Traveller Release Schedule 2023

[Condottiere]

Optimization of production.

How fast can you increase the yield, while maintaining the aspects that make the stuff edible and nutritious.

 

[Vormaerin]

Jakova,

Not sure what your post means. I do know that the section quoted wasn't written by me despite it saying so, so something is wonky about the post.

 

[Vormaerin]

This game is about the space equivalent of the Tramp Trade. All the details the game provides are focused on how the tramp trade works. This does not mean that freight liners don't exist. It means they are not the subject of the movie, so they are just flavor text in the background. And, as I commented in the Bu & Embla thread, Traveller traditionally does very little provision of flavor text. Something like 90% of world trade today moves on liners. Big ships working a fixed schedule moving from specialized port to specialized port. Space trade may be voluminous enough to work the same way. The economics behind it are totally made up so it can be set however you want. But it remains that the game is not about freight liners. Its about tramp ships.

If you want to describe more infrastructure and put focus on freight liners, do so. Personally, I have the big liners going to different spaceports in the system that support them than the tramps the players are involved with. I also have them mostly be space LASH ships that are big jump frames carrying lots and lots of smaller standardized freighters that scatter all over the system to various planets and different downports, because I don't think those big guys would be landing on planets. And I think LASH makes more sense than building a space Singapore Harbor to transship all that cargo onto the ships that will actually go to the smaller ports. But you can do it differently and the fact that this flavor text isn't nailed down lets folks approach it differently.

 

[CrispyGM]

So very excited for what's to come. We play Traveller on Discord pbp, and after our Cyberpunk Red campaign, this has been a runaway hit. Well done, Mongoose. Keep up the good work. We love your game.

 

[enpeze2]

in the imperium there should be tens of thousands of XL and XXL transport ships to reflect the immense trade volume of 5000+ worlds. Everything else is unrealistic. I agree with some of the commenters, that it is a mistake not to have floor plans for one or two of these XL and XXL freighters, which names and tonnages should also be an standard knowlege for the average traveller. Why of couse he sees such ships every day near the space docks.
I am not sure why some believe that such big ships cannot be profitable. I think the opposite is the case.

 

[Vormaerin]

in the imperium there should be tens of thousands of XL and XXL transport ships to reflect the immense trade volume of 5000+ worlds. Everything else is unrealistic. I agree with some of the commenters, that it is a mistake not to have floor plans for one or two of these XL and XXL freighters, which names and tonnages should also be an standard knowlege for the average traveller. Why of couse he sees such ships every day near the space docks.
I am not sure why some believe that such big ships cannot be profitable. I think the opposite is the case.

They can be profitable where there is volume. The assumption of said volume is where the issue is. Most entire worlds in The Imperium are lightly populated. Pop 7 is the population of England. To be profitable, it has to be cheaper to lift the goods into orbit in Planet A, transport them to Planet B, and transship them to the surface than it is to make the goods locally using the resources of the entire star system. Now, the entirety of the economics of the 57th century are made up out of thin air. So, it's entirely possible that this is the case and there's lots of trade. It's entirely possible that this isn't the case.

I will point out that Mongoose's Third Imperium material does assume these ships exist. There's some large ship stats scattered about. There's a discussion of a convoy of enormous trade ships in the description of Regina system in Secrets of the Ancients. What there isn't is floorplans for these ships or rules for the economics of superfreighter trade. Because these things don't matter for game play.

Do you really think there is a market for an "Element class Cruiser" box set of deckplans for a super freighter, such that it makes economic sense for Mongoose to publish one? Or rules for how that kind of trade works? Figure there's a lot of PC groups playing merchant bridge crew sailing back and forth between two large, safe star systems on a contracted schedule?

