Traders of Drinax : Making a living in hostile space

[IanW]

First and foremost, once you leave Imperial space and until you are in the Heirate, you are no longer a merchant - you are a smuggler. Your base assumption has to be the local authorities will, if they catch you, take at minimum your cargo, and at maximum your ship and your life.

When I say 'local authorities', I mean Pirates. This is not Imperial space. The Emperors Writ does not run here. In addition, Planetary authority does not extend to the 100 diameter limit, let alone beyond it.

Yes, the planetary authorities may turn a blind eye some of the time, but you must assume they have either been paid off by, or are working in conjunction with, pirates.

It is 20 parsecs from Tobia to Tlaiowaha - probably 8 jumps for a jump-3 craft, a minimum of 12 for a jump-2 craft, assuming no deep space refuelling.

Therefore, take the following steps.

Carefully assess your people. The biggest dangers are related to the subversion of your crew. It is a very wise move to put crew on profit shares or other bonus payments for the Heirate run. High quality sensor operators, navigators and engineers

Carefully assess your equipment. Wilderness refuelling can and should be considered on this run, because if the local authorities do not know you are there, then they cannot inform pirates. Know which systems you travel to have multiple refuelling points, and consider the risks of jumping to a secondary fuelling point with transponders off as against the benefits of the local authorities not knowing exactly where you are.

If flying in a tender, consider your balance between cargo pods, refuelling pods and security pods.

If flying in a convoy, consider the number of cargo ships as against escorts. Remember that spare fuel tankage may allow an emergency jump, and that a spare sensor platform is always useful.

Keep moving. There is very little of value on any of the intermediate stops, but also consider that four months on board ship with no liberty can lead to problems amongst a crew. It is a calculated risk to either allow or deny liberty, inside or outside a starport.

 

[Captain Jonah]

The main route is covered for about a third of the way by Imperial forces and a third of the way by Aslan clan forces. This only leaves those times when the escorts are not in system and the middle section of the run where you are completely away from help.

Aside from the major powers you can assume that the single worlds are allied with any Pirates in the area, just don’t say that out loud as they are likely to get upset. :wink:

However……

There are some huge risks with making the run secretly. Not contacting the planetary security forces, jumping in to secondary points, refuelling at outer gas giants or other non optimal points, transponder off etc.

If anything goes wrong no one knows where you are. Emergency, disaster or attack. You are all on your own. No legitimate trader is going to be refuelling at the ice planetoid 30AU out so a mayday from someone claiming to be a legitimate trader is going to be treated very carefully. After all it is very likely to be a trap. Plus if it takes several days for a security SDB to come rescue you and you have a days worth of air left in your wreck of a ship, well its time to fight over the working low berths.

If anyone spots you they will assume YOU are a pirate lurking under stealth, no transponder and jumping in and out from out of the way points. Refuelling in the outer system then coming in from the black and asking to travel with a convoy is going to raise the hairs on any half way decent escort captains neck. Legit traders don’t do that sort of thing, only people trying to hide refuel secretly. You Know, like Pirates.

Refuelling from a gas giant is a huge waste of time. Travelling from the 100D limit of a Gas Giant, scoping fuel then travelling back out to the limit to jump again can add a week or more to your time in system. Time in system is time vulnerable to attack. You are safest in jump space so should maximise time there and minimise time in real space on this run.

The safest way to travel is to pay part of the bond for starmerc escorts and go in a convoy. The starmercs will search your ship very carefully to make sure you are legit and not a pirate trying to get inside (if they don’t then do NOT fly this convoy and get your money back as they are clearly incompetent). Dedicated warships will chew up most pirate ships and even the risk of facing a warship and taking heavy damage will keep pirates away from escorted convoys.

If travelling with a convoy that is large enough consider adding a smallish liner. You can then rotate a few members of each ship onto the liner for a week off every so often.

Or use contacts and get signed as an auxiliary and travel with a corporate convoy.

Go it alone only under one of three conditions.

