Trade and multiple worlds in the same system

[Golan2072]

I'm thinking of putting two or more "mainworlds" in the same star system (a highly-developed, high-tech, high-population one). While I could easily create such worlds with the current worldgen rules, my main problem would be with trade: if different worlds within the same system would have different enough trade characteristics (say, a rich world, an agricultural world and an industrial world), then trade between them might become too lucrative for PC traders in comparison to interstellar trade.

Any ideas on remedying this?

 

[EDG]

Well if that's how it turns out, that's how it turns out. Why would it be wrong to follow supply and demand?

Though I'd have thought there wouldn't be much room for PC-sized traders between those two systems, with all the "big boy" traffic that's likely between the two worlds.

 

[klingsor]

Journey time might be a catch - it might be quicker to jump rather than using the manoeuvre drive.

A better, much sneakier idea though is to have it already sewn up by big in system freighters. They might be slow but a long as there is a steady stream of them things are peachy - taking grain and protein from green planet to grey planet and manufactured goods on the return trip.

Why am I thinking of the Roman grain ships right now? As long as there was a steady stream of grain from Egypt and Africa province the proles were happy but if there was a problem... Could there be a scenario here - maybe even a mercenary ticket?

 

[Xoph]

I agree that inter-system trade would be dominated by non-Jump vessels. Shuttles and System boats (1000 dton non J craft are probably cheaper then a fat trader) would surely dominate the trade.

Might be an interesting place for players to start out... and old starship whose J drives were pulled for more cargo space... no only if the players can make enough they could get a J-Drive installed and head out in to the universe.

 

[RandyT0001]

How far apart the two systems are from each other will affect commerce. If they are a short distance 200-300 AU's then communication will be relatively quick (less than a week). If the systems are over (IIRC) 1500 AU's apart then communication can travel quicker by jump ship since the radio signal would take longer to reach it's destination.

Supposing that the Ort Cloud (or similar) exists between the systems and only maneuver drives are used for transits then pirates may be able to operate between the systems. Ships that use jump drives to transit will not have to face such a potential problem. (IMO)

Of course there is the idea where one world was colonized by one polity (Sword Worders) and the other by another (Darrians) but is remote enough from both to not be readily assisted by either during war. (Some body might have a better example.)

 

[GypsyComet]

Binary systems can be tough to make work that way if you want two "nice" worlds, since the companion star is usually nothing big and can't get the surface of a planet above freezing.

For two happy "main" worlds, look at putting a gas giant in the habitable zone and making the moons your mains. Nothing in the rules to forbid it, and plenty of random universe to justify it.

This will make your multiple worlds *very* close, and may mean they are all one nation. As such, the large commodities trade will feel a lot like the real world. Arranged well in advance in huge quantities.

The small ships can, as a side effect, be *very* small. Lots of adventure within easy reach of a 20-ton Ship's Boat. The real strandings will be harder to arrange, since even a fairly normal radio will probably find someone in range. PCs will also not be able to outrun communications, for good or ill.

 

[Golan2072]

What I had in mind is a planet and its moon both being heavily settled and well developed; the world would be a Garden, the moon would be Vacuum and Industrial. Both would be high-pop. Wouldn't that create a trade-route a mere few hours long with Traveller engines? And would that be a problem game-wise?

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Go for it.

That is quite plausible especially if the people on the Garden world wanted to keep their planet nice and not turn it into Geidi Prime.

HUGE ships might be making the trip (think Singapore to Hong Kong). It probably takes longer to load/unload them than it does to make the trip.

They probably have dedicated space lanes and stations that outsiders (PCs) are not even allowed near. Private space stations and spaceports might even be better than the Official Starport of the system.

Depending on TL and society, they could also be pretty insular. Figuring they have everything they need between the two of them, what do they care about the rest of the universe?

Great place for the PCs to show up with a Spec Cargo of Irrulean Crystals worth Megacredits on that Rich Garden world, only to have the locals go "Neh, I like the diamonds made locally better."

 

[Shiloh]

Depending on TL and society, they could also be pretty insular. Figuring they have everything they need between the two of them, what do they care about the rest of the universe?

Maybe the rulers like that they have a hammerlock on everything and don't appreciate rude strangers showing up with better ways of doing things... Renaissance-era Japan, kinda, keeping out the Gaijin interlopers. Trading enclaves, tightly regulated, i.e. the Starport. Foreigners hired to do things the hidebound locals won't

 

[klingsor]

That is nice, one could do a lot with that idea.