As far as claims of unprofitability some of that is analysis using the existing trade rules. Which are explicitly not designed to reflect the kinds of action that superfreighters are involved in. The trade and speculation rules are designed to cover tramp freighters that go to the smaller markets that the big guys don't go to. I can't remember if that disclaimer is outright stated in MgT2e's trade section. But it is in the functionally identical Cepheus Deluxe rules and covered in GURPS Far Trader and other older books. It has been the case since the first version of the rules came out (which, incidentally, didn't even allow ships that large to exist )

The Traveller rules are there to let you play Firefly, Pride of Chanur, The Polysotechnic League, the Millenium Falcon, and all the other tramp traders in sci fi fiction getting into adventures as they go from system to system scrounging up a living. The closest you get to covering superfreighters is GURPS Far Trader. And they basically just say: "They exist and they soak up almost all the trade in the big systems, so here's the scraps your players might have access to."

 

[enpeze2]

They can be profitable where there is volume. The assumption of said volume is where the issue is. Most entire worlds in The Imperium are lightly populated. Pop 7 is the population of England. To be profitable, it has to be cheaper to lift the goods into orbit in Planet A, transport them to Planet B, and transship them to the surface than it is to make the goods locally using the resources of the entire star system. Now, the entirety of the economics of the 57th century are made up out of thin air. So, it's entirely possible that this is the case and there's lots of trade. It's entirely possible that this isn't the case.

I will point out that Mongoose's Third Imperium material does assume these ships exist. There's some large ship stats scattered about. There's a discussion of a convoy of enormous trade ships in the description of Regina system in Secrets of the Ancients. What there isn't is floorplans for these ships or rules for the economics of superfreighter trade. Because these things don't matter for game play.

Do you really think there is a market for an "Element class Cruiser" box set of deckplans for a super freighter, such that it makes economic sense for Mongoose to publish one? Or rules for how that kind of trade works? Figure there's a lot of PC groups playing merchant bridge crew sailing back and forth between two large, safe star systems on a contracted schedule?

As far as claims of unprofitability some of that is analysis using the existing trade rules. Which are explicitly not designed to reflect the kinds of action that superfreighters are involved in. The trade and speculation rules are designed to cover tramp freighters that go to the smaller markets that the big guys don't go to. I can't remember if that disclaimer is outright stated in MgT2e's trade section. But it is in the functionally identical Cepheus Deluxe rules and covered in GURPS Far Trader and other older books. It has been the case since the first version of the rules came out (which, incidentally, didn't even allow ships that large to exist )

The Traveller rules are there to let you play Firefly, Pride of Chanur, The Polysotechnic League, the Millenium Falcon, and all the other tramp traders in sci fi fiction getting into adventures as they go from system to system scrounging up a living. The closest you get to covering superfreighters is GURPS Far Trader. And they basically just say: "They exist and they soak up almost all the trade in the big systems, so here's the scraps your players might have access to."

I agree that the rules are showing small trader for convenience. Thats fully ok and I am not ranting because of this because I am always for concentrating to the essential in rpgs. Nonetheless there are many ship plans out there, small, medium, large. But somehow no XL freighters. Two ore three would be enough.

Of course not in the perfection of Elemental Class. That would be great but its, as you said, not cost-effective as stand-alone-project. OTOH its very likely that such a freighter consists mainly of freighter space or as a pure container ship with a comparatively small crew, so it should not be difficult to edit some ship data and a rough approximation of the deck layout. It does not have to be the same quality level as the excellent elemental cruiser product. (a product which I am sure also makes not much money for Mongoose) It does not even have to be professional product, fan-made would be enough for me. I guess that the topic of interplanetary megafreighters is probably not very prominent in the traveller community, so no fans did such a project yet.

you are right, most worlds are just pop7 or so. But there are also many very populated worlds with dozens of billions of people or even more. Alone the trading activities of one such a hyperpopulated world would need many XL freighters - maybe in the hundreds. I am wondering that such things are not standard background author/fan knowledge of how-the-empire-works. I mean traveller has many thousand pages, how things are working in the TU, but in some essential topics like economy its lacking.