1. You are truly desperate or looking to be attacked.
2. You are either obviously armed/equipped like a starmerc or ARE a starmerc.
3. You are a Q ship pretending to be number 1 while being number 2.

Depending on the size of ship you are running very much depends on how much a threat others will see you as. A far trader is not a serious threat even if it is broadcasting its ID as a mercenary escort. A 600Dton ship that seems to be a liner but has active energy signatures which suggest particle barbettes and drops a pair of what look like 10Dton fighters as soon as it comes out of jump is going to be thought of as a clear threat.

Fierce face is very relevant for any ship making the run solo. The treasure ship is fairly tough and well armed but with several hundred million in loot aboard is worth the risk of losing a ship for. A smaller ship that may or may not have a few tens of millions in loot but which looks to have the firepower to smash several pirate ships simply is not worth the risk. Pirates need to be accountants just like any other “Business person”. If it costs you more to take a prize than the prize is worth go elsewhere.

In terms of crew. You are making a 20 parsec cargo run. With a jump 3 ship this means you are making the run out and back twice a year. That is like carrying “Four” cargos a year. Those cargos must be worth enough to pay the years bills in those four runs. This isn’t a matter of a few thousand a Dton profit, you must be making enough in those runs to pay your entire years mortgage, bills, fuel, salary etc. That means megacredits profit for each run. Paying your crew double wages by means of a bonus is nothing compared to the cargo value itself. A pirate can pay ten times a stewards annual salary out of small change from the value of your cargo.

Lets be blunt here. You need a loyal crew. That loyalty comes from the fact that they love you or the company, that they hate pirates or that the risk is not worth the considerable money.

You need people who have been with you thick and thin, who have proven loyalty, ex military types with a clear hatred of the pirate scum who slaughter and murder across the space lanes. You want older crew, people who are settled, who have families back on the companies home world where your corporate security can “find” them if needed. You need to establish that any of your crew who betray you have a bounty on their heads big enough to draw killers from far and wide and that bounty is the head of the trader, in ice, so it can sit somewhere at the company HQ. :twisted:

You DO NOT hire on that nice young chap with the good CV because your chief engineer has suddenly disappeared. You use people who are of proven loyalty or you go short handed. With 500 million in portable trade goods only a complete idiot or the incompetent and over confident captain of a treasure ship is going to hire on a few people from a bar to replace his missing crew.

Traveller ships tend to be safer not because the crew are safer but because the players are friends and don’t want to annoy the others over a game. A Player who betrays the rest of the group too often is a player who gets cold shouldered very quickly. :roll:

 

[IanW]

Im not particularly concerned about a merchant with a high value cargo spending time if it keeps a ship safe - I'd be expecting the profit margin to be in range of the hundreds of thousands of credits per dton to make a run like this worthwhile (and its not that hard to come up with cargos worth those sort of numbers - ten suits of battledress and spares would fit into a dton, for example, and there are plenty of smaller clans in the Heirate who would buy Imperial-made armour rather than trust a bigger clan's armourers).

Refuelling away from the starport is a risk, but it's balanced against the likelihood of being sold out by corrupt planetary authorities.

Yes, convoy works. Always has, always will. I recommend it. But be aware that convoy also slows down traders, especially if they arent willing to abandon stragglers from jump timing until a couple of days is up.

As well, its a very fine line between a starmerc and a pirate - a pirate band, after all, could be happy to provide escort services in exchange for protection money, and starmercs sometimes need to make payroll.

But yes, if there is no Navy, bring your own

 

[Hans Rancke]

According to the Traveller Wiki (which cites the fanzine "Third Imperium" as the source, so not actual canon), the trade route between the Hierate and the Imperium goes from Tlaiowaha (1928) to Tyokh (2226) to Pohl (presumably a misspelling for Paal (2425)) to Tech-world (2624) to Acrid (2722) to Pandora (2820) to Fist (2918). "Trade then diffuses from this point to the various Imperial worlds of the sector." It's a jump-3 route with the ships forced to jump short a couple of times.

