Traveller Manufacturing Rules

[MasterGwydion]

Hey guys! Okay, so I do a lot of building and manufacturing in Traveller and one thing I have noticed is that the rules for Fabricating and Manufacturing are entirely unbalanced. Using the Mineral Refinery and the Manufacturing Plants, I can build a planet with less than 200 million sophonts that can out-produce the entirety of the Vincennes subsector. Examples below. (I use a 50% material cost for production)

In a non-microgravity environment, 1 Mining Bot can mine just under 12 Dtons per day. 6 tons of Mineral Refinery can handle this along with 30 tons of Smelter. This requires 1 Sophont and puts out just over 9 tons of material. 4.5 tons of Common Raw Material, 2.7 tons of Uncommon Raw Material, 1.4 tons of Crystals and Gems, and 0.5 tons of Precious Metals. Combined Value of 130,000Cr per day.

With that 130,000Cr per day of materials, you can feed them into an Advanced Manufacturing Plant of just over 50 tons of Plant and requiring 25 sophonts. Total Output of 260,000Cr per day.

Take that 260,000Cr per day and feed them into a Specialist Manufacturing Plant of 25 tons, requiring 9 sophonts. Total Output of 518,000Cr per day.

This means that for every Mining Bot and its required downstream processing, you make 14.5MCr per month and need 35 sophonts. (if none are robotic)

The Vincennes Subsector has a total economy of 686GCr. 686GCr divided by 14.5MCr gives you just under 48 million Mining Bots with 1.7 Billion sophonts without using robots. Using robots, you can do it with 170 million sophonts. (which makes sense for TL-15 or 16).

One planet with less than 200 million sophonts and it out-produces the whole subsector, of which half of that is from Vincennes itself. You could even stretch this across a whole planetary system, not just one world, and have 10 in-system population centers with 17 million each. Vincennes alone has 10 Billion people.

Perhaps the Manufacturing rules were developed to be player-facing and do not scale well up to planetary-size and above. I think that the capability of Manufacturing Plants and such needs to be reduced to bring it more in line with the stated economic totals for planets in the TU.

Any ideas? Geir?

 

[J. L. Brown]

The whole economy (as it currently stands in Mongoose Traveller) is a hand-wave. None of it makes sense. Even your starting point

(I use a 50% material cost for production)

is an assumption that is only hinted at in the rules.

Here is a fun exercise:
Assume a starting character has a homeworld of Vincennes (or Pashus) and an engineering background in 'How to build Construction machinery', and figure up the smallest TL16 installation that can be used to build itself. You can fit the seed of an entire TL 16 economy into a single Type-R Subsidized Merchant.

 

[Terry Mixon]

The whole economy (as it currently stands in Mongoose Traveller) is a hand-wave. None of it makes sense. Even your starting point

is an assumption that is only hinted at in the rules.

Here is a fun exercise:
Assume a starting character has a homeworld of Vincennes (or Pashus) and an engineering background in 'How to build Construction machinery', and figure up the smallest TL16 installation that can be used to build itself. You can fit the seed of an entire TL 16 economy into a single Type-R Subsidized Merchant.

I'm sort of doing this--writ large as I'm seriously pushing the rules and breaking my universe and players for fun and profit. You can make a huge, self-sufficient manufacturing setup that makes boatloads of cash. My players inherited a TL-16 spaceport that is just crazy. As I'm not aiming for reality, it's fun to drop things like that as they backdoor the Ancients campaign with me.

 

[Arkathan]

Wow... and I felt cheesy for allowing my players to track down a ship reported lost for insurance purposes that was carrying a module with a 250 ton TL 14 manufacturing bay. I even gimped them by making them wait until two duplicate units had been manufactured before the Sword World faction would let them have a copy.
The ship was on a long orbit outside the plane of the ecliptic.
The executive who trapped his rival on that ship is about to get a nasty surprise from the planet he cheated... She survived and has been mining the corporate net. She has the receipts.

 

[MasterGwydion]

The whole economy (as it currently stands in Mongoose Traveller) is a hand-wave. None of it makes sense. Even your starting point

is an assumption that is only hinted at in the rules.

Here is a fun exercise:
Assume a starting character has a homeworld of Vincennes (or Pashus) and an engineering background in 'How to build Construction machinery', and figure up the smallest TL16 installation that can be used to build itself. You can fit the seed of an entire TL 16 economy into a single Type-R Subsidized Merchant.

Yes, you can. I have done it... lol

 

[Geir]

Well keep in mind that it's ancillary rules for a table top role playing game, not Sim-Charted Space.
In a different forum there'd be arguments about how a simple mid-level necromancer could build a self-perpetuating army of skeletons and zombies and overrun all the elven forests of the world in just two seasons. Or something.

It's nice if the manufacturing rules work more or less correctly, but if they don't, I'd be more worried about making sure the rules don't allow a character to shoot and always hit and the enemy to always miss.

 

[J. L. Brown]

Well keep in mind that it's ancillary rules for a table top role playing game, not Sim-Charted Space.
In a different forum there'd be arguments about how a simple mid-level necromancer could build a self-perpetuating army of skeletons and zombies and overrun all the elven forests of the world in just two seasons. Or something.

It's nice if the manufacturing rules work more or less correctly, but if they don't, I'd be more worried about making sure the rules don't allow a character to shoot and always hit and the enemy to always miss.

Long-form campaigns need to have a handle on this, though. Pirates of Drinax is about rebuilding a ruined Kingdom, including restoring, recruiting, and developing systems -- and assembling a navy capable of forcing the Imperium and Hierate to take the Kingdom seriously. A big TL-15 external fabber absolutely functions as a 'win button'; pooping out starship components and robots every hour.

Something as simple as defining 'X Credits worth of productivity; for W Credits of material, Y workers, and Z power input per day' would fix a bunch of problems. Higher TLs allow higher productivity and less inputs.

 

[Geir]

Long-form campaigns need to have a handle on this, though. Pirates of Drinax is about rebuilding a ruined Kingdom, including restoring, recruiting, and developing systems -- and assembling a navy capable of forcing the Imperium and Hierate to take the Kingdom seriously. A big TL-15 external fabber absolutely functions as a 'win button'; pooping out starship components and robots every hour.

Something as simple as defining 'X Credits worth of productivity; for W Credits of material, Y workers, and Z power input per day' would fix a bunch of problems. Higher TLs allow higher productivity and less inputs.

Yes, obvious exploits should be stamped out, but that's also where Rule Zero and a reasonable Referee comes in.

Even at it's most basic, it's easy to build a perpetual motion machine in Traveller (or at least a free energy machine). All you have to do it use an air raft to haul water up a hill and let if fall back though a hydroelectric generator and you will likely come out ahead in terms of energy consumed and produced, especially when you gather that same water in the same bucket and haul it up there again - I could never come up with a model for 'anti-gravity' where something like that wasn't an issue in certain cases.

But even in ideal fabricator environments, the rules do make it simple because energy input isn't costed in, nor raw material transport, nor supply chain issues and security of both the raw inputs and the programming... (excuse me, I was going to write more, but I have to get this. My pager is going off (Okay. maybe that's too soon)).

 

[J. L. Brown]

Yes, obvious exploits should be stamped out, but that's also where Rule Zero and a reasonable Referee comes in.

Even at it's most basic, it's easy to build a perpetual motion machine in Traveller (or at least a free energy machine). All you have to do it use an air raft to haul water up a hill and let if fall back though a hydroelectric generator and you will likely come out ahead in terms of energy consumed and produced, especially when you gather that same water in the same bucket and haul it up there again - I could never come up with a model for 'anti-gravity' where something like that wasn't an issue in certain cases.

But even in ideal fabricator environments, the rules do make it simple because energy input isn't costed in, nor raw material transport, nor supply chain issues and security of both the raw inputs and the programming... (excuse me, I was going to write more, but I have to get this. My pager is going off (Okay. maybe that's too soon)).

That perpetual motion machine should not work; the energy required to lift the mass of the vehicle should be more than the energy recovered from coming back down -- but in the current 'Vehicles' rules trivial little stuff like 'fuel' and 'energy used' is not tracked at all.

And sure, the referee is free to change things to suit their table -- but 'Rule Zero' has some serious drawbacks on its' darkside. If the whole game is 'the referee has to make all this up', then there is no reason to bother buying the rules; if the rules specifically do allow a particular exploit because they are poorly thought out, and EVERY referee has to over-write them -- then the company loses the trust of the referees; every house-rule reduces the ability to carry elements from one table to another, making tournament and convention play more difficult -- and undermining resources available in the community. Rule zero should be reserved strictly for fixing rare problems that crop up at unforeseeable edge cases, not a tool for editors to be lazy.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Yes, obvious exploits should be stamped out, but that's also where Rule Zero and a reasonable Referee comes in.

Even at it's most basic, it's easy to build a perpetual motion machine in Traveller (or at least a free energy machine). All you have to do it use an air raft to haul water up a hill and let if fall back though a hydroelectric generator and you will likely come out ahead in terms of energy consumed and produced, especially when you gather that same water in the same bucket and haul it up there again - I could never come up with a model for 'anti-gravity' where something like that wasn't an issue in certain cases.

But even in ideal fabricator environments, the rules do make it simple because energy input isn't costed in, nor raw material transport, nor supply chain issues and security of both the raw inputs and the programming... (excuse me, I was going to write more, but I have to get this. My pager is going off (Okay. maybe that's too soon)).

A new World Tamer's Handbook would fix this, but I doubt that We will see that before 3rd Edition at the earliest.

 

[agentwigggles]

A new World Tamer's Handbook would fix this, but I doubt that We will see that before 3rd Edition at the earliest.

Why would it solve it? Real world economics isn't a solved problem. Let alone making it a solved problem for a ttrpg with fantasy elements.
Any approach to the problem to solve can't be done with d6s. And you end up with campaign of North Africa and Phoenix command amount of complexity and swiftness.

 

[Geir]

The one thing a level abstraction like the a World Tamers Handbook would deliver is that as long as it stayed at a consistent scale (world or regional hex scale, not machine shop scale), it is harder to find exploits in the 'crunchy cracks'.