 

[Vile]

I've never been convinced by the concept of interstellar trade, except for one-off speculative trade embassies. There's certainly no need to be shipping ores from one star system to another.

IMTU in-system trade far outweighs any interstellar trade, both in total tonnage and in the tonnage of individual ships. I can't think of anything a functioning system would need to import, so interstellar trade would be limited to cultural and technological exchange. In-system trade runs the whole reane from mail to bulk commodities transport.

 

[klingsor]

In reality I suspect you are right, even in-system shipping costs are going to be far from insignificant, though we will not know for sure until we get out there.

Radioactives will depend on the age of the system to some extent but as for the rest I simply have no idea - system formation is part of it but we need an astrophysicist to even give any sort of best guess.

 

[GypsyComet]

The economic model of Traveller is a point of long and lengthy "discussion", and since it can be said to have an impact on just about everything else, it also tends to be the end point for discussions that started on a completely different topic.

And since even trained economists don't really understand this stuff, gamers tend to generate a lot of heat but not a lot of light...

I've never been convinced by the concept of interstellar trade, except for one-off speculative trade embassies. There's certainly no need to be shipping ores from one star system to another.

IMTU in-system trade far outweighs any interstellar trade, both in total tonnage and in the tonnage of individual ships. I can't think of anything a functioning system would need to import, so interstellar trade would be limited to cultural and technological exchange. In-system trade runs the whole reane from mail to bulk commodities transport.

In big systems with large populations on stable mainworlds, yes. Not many of those come out of the system generation rules. When they do occur, such systems tend to dominate the economy for light years around them. Why? Because they have money. Often LOTS of money.

So why would they be interested in iron ore from 2 parsecs away? Because its there, and someone else has paid the infrastructure charge to mine and deliver it, that's why. Someone who isn't getting the local tree-huggers all upset over the newest pit mine, someone who has the stuff just sitting on the surface instead of down a hole, someone willing to feed my hungry smelters and take a tiny fraction of the finished product in return. Why such a small fraction? Because the descendants of the entrepreneurs who started that mine still number only 4000 souls in the whole system (whatever its name is) but will cheerfully provide iron to run my 8,000,000 person economy with enough left to sell to others just like them.

That's why they are there, and that's why we buy from them.

 

[EDG]

So why would they be interested in iron ore from 2 parsecs away? Because its there, and someone else has paid the infrastructure charge to mine and deliver it, that's why. Someone who isn't getting the local tree-huggers all upset over the newest pit mine, someone who has the stuff just sitting on the surface instead of down a hole, someone willing to feed my hungry smelters and take a tiny fraction of the finished product in return. Why such a small fraction? Because the descendants of the entrepreneurs who started that mine still number only 4000 souls in the whole system (whatever its name is) but will cheerfully provide iron to run my 8,000,000 person economy with enough left to sell to others just like them.

That's why they are there, and that's why we buy from them.

If you have an asteroid belt and can access it, raw resources become essentially free. You can get all the minerals you need from there after all, and certainly have no need to import it from another system.

Even if you have no asteroid belt in the system - if you can get into space then you can mine inner worlds for ores, and outer worlds/satellites for ices and volatiles. Again, there's no need whatsoever to import raw materials like that from other systems.

And even if you have no space access at all, you can still mine your own planet, in which case you don't need anything from anywhere else anyway.

 

[captainjack23]

If you have an asteroid belt and can access it, raw resources become essentially free. You can get all the minerals you need from there after all, and certainly have no need to import it from another system.

Even if you have no asteroid belt in the system - if you can get into space then you can mine inner worlds for ores, and outer worlds/satellites for ices and volatiles. Again, there's no need whatsoever to import raw materials like that from other systems.

And even if you have no space access at all, you can still mine your own planet, in which case you don't need anything from anywhere else anyway.

None of the above are free when infrastructure is taken into account.
It may still be cheaper to import it than to set up mining -planet or asteroid belt) from scratch, including processing.

Plus, the motivation to do so would likely be undermined if it was invariably cheaper (and ease of access counts towards profit) to simply place an order - and it may well be quicker, too. dirt to ingot iron production takes far more than three weeks, I suspect -and a pile sitting on the next planet is about three weeks or so away. (travel + shopping and refitting)

Finally, even in a fully developed system, with extensive infrastructure, when local demand outstrips supply, one must import. To illustrate, consider that domestic (USA) oil production is quite high - and we require imports.