Tech-world and Acrid are specifically said to be Imperial allies. As for other systems, the Emperor's writ runs (in the sense that people had better respect it or else) anywhere the locals are unable to resist the attention of an Imperial task force, as the previous government of Tarkine found out when it was discovered aiding and abetting piracy.

The Imperium may well be oblivious of pirate activity away from the trade route, but on it a merchant is probably pretty safe, with local governments anxious not to tick off the Duke of Tobia and Imperial CruDivs on frequent courtesy visits.


Hans

 

[IanW]

Hans,

Meh, I'm happy to accept a certain amount of retconning ... and that said - what you've described is the normal state of affairs that held in Trojans Reach.

However, post the 5FW, the Imperium has been forced by the complex diplomacy of the Heirate to "not engage in excessive extraplanetary influence" in those subsectors for the last decade or so - and thats reasonable, as if I was a proud and touchy Aslan, I could easily get stroppy about all those CruRons and the Imperium changing the governments in the buffer statelets.

This is a high risk gamble by the Imperium, with some possibly-too-smart types figuring that the great Aslan trading clans will handle the politics on their end once they get tired of losing profits, both to pirates and from cargos that go undelivered due to higher freight costs, as all trade between Tobias and Tlaiowaha gets re-priced to somewhere between Amber and Red.

The plan is that then, the Imperium and it's trading partner clans arrange a diplomatic visit to someone or other every three months or so, post the schedule well in advance and send a big escorted convoy there and back.

The next stage is that a clan or three and an Imperial corporation or two form a joint venture and build a series of protected refuelling stops, protected out to the 100 diameter limit each way. Done right, it would probably cost less than ten BCr, and you'd be able charge the through traffic a fair bit for fuel.

This freezes the border in place for the next century or so, as the Aslan trading clans are then committed by their profits to keeping the border just where it is.

This is all credible to me, as we temporarily relax the things that make piracy around mainworlds impossible.

 

[Hans Rancke]

Meh, I'm happy to accept a certain amount of retconning ...

I don't mind a good retcon myself, provided that it isn't gratuious and that it works. Official changes to things that work already just because a new editor likes his own ideas better is IMO very bad for an official game universe. (I'm all for changing things that doesn't work).

...and that said - what you've described is the normal state of affairs that held in the Trojan Reach.

However, post the 5FW...

Small aside: I thought Mongoose was sticking to 1105 for the forseeable future? Hence I was assuming pre 5FW.

...the Imperium has been forced by the complex diplomacy of the Heirate to "not engage in excessive extraplanetary influence" in those subsectors for the last decade or so - and that's reasonable, as if I was a proud and touchy Aslan, I could easily get stroppy about all those CruRons and the Imperium changing the governments in the buffer statelets.

Well, it would be reasonable if the Imperium had any reason to appease proud and touchy Aslans (a very iffy proposition in the first place, but possibly something that could be justified somehow) and if the Imperium's vested interest in keeping Hierate clans out of the Outrim Void (or the Buffer Zone as I call it) didn't already cause it to prevent them from moving in on the neutral worlds and taking over, a conduct that would surely be even more insulting to proud and touchy Aslans and thus render any such attempts at appeasement moot.

The transrift Hierate's coreward border must have reached its current extent somewhere towards the end of the 6th Century; ihatei forerunners reached the Darrian subsector in 585. The only possible reason I can come up with for the existence of the neutral worlds is that at some point around then, the Imperium must have drawn a line in space and told the Aslan clan lords "thus far and no further"[*]. And enforced it. And it has been enforcing it for 500 years. And I see no reason why it should change that policy now. It certainly can't be military pressure from the Aslans; Aslan clans are notoriously unable to cooperate on the offensive. Note that a merely subsector-sized pocket empire like Tobia has been fending them off for even longer. And the Glorious Empire a subsector-sized pocket empire that is far more offensive to any proud and touchy Aslans than the Imperial barbarians could ever be, has likewise been fending them off, though only for a couple of centuries.

[*] I believe the actual date is 610, when the Imperium declared Five Sisters, District 268, Egyrn, Pax Rulin, Sindal, and Tobia subsectors to be Imperial districts (Yes, only the first two are canonical, but I think it works).

This is a high risk gamble by the Imperium, with some possibly-too-smart types figuring that the great Aslan trading clans will handle the politics on their end once they get tired of losing profits, both to pirates and from cargos that go undelivered due to higher freight costs, as all trade between Tobias and Tlaiowaha gets re-priced to somewhere between Amber and Red.

How can any Imperial with two brain cells to rub together possibly believe that anything other than naked force can keep Aslan clans from encroaching on available land? If someone wasn't actively fending off ihatei in the Outrim Void, the Hierate would have been contiguous with the Imperium centuries ago. And if that someone suddenly were to ease up, those ihatei would be swarming all over the choicest neutral worlds as soon as the word got out.

The plan is that then, the Imperium and it's trading partner clans arrange a diplomatic visit to someone or other every three months or so, post the schedule well in advance and send a big escorted convoy there and back.

The next stage is that a clan or three and an Imperial corporation or two form a joint venture and build a series of protected refuelling stops, protected out to the 100 diameter limit each way. Done right, it would probably cost less than ten BCr, and you'd be able charge the through traffic a fair bit for fuel.

There has been a trade route between the cisrift Hierate and the Imperium since the middle of the 5th Century. Any kinks associated with that route must have been worked out fairly soon after that, including safe refuelling spots.


Hans

 

[locarno24]

Go it alone only under one of three conditions.

1. You are truly desperate or looking to be attacked.
2. You are either obviously armed/equipped like a starmerc or ARE a starmerc.
3. You are a Q ship pretending to be number 1 while being number 2.

or

4. you are carrying something you do not wish to declare to the authorities and cannot afford to have your ship searched.

Not that any travellers would ever accept a contract of questionable legality. Possibly involving a run of less than 12 parsecs with a hold full of (dust)spice.

 

[Hans Rancke]

Not that any travellers would ever accept a contract of questionable legality. Possibly involving a run of less than 12 parsecs with a hold full of (dust)spice.

What's illegal about dustspice?

And illegal according to whom? Things like slaves and nuclear weapons, anything that you could expect the Imperium to take a dim view of, yes, that'd warrant an alternate route. But anything that's just illegal on one particlar world would at most require a detour around that particular world. Assuming the Imperium don't enforce immunity to local laws for cargoes that are just passing through systems, of course.


Hans

 

[Captain Jonah]

Not that any travellers would ever accept a contract of questionable legality. Possibly involving a run of less than 12 parsecs with a hold full of (dust)spice.

What's illegal about dustspice?

Hans

I'm sorry to say you failed your Geek/Nerd qualification. :lol:

 

[IanW]

Hans,

In general, yeah. Theres a treaty. The clans arent good at cooperating to bring big, coordinated fleets in to play, and so surprisingly small defense forces can beat many small Aslan ships.

The statelet a lot of the trade through got greedy and then got bombed from orbit by one of the Aslan clans.

"How can any Imperial with two brain cells to rub together possibly believe that anything other than naked force can keep Aslan clans from encroaching on available land? If someone wasn't actively fending off ihatei in the Outrim Void, the Hierate would have been contiguous with the Imperium centuries ago. And if that someone suddenly were to ease up, those ihatei would be swarming all over the choicest neutral worlds as soon as the word got out."

So you've read Pirates of Drinax, huh

 

[Hans Rancke]

In general, yeah. Theres a treaty. The clans arent good at cooperating to bring big, coordinated fleets in to play, and so surprisingly small defense forces can beat many small Aslan ships.

The statelet a lot of the trade through got greedy and then got bombed from orbit by one of the Aslan clans.

I don't quite get your point.

"How can any Imperial with two brain cells to rub together possibly believe that anything other than naked force can keep Aslan clans from encroaching on available land? If someone wasn't actively fending off ihatei in the Outrim Void, the Hierate would have been contiguous with the Imperium centuries ago. And if that someone suddenly were to ease up, those ihatei would be swarming all over the choicest neutral worlds as soon as the word got out."

So you've read Pirates of Drinax, huh

No. I've downloaded it and I keep meaning to read it, but somehow there's always something else to do (today I bough the sixth season of Dr. Who ). Buit I believe that Mongoose stil has ihatei reaching Darrian subsector in 585, still has the Hierate border no further corewards than halfway up the Trojan Reach, and still has a roughly ten parsec band of neutral worlds lying between the Hierate and the Imperium.

What I don't know is whether the author of Pirates of Drinax realized the implications of the preceding 700 years of history or whether he is still using the picture of the Outrim Void Bob McWilliams painted back in 1980 under the impression that Glisten subsector was a genuine frontier that the Imperium had only moved into quite recently rather than 800 years earlier. I hope he has and I hope he has given the Outrim Void a good and much-needed revision, but I'm not too sanguine. Probably one of the reasons I can't muster the energy to read Pirates... I'm too expectant of disappointment.


Hans

 

[IanW]

Hans,

Briefly, much of the meta plot is what you said would happen, happening.

The jumped-up State that the safe trade route went thru got stroppy, tried to tax the trade too hard and got bombed rather than annexed. This caused the chain of safespots to be disrupted etc etc.

Your opinion will probably be that module kinda makes sense, but not for the 1100s

 

[Hans Rancke]

Briefly, much of the meta plot is what you said would happen, happening.

However, what I said was what would happen IF the Imperium stopped keeping the Aslans at bay (as it has been doing with ease for 500 years) which IMO is a very good reason to believe that it would not suddenly stop keeping the Aslans at bay.

The jumped-up State that the safe trade route went thru got stroppy, tried to tax the trade too hard and got bombed rather than annexed. This caused the chain of safespots to be disrupted etc etc.

Your opinion will probably be that module kinda makes sense, but not for the 1100s

I've had a browse through the first two chapters and found the Secret of the Reach page description of How Thing Really Work on p. 2 of Ch. 2 and had all my fears confirmed.

The biggest fallacy is the myth of the "fast-expanding Aslan Hierate". The whole picture of Aslans overwhelming their neighbors in an swift unrelenting wave is completely incompatible with the known canonical history, at least in the Trans-Rift (It's quite blemished in the CisRift too, since the Solomani Confederation appears to have taken over every world in whatever buffer zone the Peace of Ftahalr created between the Imperium and the Hierate in Magyar and Dark Nebula).

But leaving the evidently-not-all-that-inexorable Aslans of the Cis-Rift to one side and sticking to the Trans-rift Aslans, they first crossed the Great Rift in -1044, arriving at a world about 8 or 9 parsecs (don't have a map of that subsector handy) rimwards of the border between Riftspan Reaches and the Trojan Reach. That's canon. In 1105, the furthest coreward extent of the Hierate is Akhwohkya in TR 1621. That's canon too. That's an expansion rate of one parsec every 74 years, or every three generations (Assuming an Aslan generation is 25 years). In other words, if some Aslans take ove a non-aligned world, their GREAT-grandsons will be grown before the next world is taken over.

That's assuming the coreward expansion rate has been constant since -1044, which is almost certainly not the case, of course. Early expansion may have been slower or faster, who knows? If you accept GT:Sword Worlds as canon, the coreward Hierate border was somewhere
around the rimward edge of the Trojan Reach -400. Admittedly, there is no canonical date for when the Hierate border reached its current extent. I say it was around 600, but I can't prove it. I will point out that The Glorious Empire was established in 650 and stopped expanding in the 900s.

But even if the Aslans have been expanding steadily year after year (or at least every three generations), the rate of their expansion would STILL give the Imperium another 750 years before the Aslans reach its border. Not exactly a desperate situation.

And there's something else that speaks against that notion: If the Aslans had been expanding without effective interference, I would have expected a patchwork border with the Aslan-norm and Aslan-prime worlds already settled to the edge of Imperial space and the less desirable worlds still non-aligned but slowly being taken over by third- and fourth-rate Aslan clans. Instead, we have an arbitrary line in space rimwards of which every single world has some sort of Aslan government and corewards of which all worlds are non-aligned with not a Hierate government among them. If that doesn't spell intent and enforcement, I'd like to know what does.

No, the Aslans are very far from being unstoppable and are, indeed, already being stopped very satisfactorily, and if GeDeCo's psycohistorians predict that unless Something Is Done the Aslans will inevitably conquer the whole domain of Deneb, they should try to get their money back from the mail-order universities that awarded them their degrees.

Oh, and the Aslan desire for land is far from insatiable. Every male commoner manages to live his life without owning or controlling any land at all.

Moving into opinion territory, the Peace of Ftahalr is not what is keeping the Aslans from moving corewards (They were ready enough to point out that it doesn't apply to the Trans-rift as soon as the Imperium was weakened by the Rebellion). At most it is a convenient excuse an ihatei admiral can use to explain why he's taking his fleet on a weary journey many parsecs to spinwards without having to admit that he's intimidated by the Imperium's might.


Hans

 

[Captain Jonah]

The Aslan ARE a great juggernaut sweeping towards the Imperium, they will be filling the skies over these worlds within decades. Here are our carefully (and expensively) produced reports, note the names of the sector leading researchers and experts. We have documentation, seminars, expert opinions, eye witness reports, unmistakable conclusions.

And not to mention this treaty uncovered on that Treasure ship that clearly supports what we are warning of.

The Aslan are coming ! ! ! ! ! !

Now as you can see from page 1437 of our 1800 page report on this situation we have carefully drawn up the following steps we need to take in response to this. The advance of Imperial fleet units to these worlds, the extablisment of Imperial bases and protectorates. These worlds to be offered Imperial membership. The creation of a militarised zone here.

Yes this is likely to be expensive but consider not only the peace of mind that comes from your children growing up free from the threat of the Aslan crushing their worlds but also the long term implications of Imperial membership. Free trade with Imperial worlds without all those annoying taxes you pay for now as your cargos cross the Imperial borders, wider access to Imperial good and for your goods to the Imperial markets. A secure route from Imperial space to the Aslan border allow for a huge increase in trade that way.

The threat is real and the solution is clear. Send in the fleets.



“Well”.

“Its looking good, they are falling for it. We pull this off and we will find ourselves administrating Imperial subsectors not backwater frontiers. Give it a decade and the levels of trade will have increased so much no one will be able to keep track. Plus since we already have control over the bureaucracy of so many of these worlds plus a few bribes back at court we can pick our own sub sector nobles. This scam is going to make us all billionaires” :lol:

 

[Hans Rancke]

The Aslan ARE a great juggernaut sweeping towards the Imperium, they will be filling the skies over these worlds within decades. Here are our carefully (and expensively) produced reports, note the names of the sector leading researchers and experts. We have documentation, seminars, expert opinions, eye witness reports, unmistakable conclusions. [...]

You're missing my point. That "Secrets of the Realm" text is not viewpoint writing, it's in authorial voice. Information presented in authorial voice is supposed to be true. This isn't. The Aslans are NOT coming. They are being held back and they have apparently been held back for half a millenium.

(Aside: Please note that I'm not saying that some Aslans haven't slipped under the wire, but any that have have had to become subject to non-Aslan governments).

Unless, of course, previously published information is invalidated by the new reality. Which I'm not overlooking as a possibility. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to make it work. If you change the date the Aslans first crossed the Great Rift so that they're really sweeping across the Trojan Reach, you mess up the history of the Reach something awful (not to mention erase the Aslans Darrians that began arriving in Darrian subsector in 585), and you STILL don't explain that Hierate border.


Hans