class A starport. The Dilettante needs to effectively jump-start the formation of a community on-world for it to work smoothly (he does not realize this yet, I think). I leave the details up to him, as I am only the rules facilitator at this point. I think they may need to survey Septic (1407-X535000-X) a little closer, as some of the wildlife is actually fantastically dangerous. It will likely be more profitable to sell land grants to a garden world they uncovered last session than to mine a marginally inhabitable world for silicates.

The sector is technically an unincorporated region and outside the jurisdiction of any member state of the Solar Empire. This might change pretty suddenly if the PCs start spreading the wealth around like I suspect they might.

Did I mention that the only starship they have access to is a slightly modified Scout ship? The biggest money sink for them is the trade network they'll have to build from scratch.

 

[Darzoni]

Something that has come up while trying to determine the utility of a ubiquitous civilian walker over a cargo lifter. How do I determine the carrying capacity of something with Manipulator Arms? Obviously Vehicles don't have an Endurance stat...

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

Have a look in 'Book 9 - Robots' that might help (and provide some stats of construction robots).

 

[Darzoni]

Book 9 helps. So I figure that a Vehicle's Structure is a good replacement for Endurance. So I came up with the following house rule for this.

Manipulator Arms can carry/lift (STR + Vehicle Structure) * Vehicle Spaces kilograms, base. Manipulator arms add the Vehicle’s spaces to the Effect of any melee damage roll.

 

[Darzoni]

Somebody asked about planets, so a few more details.

Arvak sector, Sorival sub-sector.

SA Arvak//Sorival-1407, "Septic" (1407-X535000-X): Low density oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere planet with landmasses dominated by fungal and insectoid life. More complex organisms live in the unusually oxygenated ocean, such as the Emperor Salamander. Land life incorporates the high concentration of silicates into their bodies, primarily for structural components in the larger fungal forms and exoskeletal armor in the insects. Insects seem to be 'armored' with organically produced ceramics. Majority of scavengers seem to be a starfish-like mobile fungal form. Extremely swampy. Recently surveyed.

SA Arvak//Sorival-1606, "Hammerfall" (1606-X6B0000-X): Hammerfall is the moon of the system's lone gas giant and gets its name from its most distinguishing feature. At some point in the past, a planetoid smashed into Hammerfall, leaving a primary impact crater approximately the size of Australia. The planet is riddled with enormous and extremely deep canyons radiating outward from the impact as well as countless secondary impact craters from ejected matter. All signs point to microbial life being transferred from the destroyed planetoid to Hammerfall, where life evolved to take advantage of the volcanic gasses erupting from the worldlet's wounds. Plant-life appears be lithovoric, using captured sulfur to produce digestive enzymes. The density of life grows thicker the further down one travels; above the canyons and primary impact crater there only seems to be lichen-like. The atmosphere is mildly corrosive, though not enough to endanger vacsuits, and is thickest in the impact canyons. There is a ring of ejected matter around the planet and its parent. Recently surveyed. Named because it looks like somebody took a god-sized hammer to the place.

Sorival (1609-D864411-2): Colonized within the last fifty years, Sorival is the spinward end of the Novac Trade Nexus. It has little offer other than agricultural products and little interest has been shown in improving the industrial infrastructure, likely due to import costs and the unexplored nature of the Sorival subsector, in addition to the backwater nature of the Arvak sector. As it is the only colony in the subsector, it is also the sub-sector capital.

 

[IanW]

- Economics: The projected output for the above refinery, assuming everything works well, is 25 displacement tons of refined silicates per day. The base price for Refined Ores is 5k/ton, while the long-term contract ended up being 6.75k per displacement ton. Assuming that the freighters can arrive at a sufficient rate to export all of the output regularly for a 30 day period, that's 5,062,500cr a month. Not sure if I'm applying the economics system correctly, though the above example is gross, not net.

25 dtons a day is roughly 750 dtons a month, or about 7500 tons. You're just building a mine, so theres no real starport, so I think we can assume you'll be needing a Far Trader/Frontier Trader sort of ship to ship it out.

Now, I assume that Our Heroes are only getting the MCr5 a month once the cargo gets to civilisation at the other end, right ?

Theres also no security, which will make Fat Traders of various types ... reluctant ... to make the run.

A 500 dton Family Spofulam Yards Recollet class armed frontier trader (*) carries 102 dtons of cargo space. If you handwave the fuel away, it goes up to 250 dtons of cargo, and you could squeeze a bit more in if you got rid of some of the staterooms. A Recollet costs MCr 226 or so.

Assuming its two weeks to civilisation and two weeks back, you'd need three of these to ship the cargo out - and remember a ship with a smaller and cheaper jump drive will take longer, so will make less trips a year, so you'll need more of them.

Therefore, even if the mine costs in the single-digit megacredits, to get that sweet sweet sweet MCr 60 a year, you're going to need to spend some serious ker-ching in leasing armed freighters.

The good news is they'll be coming back empty, so they can bring colonists, food and whatnot essentially as ballast.

My gut feeling is you need something a lot more valuable than KCr 5 per dton silicates to make this work.

(*) http://www.bitsuk.net/Archive/archive_background/files/Spofulam.pdf

 

[Darzoni]

While there are some pirates in the area, I have not quite decided how piracy actually /works/ yet. That is to say, what sort of things do the pirates go after in a sector that is largely unexplored and uninhabited? Not sure that refined silicates would attract them. Though it would give me an excuse to scare them with ship-to-ship combat.

I have some time to figure it all out, as there is no game this weekend (due to Free RPG Day) and they are presently distracted by games of nobility in the sector capitol for awhile. The Dilettante's rival has arrived in-sector and has summoned them to his debut ball/party. Not to mention the people out for the Thief's head have set up a bounty-hunting office in the same system. Heh heh heh.

 

[IanW]

Im solidly of the opinion that pirates dont steal cargos - they steal valuable things, like ships and people, and hold unprotected cities and installations to ransom.

That said, if you want Our Heroes to have to work for that money, all they need is to get questions from shippers about 'Whats the security like ? Will I be escorted ? Is the Navy there ?'.

IMO the reason the 3I is so anti-piracy is that the threat of piracy prevents trade. Those silicates will be very useful to the future of many industries ... if someone can make a credit getting them off planet.

But speaking in general, piracy is a symptom of healthy trade - if theres no merchant ships, pirates find something else to do.

 

[Darzoni]

Piracy in a setting where warp drives rather than jump drives are used raises some questions though. The primary one is 'Can you detect a ship while it is traveling at warp speeds?'

I guess there would have to be a way to do so, or all military defenses would be useless. Quantum shockwaves, I suppose, requiring a specific kind of sensor. Most Class C starports would have them, and Class B and A ports would definitely have them.

So pirate would have them. Or some way of getting outbound flight paths, probably an inside man. Or just staying dark near the common 100D routes. I mean, realistically, sensors would have a hard time distinguishing a starship from a chunk of cold rock if there were no heat sources or EM emissions coming from it.

But really the source of the PC's problems will be privateers hired by the Dilettante's rival. And the extremely hostile 35kg dragonflies on the world they plan on mining...

Septic Dragonfly: Carnivorous Killer Insect (Swamp/Marsh). Flight/Half-Speed Walk. STR 14, DEX 17, END 10, INT 1, INS 16, PCK 8. Survival 0, Athletics 0, Recon 0, Melee (Natural Weapons) 1. Pack size 2d6x3. Armor- Bioceramic Exoskeleton 10. Attack- Mandibles 2d6+5, inflicts a bleeding wound. Weighs approximately 35kg, shaped like a over-sized terran dragonfly with four pairs of wings, extremely aggressive predators. Likely the apex predator on land.

 

[IanW]

"Piracy in a setting where warp drives rather than jump drives are used raises some questions though. The primary one is 'Can you detect a ship while it is traveling at warp speeds?'

I guess there would have to be a way to do so, or all military defenses would be useless."

Not at all. Lets take the Sol system, as an example.

Terra is a TL8 world, with some pretty impressive ground defenses and some limited sensor ability.

Lets assume an enemy fleet suddenly appears in the Outsystem - around Saturn, for example.

What can they do to the Mainworld, Terra ? Till they get there in several days, nothing.

And by the time they get here, the local planetary defenses get organised ... and we've used that couple of days to send a bunch of Type S Scouts off in various directions saying 'Enemy fleet of following composition sighted in Sol system'.

As the enemy fleet will take a while to get refueled and so on, the news of them being in the vicinity will move - just - faster than they do.

The flip side is that Terra can do nothing to protect the Outsystem against that fleet.

But thats OK, because the Mainworld is where the economy and the resources are, sitting under the guns of the Planetary Defence Forces.

The Outsystem is just *there*, and what happens in the Outsystem stays in the Outsystem.

Of course, if you have communication that is faster than ships, all bets are off.

" I mean, realistically, sensors would have a hard time distinguishing a starship from a chunk of cold rock if there were no heat sources or EM emissions coming from it."

Absolutely. And thats why we need to heat up that cold rock a little, by using it as target practice. Its a hazard to navigation, dammit.

"But really the source of the PC's problems will be privateers hired by the Dilettante's rival."

Good thinking, that man.

 

[locarno24]

I mean, realistically, sensors would have a hard time distinguishing a starship from a chunk of cold rock if there were no heat sources or EM emissions coming from it.

Depends how cold and dark. If you're running anything (including life support) you have a heat signature.

If you have suitable stealth (including some sort of cooling capability) you could theoretically prevent yourself radiating heat, but that means heat energy building up inside the ship, so there's a very significant deadline beyond which you have to start radiating.

Hiding in a complex environment (jovian moon/ring system) or behind something solid (like a planetoid) is a lot easier - which is why cheapskates fuelling at a gas giant are taking risks - there is no local SDF to protect them, it's harder to see enemies, and either their tanks are dry or they're several hours inside a gas giant's massive 100D limit.

 

[IanW]

Hiding in a complex environment (jovian moon/ring system) or behind something solid (like a planetoid) is a lot easier - which is why cheapskates fuelling at a gas giant are taking risks - there is no local SDF to protect them, it's harder to see enemies, and either their tanks are dry or they're several hours inside a gas giant's massive 100D limit.

Refueling in a gas giant as a commercial starship is actually a certainty to send you broke - the time it takes you to get there, skim and refine the fuel is time you arent making money.