 

[Vormaerin]

Again, there's no agreement that maritime trade is a reasonable model for interstellar trade. They are very different situations. Putting things on boats and floating them somewhere else is by far the cheapest way to move things on a planet. On the other hand, grabbing something and tossing it up into orbit is about the most expensive way to move something on the planet at the moment. We might reasonably assume that changes and Shanghai Harbor in space is totally cost effective. But its just an assumption, not any kind of fact of nature.

You still have the question of what do you want to ship from Planet A to Planet B and what can Planet B ship back to Planet A? Because those huge freighters only function when they have their cargos guaranteed to be full weeks ahead of time. So even if you have a class A starport that can handle that kind of ship, you have to actually be able to guarantee the cargo is full both ways, week in and week out. That requires A LOT of people in both places.

Asia is a pop 9 planet. North America and Europe are Pop 8 planets. 9 of the top 10 container ports are in Asia. Rotterdam is 10th. (If you cheat and combine LA and Long Beach together, they bump Rotterdam from 10th). Now look at Regina. Its pop 8 (like Europe or North America). There is ONE other pop 8 planet with a good (B) starport within Jump 2 of Regina (Extolay). Dinomn has a class B starport, but its only Pop 6 (like Latvia). Feri is Pop 8, but its Jump 5 away and the intermediate stop is an Amber zone. Jenghe and Yori are pop 6 and 7, respectively, but they are only class C ports. No one is sending a mega freighter to a planet that may not even have a highport and definitely doesn't have high quality fuel and maintenance facilities. Ruie has pop 9, but its an Amber zone, has a class C port, and is outside of the Empire.

So who is Regina trading with in these massive freighters? How many jumps are you paying for with all these unprofitable intermediary stops. Its not like maritime trade, where you can go straight from Shanghai to LA. You have to pass through all these intermediary, unprofitable systems. So now you've got months of salaries, maintenance, fuel, etc going into the freight charges you are paying to get to these more distance worlds. What's worth shipping that far? It's hard to explain Regina not getting raw materials from its own solar system. So what's being imported into Regina in that kind of volume?

And as far as size goes, consider this. Hawai'i is an island. It imports 80% of all the goods it needs and almost all of that comes by ship, because the only other route is by plane. Its a pop 6 world. And the largest container ships to use the Port of Honolulu are 3600 TEUs. Whereas the container ships going into Shanghai and Guangzhou are up to 24,000 TEUs.

I'm all on board with having lots of interstellar trade, though most of the traveller settings (Spinward Marches, Reaver's Deep, Great Rift, Spinward Extents, Trojan Reach, Trailing Frontier) are all considered frontiers, not stable developed regions. But all that trade having to be on mega freighters? Not so sold on that. I like my LASH idea, but that's just my preference. I can totally see trade being more limited and even the 'big' freighters being in the 5 to 10k range that we have several examples of rather than 50k or 500k ships like get mentioned but never detailed.

 

[Vormaerin]

FYI, the "official" answer from Third Imperium is:

"Trade goods are transported aboard megafreighters in the multi-10,000-ton range. However, the trade routes only serve 10 percent of Imperial worlds. The remaining 90 percent get their goods from subsector merchant lines, interface lines and tramp traders."

And most of those 10% are probably in the Core/Vland/Ielish central regions, I bet.

There's a floor plan of sorts for a 100k logistics barge in Solomani Rim. That's basically a giant freighter, except no jump drives and a bit of military-ness.

The Skander (in Skandersvik) is a 4k merchant cruiser. That's the largest actual merchant ship I can find proper deck plans for from memory. I thought there was a 10k Tukera ship somewhere, but I can only find the smaller ones at the moment.

 

[enpeze2]

Again, there's no agreement that maritime trade is a reasonable model for interstellar trade. They are very different situations. Putting things on boats and floating them somewhere else is by far the cheapest way to move things on a planet. On the other hand, grabbing something and tossing it up into orbit is about the most expensive way to move something on the planet at the moment. We might reasonably assume that changes and Shanghai Harbor in space is totally cost effective. But its just an assumption, not any kind of fact of nature.

You still have the question of what do you want to ship from Planet A to Planet B and what can Planet B ship back to Planet A? