Trade in the Beteigeuze Reach

[rust]

I have already mentioned in other threads that I handle trade differently
from the Mongoose Traveller rules, and perhaps it makes sense to ex-
plain the concept I use for the Pandora setting.

The merchant ships of this setting use hyperdrives, usually with a hyper-
space speed of 2 parsec per day. These drives do not require jump fuel,
only reactor fuel, and the merchant ships only visit inhabited planets whe-
re hydrogen fuel for their reactors is available.

There are no mortgages to be paid in this setting. Someone either has the
money to buy a used ship and the skills to make enough profit to improve
it or to upgrade to a better ship, or he will never become a trader. There
is no bank that would be foolish enough to lend someone money to start
a career as a frontier trader.

A trader usually attempts to sign a contract with at least one colony. This
contract details how often he will visit the colony, how much cargo and
how many passengers the colony expects to provide, and what the prices
for cargo transport and passages will be. Contracts of this kind are nor-
mally sufficient to keep the trader in business, but he usually needs some
clever speculative trading to make a nice profit.

Since the colonies want the traders to visit them (in fact urgently need the
traders), it is the custom that the colonies operate their starports and pro-
vide the hydrogen fuel for free. Since most starports are hardly more than
minimal frontier installations with a fuel processor, the costs for this are
quite low.

The normal operating costs of a merchant ship therefore consist of the wa-
ges of the crew, the maintenance costs of the ship and the costs for the
life support. The transport of a ton of cargo earns about 1,000 Credits per
week, a normal passage earns about 1,500 Credits per week.

A common frontier trader is the Deneb Class Modular Starship, a ship of
300 dtons that can carry up to 6 modules of 30 dtons each, either cargo
modules with a capacity of 30 dtons each or passenger modules with a ca-
pacity of 18 passengers each.

The normal operating costs of a ship of this class are about 30,000 Credits
per month, a full cargo module earns these 30,000 Credits and keeps the
ship in business. A full passenger module only earns 27,000 Credits, but
passengers have other advantages: They always pay in advanve, they do
not require warehousing, they do not require an insurance, and they mo-
ve themselves.
Besides, a trader unwilling to transport passengers, or demanding more
for a passage than a colony is able or willing to pay, will not get a con-
tract with that colony.

All in all, a skillful (and lucky) trader with contracts with several colonies
can expect to transport an average of two cargo modules and one pas-
senger module per week, earning a total of about 300,000 Credits each
month.
If he is also a clever trader, he will spend some of this profit to improve
his relations with his customers, for example through occasional gifts, es-
pecially good speculative trade offers and perhaps a free passage now
and then when there is room left in a passenger module.

This also improves his chance for successful speculative trading, because
the colonists are of course more likely to buy from their favourite friendly
trader, and also to give him the informations he needs to know his market
and to decide which goods would be welcome there ("You know, the aqua-
farmers keep complaining that the batteries they use to power the bubble
fences have such a low endurance, they would surely pay well for batte-
ries of the same size and weight with a higher endurance.").

Well, that's about all there is.

 

[MarkB]

How expensive / available are cargo modules, especially on frontier colonies? It would be a shame to get to a colony, find out that there's an extra module's worth of cargo / passengers available to transport, and not have a module to put them in, even though your ship has spare mounts available.

Would it cost extra in maintenance / upkeep terms for a modular trader to carry around additional empty modules, just in case they have an opportunity to fill them at their next stop?

You've mentioned specialised make-your-own-colony modules previously. Are there other types of specialised module that a trader might be asked to transport?

 

[alex_greene]

You've mentioned specialised make-your-own-colony modules previously. Are there other types of specialised module that a trader might be asked to transport?

Some ideas spring to mind-

- Admin module: Containing specialised computer systems, an expert computer specialising in Admin and other equipment designed to keep track of the running of the colony.
- Precinct module: Containing a small forensic laboratory and specialised equipment including a space allocated for a courthouse, this provides facilities to allow a small task force to maintain law and order within the colony.
- Education module: A module designed to be physically expanded to create a space for the education of colony children. Includes expert systems with specialised educational interfaces and human form robot teachers.
- Med module: Laboratories, a large space for a sickbay or banks of autodocs and cryoberths, this module caters for the colony's medical needs.
- Vehicle module: Spare parts for vehicle and small craft maintenance, and facilities the equivalent to those on a starship's flight deck.

 

[locarno24]

If the modules are literally that - as in pull-or-affix as necessary, it's quite feasible that a colony might quickly find itself with a stockpile of emptied cargo modules, either in orbit or on the ground (depending on whether it has a highport or not).

I imagine that early in a colony's life, you might therefore find quite a few facilities converted straight out of cut-together cargo or passenger modules.

the merchant ships only visit inhabited planets where hydrogen fuel for their reactors is available.

Only the colony itself, or are they equipped for gas giant skimming (or might the colony establish a remote fuelling facility?)

A common frontier trader is the Deneb Class Modular Starship, a ship of 300 dtons that can carry up to 6 modules of 30 dtons each, either cargo modules with a capacity of 30 dtons each or passenger modules with a capacity of 18 passengers each.

The cargo modules are 100% space efficient?

 

[rust]

How expensive / available are cargo modules, especially on frontier colonies?

A cargo module costs 1.3 MCr, a passenger module 4.8 MCr. A colony
usually has a small number of cargo modules and one or two passenger
modules available, normally provided and owned by a trader who has
a contract with the colony and visits it regularly.

Would it cost extra in maintenance / upkeep terms for a modular trader to carry around additional empty modules, just in case they have an opportunity to fill them at their next stop?

No, not at all. Since most of the speculative trade lots of the setting are
less than 30 dtons, it is quite common for a trader to carry an empty mo-
dule for such business opportunities.

You've mentioned specialised make-your-own-colony modules previously. Are there other types of specialised module that a trader might be asked to transport?

There are dozens of types: Lab Modules, Survey Modules, Comm Center
Modules, Workshop Modules ...

The ship of the example is a modified LSP Modular Starship as published
by Avenger, the modules are standard Cutter Modules. There have been
lots of specialized designs of such modules, official ones as well as fan de-
signs (Dave Chase has designed a fascinating series of such modules),
and each of the many modules that makes sense within my setting could
appear there.

 

[rust]

Only the colony itself, or are they equipped for gas giant skimming (or might the colony establish a remote fuelling facility?)

While it would be easy to outfit the ships for gas giant skimming, it is
just not done. Planets without at least some water or water ice are not
colonized, and the little volume of reactor fuel required by the ships is
rarely a problem for a colony.

The cargo modules are 100% space efficient?

Yep, they are the usual Cutter Modules, like the ones used for the cut-
ters of the Broadsword mercenary cruiser.

 

[Captain Jonah]

To me this setup leaves lots of room for a merchant to make a fair profit.

Pandora being a water world produces tons of fish for eating, these would bring a nice price on a dustball world. Spices and vegtables would bring in a better price on pandora which has little room to grow such crops but they would be common on an agrarian world. A few tons of veg in a cargo pod and a few boxes of spices and herbs on the ship in a locker for pandora, a few tons of fish from pandora for the dust ball etc.

Decent alcohol. Pandora will most certainly have a seaweed still going somewhere but wine or beer need to be imported as luxury goods.

Even bringing in the last 6 months of movies and novels from the core worlds would be a source of income or could be downloaded free to build goodwill. As data they take no space and a trader with goods to sell will get a better reaction from the locals if he hits orbit and downloads the mail and blockbusters first

The limited number of ships visiting the frontier colonies means that the competition is far lower than in the 3I with hundreds of ships on the mains.

Even if you just hold back 30 tons in a single pod for personal deals you can do well under these circumstances. Just look at what the frontier worlds lack and buy it cheap back in the core. Spending a week of two hopping back to the core worlds every few months to stock up on small high value items should more than cover the time off runs.

 

[rust]

To me this setup leaves lots of room for a merchant to make a fair profit.

Indeed, all the trader really needs to make a fair profit is the ability to
think like the colonists of the planets he visits, to demonstrate it to them
by providing the goods and services they need and want, and to do so in
a friendly way.

For example, while the Pandora colonists will plant fruit trees soon after
their arrival (one small island, named Orchard, will be used for this only),
it will take quite a while before these trees will produce the amount of
fruit the colonists would doubtless like to have.

A clever trader will realize this, and will make sure that he will have a few
dtons of apples, oranges and thelike among his cargo during his next vi-
sit to Pandora, whether the colonists themselves thought of this or not.
And if he is really clever, he will use some of the profit from selling the
fruit to give a crate or two for free to the local kindergarten or school.

On the other hand, a greedy and slightly dumb trader has lots of opportu-
nities to make the colonists so angry that they cancel his contract and re-
fuse him the permission to land on their world.

For example, imagine a colonist's child who caught some strange disease
the colony's small hospital is unable to deal with. The child urgently needs
a passage to a planet with better medical services, and since it is quite
young, it should be accompanied by one of its parents. Unfortunately the
colony is low on cash, and right now does not have the money to pay the
9,000 Credits for the two passages.

The greedy and stupid trader says "No money, no passage - save up the
money until my next visit in three months, then I will transport you".
While it is his right to do so, he will never again sell anything on that co-
lony world, and if the news spread, he would do well to leave the region
for good ...

 

[alex_greene]

To me this setup leaves lots of room for a merchant to make a fair profit.

Decent alcohol. Pandora will most certainly have a seaweed still going somewhere but wine or beer need to be imported as luxury goods.

Not only that: as Referee, you can decide what exports Pandora can provide.

Consider:-

- The seaweed itself is a richer source of iodine than Terran seaweed. Pandoran sea salt likewise has a higher iodine content. The process of making iodine can be achieved with an outlay of no higher than TL1 or 2: all you need is a place to build a decent enclosed fire to burn the seaweed into ashes.

- The greasy discharge from a particular Pandoran marine animal contains a chemical precursor to anagathics, medical slow or some similarly beneficial medicinal drug. The financial outlay to produce this oil is comparatively minimal: you only need trawl the beaches.

The creatures disgorge the stuff in big, ugly lardy blocks ranging from brick size to Air/Raft size. They do this just after every mating season, and there are two mating seasons a year. Why they do this is anybody's guess; the industry just thanks Providence for a species that has a habit of hawking up loogies every time it mates.

Just think of ambergris, and you get the idea.

- The concentrated oil from a particularly common edible fish is a better facilitator of cognitive processing in mammals than the Omega oils of Terran fish. These fish really do make people smart, and so often the oil sells for more than the raw fish. Needless to say, the fishermen making the trade like to eat their catches, and so they can be very canny negotiatiors.

You can always think of something new.

 

[rust]

Not only that: as Referee, you can decide what exports Pandora can provide.

Yep, and this gives the referee a nice opportunity to allow the characters
to use their otherwise often neglected science skills and to keep them bu-
sy in the campaign's off time.

For example, if a dolphineer mentions that the colony's dolphins love to
eat a certain kind of native seaweed, a clever scientist among the charac-
ters will take the hint and study the seaweed in question to find out whe-
ther it has any interesting properties - perhaps it is a danger, because it
is addictive for dolphins, perhaps it will become the colony's next profi-
table export because it can be developed into a medicinal drug ...

 

[rust]

Looking at trade from the colony's side, the most important point is that
the trade ship visits are regular and reliable, and the price is a very clo-
se second point.

In my setting, each colony has to offer some export goods or services to
pay for all the imports the colony can not yet produce itself, from spare
parts for the fusion reactor to kitchen appliances. In the case of Pandora,
the way to finance these imports are the ores from the seafloor mining,
later on aquafarming products and even later perhaps tourism will follow.

To export the ores, Pandora has to sign a contract with a company on
Cassandra, and this company expects a certain amount of ore to arrive
at a certain point in time. This need for predictable transport is why the
colonies are willing to sign contracts with the traders instead of hoping
that some free trader with sufficient free cargo capacity will happen to
arrive just in time to transport the exports to their destination.

The "time window" for the imports is usually less narrow, except for the
rare truly urgent stuff it does not make that much of a difference whether
the new holovid sets arrive this month, next month or the month after the
the next month. The trader is usually given the colony's orders, buys the
material where he can get it for a fair price, and ships it to the colony
whenever he has some free cargo capacity to do so.

A successful trader manages to organize a fast turnover between a colo-
ny's orders and his delivery of the goods, but most colonies do not see
this as a top priority - waiting a little longer for good products at good
prices is usually accepted.

Passages are a special problem, because the need for them is less easy
to predict than the need for cargo space. In most cases the contract be-
tween a colony and a trader mentions a certain number of passages the
colony expects to need per visit, and the trader promises to provide that
number of empty staterooms whenever he visits the colony.

However, since it happens quite often that someone suddenly needs a
passage for whatever urgent reason (medical treatment, death of a rela-
tive on another planet, and so on), traders usually provide two or three
more passenger "slots" than mentioned in the contract. Passages on the-
se "surplus slots" are occasionally sold at a reduced price or offered as
a part of special programs, for example to allow students cheap, but
"last minute" travel to the university on the neighbouring planet.