In other words, less chance someone finagles a way to use a widget or unanticipated widget combination to create unconstraint exponential level growth and *poof* It's Singularity Time! (did someone bring the cake?)

Of course, beta testing the heck out of something like that wouldn't be a bad idea either.

 

[Terry Mixon]

The one thing a level abstraction like the a World Tamers Handbook would deliver is that as long as it stayed at a consistent scale (world or regional hex scale, not machine shop scale), it is harder to find exploits in the 'crunchy cracks'.

In other words, less chance someone finagles a way to use a widget or unanticipated widget combination to create unconstraint exponential level growth and *poof* It's Singularity Time! (did someone bring the cake?)

Of course, beta testing the heck out of something like that wouldn't be a bad idea either.

As I'm pushing a Singularity in my game, exploiting the cracks is working fine for me.

 

[MasterGwydion]

The one thing a level abstraction like the a World Tamers Handbook would deliver is that as long as it stayed at a consistent scale (world or regional hex scale, not machine shop scale), it is harder to find exploits in the 'crunchy cracks'.

In other words, less chance someone finagles a way to use a widget or unanticipated widget combination to create unconstraint exponential level growth and *poof* It's Singularity Time! (did someone bring the cake?)

Of course, beta testing the heck out of something like that wouldn't be a bad idea either.

No system is going to be perfect. It is just an RPG, not a simulator. In My opinion though, the World Tamer's did a better job than most. It also kept everything at Settlement-Scale as opposed to Spaceship or Vehicle-Scale.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Credits are PC scale
World economics should move to the RU scale

As to free energy - that ship has sailed. The amount of kinetic energy generated by a maneuver drive, or air/raft even, is orders of magnitude higher then the energy the fusion power plant outputs.

The only explanation I can throw at this is that gravitcs borrows energy through the gravitic coupling of the gravitic system with external gravitaional potential. The universe loses gravitational energy which is converted to kinetic energy for the gravitic device. The energy input to the gravitic device establishes the connection.
But.
What will be the long term effects of borrowing all this gravitaional energy without it being paid back...

 

[Condottiere]

Localized.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Credits are PC scale
World economics should move to the RU scale

As to free energy - that ship has sailed. The amount of kinetic energy generated by a maneuver drive, or air/raft even, is orders of magnitude higher then the energy the fusion power plant outputs.

The only explanation I can throw at this is that gravitcs borrows energy through the gravitic coupling of the gravitic system with external gravitaional potential. The universe loses gravitational energy which is converted to kinetic energy for the gravitic device. The energy input to the gravitic device establishes the connection.
But.
What will be the long term effects of borrowing all this gravitaional energy without it being paid back...

Credits are in game. I have never heard of anyone discussing RUs in game. As far as I am aware, RUs are only an out of game mechanic.

So, in game, Credits don't have a scale, unless you count Cr, MCr, and GCr as different scales.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Credits are in game. I have never heard of anyone discussing RUs in game. As far as I am aware, RUs are only an out of game mechanic.

So, in game, Credits don't have a scale, unless you count Cr, MCr, and GCr as different scales.

Exactly, when you are dealing with world and subsector economies you are beyond the PC scale of things and need a more useful metagame model, which is something the T4/T5 RU - resource unit - brings to the table.

 

[J. L. Brown]

Credits are PC scale
World economics should move to the RU scale

Maybe but the definition of RU has proven to be (to me) non-intuitive; and very people are familiar with the term. TeraCreds probably works just as well. Honestly, I think the RU was an early attempt to get away from explicitly defined units -- as such, maybe it needs to go.

As to free energy - that ship has sailed. The amount of kinetic energy generated by a maneuver drive, or air/raft even, is orders of magnitude higher then the energy the fusion power plant outputs.

I disagree; since we do not know how much energy is requires for these things, it is unhelpful to define them as 'more energy than you have'. As a first approximation I think 'energy required to counteract gravity; plus a similar (or smaller) portion to represent losses' is pretty intuitive for anti-gravity effects. And fusion produces a vast amount of energy per gram of fuel -- it is one place in the game where the predictions are wildly pessimistic.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Maybe but the definition of RU has proven to be (to me) non-intuitive; and very people are familiar with the term. TeraCreds probably works just as well. Honestly, I think the RU was an early attempt to get away from explicitly defined units -- as such, maybe it needs to go.

Yeah, I don't use RUs at all. They don't tell Me anything that I need to know to worldbuild.

I disagree; since we do not know how much energy is requires for these things, it is unhelpful to define them as 'more energy than you have'. As a first approximation I think 'energy required to counteract gravity; plus a similar (or smaller) portion to represent losses' is pretty intuitive for anti-gravity effects. And fusion produces a vast amount of energy per gram of fuel -- it is one place in the game where the predictions are wildly pessimistic.

Once Fusion+ exists, that society is basically post-scarcity as far as energy goes. Fuel is basically unlimited since Hydrogen is the most abundant element in existence. Once power generation becomes post-scarcity, then only resource-scarcity needs to be taken into account. Why build a perpetual motion hydroelectric system when you can just drop a hose in the lake and call it done? Hydrogen is basically free.