Its never just as simple as "local is cheaper".

 

[GypsyComet]

So why would they be interested in iron ore from 2 parsecs away? Because its there, and someone else has paid the infrastructure charge to mine and deliver it, that's why. Someone who isn't getting the local tree-huggers all upset over the newest pit mine, someone who has the stuff just sitting on the surface instead of down a hole, someone willing to feed my hungry smelters and take a tiny fraction of the finished product in return. Why such a small fraction? Because the descendants of the entrepreneurs who started that mine still number only 4000 souls in the whole system (whatever its name is) but will cheerfully provide iron to run my 8,000,000 person economy with enough left to sell to others just like them.

That's why they are there, and that's why we buy from them.

If you have an asteroid belt and can access it, raw resources become essentially free. You can get all the minerals you need from there after all, and certainly have no need to import it from another system.

Even if you have no asteroid belt in the system - if you can get into space then you can mine inner worlds for ores, and outer worlds/satellites for ices and volatiles. Again, there's no need whatsoever to import raw materials like that from other systems.

And even if you have no space access at all, you can still mine your own planet, in which case you don't need anything from anywhere else anyway.

It need not be ore. It could be broccoli, wheat, and sugar cane. The hub world of an area will almost always have gaps in what it can produce locally, based on what the world itself is like and what the rest of the system can provide *more readily than a neighboring system*.

It takes a lot of shipping capacity to bring in a foodstuff in anything close to staple quantities for a high population world, but it takes a LOT more dedicated agro space to grow it locally even if your world is suited to it. Many aren't, which means that space is either better used for something else or is too expensive (or impossible) to convert. And note that even a "luxury" imported foodstuff trade is going to fill a fleet of mega-freighters on constant loops if a high population world is involved.

Non-spacefaring worlds are going to be self-sufficient by definition; they wouldn't be able to survive otherwise. But they may well become a provider to some world that isn't self-sufficient. Their infra-structure could, for example, allow them to be the smelting point for System B's iron ore, most of which is then shipped off to System C for the next step. Are they seeing a lot of traffic? Yes. Is money moving through the system? You bet, and that WILL get someone's attention eventually.

A world with no space capacity and no commodities to draw in outsiders isn't a part of the wider subsector/sector economy. Under Imperial Golden Age assumptions, such a world is an anomaly. Given human nature, even a world with no attractions for visitors or speculators has, for that very reason, a commodity it may not suspect: Distance.

It also has a sustainable (and possibly entirely native) biosphere. That means at least one of the large Imperial corporations that deals in biologicals will set up shop there.

A common mistake when looking at Traveller economics and the macro-economic structure around commerce is that we look at the numbers and forget the people those numbers represent...

Back to the iron ore example. Under many of the government systems Traveller covers, the chance that some government minister decides to buy ore from System D is fairly slim. The company that runs the smelters and foundries makes that decision. That company may have a financial interest in the mining company, or it may have simply been approached by System D Mining as a way to get their ore smelted. Smelter A doesn't necessarily care where that load of ore in the yard came from as long as they make some money on the process.

Flipping this over, why then is System D Mining going offworld for smelting? New operation? Onworld smelting is at capacity, or involves a socio-political barrier that is more expensive to overcome than shipping offworld? Better quality work at Smelter A? Limited shipping capacity to the final customer but more than enough to Smelter A (so the stop-over makes some sense purely for shipping reasons)? Smelter A is the only middle processor Factory E will accept? Lots of reasons, many of which have a human factor.

In the final analysis, this perceptual problem with Traveller economics comes from the game itself, which tends to treat trade classifications solely as "Cause" and the resulting commerce solely as "Effect". The reality is far more complex and non-linear.

 

[EDG]

If you have an asteroid belt and can access it, raw resources become essentially free. You can get all the minerals you need from there after all, and certainly have no need to import it from another system.

Even if you have no asteroid belt in the system - if you can get into space then you can mine inner worlds for ores, and outer worlds/satellites for ices and volatiles. Again, there's no need whatsoever to import raw materials like that from other systems.

And even if you have no space access at all, you can still mine your own planet, in which case you don't need anything from anywhere else anyway.

It need not be ore. It could be broccoli, wheat, and sugar cane. The hub world of an area will almost always have gaps in what it can produce locally, based on what the world itself is like and what the rest of the system can provide *more readily than a neighboring system*.

If you have space travel and sufficiently high TL (say A) then food growing isn't a problem - if you can't just make fauxflesh and synthetic foods on the ground, you can make orbital or lagrange O'Neill colonies dedicated to crop production (with a lot of surface area entirely devoted to food growing) that you can ship to the mainworld (or export out).

A world would arguably need to use these if it was high pop (9+) in order to feed its people, and it'd be a lot cheaper than importing food from out of system (and often a lot faster too). Why have megafreighters taking a couple of weeks to come in from out of system with perishable foodstuffs when you can ship the food down from orbit within a couple of days?

Non-spacefaring worlds are going to be self-sufficient by definition; they wouldn't be able to survive otherwise. But they may well become a provider to some world that isn't self-sufficient.

Only if they have excess of what they are making for themselves.

A world with no space capacity and no commodities to draw in outsiders isn't a part of the wider subsector/sector economy. Under Imperial Golden Age assumptions, such a world is an anomaly.

Actually such a world is pretty common in the Imperium - you don't really think those Lo Ni worlds are actually doing anything useful for anyone else do you? There's barely enough people on the planet to fill a small village and they probably have a pre-industrial TL too, so why would interstellar traders be interested in them? Sure, they may have the odd social or cultural commodity but I really can't see how it's enough to warrant a trader coming to visit. There's loads of worlds in the 3I that are so low tech and/or low pop that it's hard to imagine why they're even part of the Imperium at all.

Given human nature, even a world with no attractions for visitors or speculators has, for that very reason, a commodity it may not suspect: Distance.

Or cultural stuff like art or music or books or information. Most likely that's all those worlds even have to offer.

 

[EDG]

Plus, the motivation to do so would likely be undermined if it was invariably cheaper (and ease of access counts towards profit) to simply place an order - and it may well be quicker, too. dirt to ingot iron production takes far more than three weeks, I suspect -and a pile sitting on the next planet is about three weeks or so away. (travel + shopping and refitting)

Iron asteroids are relatively common, and are pretty much entirely made of nickel/icon. They don't need much processing to separate into individual metals.

True, you need the infrastructure in place to do that, but with an advanced space-faring society with grav tech and fusion power that's not really hard to set up. And given the high TLs in the 3I, someone must have already come up with a streamlined "miner's kit" that any "homesteader" can set up in a belt and start his own mine with.

 

[Shiloh]

I don't know the answer to this question, and don't have time to calculate it, but are asteroid fields actually closer to the mainworld than out of system? Your "factory ship" won't be built with a M of more than 1, I'd say, so, to take the Terran system as an example, is it closer than a week away under 1G with a stationary intercept?

Is the differential between intrasystem shipping (bearing in mind the general horreur of automated piloting) and intersystem enough to make setting up in-system plants worthwhile if there's an extra-system supplier?

Or does it matter? Will the mining camps send their product back by mass driver? Will the inner system accept the asteroid belt hurling high velocity meteors at them? Orbital mechanics is a highly chaotic system, maybe they'd want the slugs piloted?

 

[GypsyComet]

A world with no space capacity and no commodities to draw in outsiders isn't a part of the wider subsector/sector economy. Under Imperial Golden Age assumptions, such a world is an anomaly.

Actually such a world is pretty common in the Imperium - you don't really think those Lo Ni worlds are actually doing anything useful for anyone else do you? There's barely enough people on the planet to fill a small village and they probably have a pre-industrial TL too, so why would interstellar traders be interested in them? Sure, they may have the odd social or cultural commodity but I really can't see how it's enough to warrant a trader coming to visit. There's loads of worlds in the 3I that are so low tech and/or low pop that it's hard to imagine why they're even part of the Imperium at all.

Given human nature, even a world with no attractions for visitors or speculators has, for that very reason, a commodity it may not suspect: Distance.

Or cultural stuff like art or music or books or information. Most likely that's all those worlds even have to offer.

But such worlds *are* generally interested in doing offworld business, if only to bring in things they need. That could be edibles, machine parts, or finished goods, depending on the physical nature of the world, and it does make them part of the economy, even if they are lost below the significant digits kept by the economists on BigWorld three parsecs away.

And as noted before, "no one ever goes there" has an attraction all its own to certain segments of the populace. Whether those segments are there to put money into the local economy or take it out is the stuff of adventure. You are running a game of Traveller, right?