On the other hand, traders are very likely to demand some compensation
if a colony constantly buys less passages than it promised in the contract.
It can happen that a colony sends a couple of people to a training facility
on another planet with the main intention to fill the agreed upon passenger
"slots" on a trader's ship in an at least somewhat useful way instead of ha-
ving to pay compensation for this visit's unused "slots".

 

[MarkB]

- Vehicle module: Spare parts for vehicle and small craft maintenance, and facilities the equivalent to those on a starship's flight deck.

I'm getting a vision of Thunderbird 4.

On the subject of vehicles, how about a System Patrol craft sized and shaped to replicate a cargo module? Plug it into the modular trader so it can piggyback the larger ship's hyperdrive, then undock it at the destination, and the colony has its new local-space patrol craft, ready and working.

 

[rust]

On the subject of vehicles, how about a System Patrol craft sized and shaped to replicate a cargo module? Plug it into the modular trader so it can piggyback the larger ship's hyperdrive, then undock it at the destination, and the colony has its new local-space patrol craft, ready and working.

A good idea, and if it is built with the hull of a 30 dton ship's boat it would
have the size and shape of a module anyway.

 

[Dave Chase]

PM sent (rust).

Dave Chase

 

[alex_greene]

- Vehicle module: Spare parts for vehicle and small craft maintenance, and facilities the equivalent to those on a starship's flight deck.

I'm getting a vision of Thunderbird 4.

LOL All those pods rolling along the conveyor. We used to take bets as to which numbered pod Thunderbird 2 would sit on this week. If Jeff Tracy mentioned Thunderbird 4 in advance, though, all bets were off.

Oh, the simple joys of growing up.

 

[kristof65]

So would a Trader's contract with a colony be exclusive? or would it be more of the situation where the colony tries to sign several traders to contracts so they have frequent service?

What's the typical timing between Trader visits to a colony, and/or between a single trader's visit?

 

[rust]

So would a Trader's contract with a colony be exclusive? or would it be more of the situation where the colony tries to sign several traders to contracts so they have frequent service?

Exclusive contracts are possible, but extremely rare. Few traders on the
frontier have enough ships to serve all the trade routes of a colony, and
even fewer have all the necessary contacts to provide all the goods a co-
lony is likely to order at fair prices and with a profit - and very few colo-
nies would be willing to give a single trader a monopoly on their offworld
contacts.

For example, the Pandora colony will initially aim for one contract to han-
dle the ore trade and the other trade on the trade route to the industrial
planet Cassandra, and another contract for the trade route with the agri-
cultural planet Creusa.
Once the colony produces more exports or needs more imports or pas-
sages than the trader who has the initial contract can handle, the colony
will either cancel that contract and sign a new one with another trader
with more capacity, or it will sign a second, additional contract with a se-
cond trader.

What's the typical timing between Trader visits to a colony, and/or between a single trader's visit?

This depends entirely on the size and needs of the colony and the capacity
of the trader(s) it signed the contract(s) with.

In the case of Pandora, the first contract will most probably be for only
two visits per year, since the seafloor mining will only produce a small
amount of ore, the aquafarming will only be sufficient to feed the colo-
nists and not yet produce any surplus, and there is not much need for
passages - two ships per year will do for the first year or two.

By the way, there are of course also some - very few - really "free" tra-
ders who have no contract with any colony and try to survive on specu-
lative trade and the rare charter alone, visiting the colonies whenever
they think they have something that may allow them to make a profit
there. The number of visits by these "peddlers" is low and unpredicta-
ble, some years half a dozen or even more visit a colony, other years
not a single one lands there.

In the case of Pandora, several such "peddlers" will appear for the Trade
Fair held after the colony has been established, when the bigger traders
compete for the contracts. Afterwards there will perhaps be one or two
visits by "peddlers" in each of the early years.

 

[BP]

This is all covering 'above board' trading, no?

 

[rust]

This is all covering 'above board' trading, no?

If "above board" means "legal", yes. There is not that much illegal trade
going on along my setting's frontier, and what is there is usually in very
small volumes - the colonists just do not have much money to spend on
any illegal luxuries. The typical example would probably be a colonist
from prudish Hecuba who tells a trader's crew member that he would re-
ally like to see some of those explicit holovids he has heard talk about.

 

[BP]

Emerging, ripe market... :lol: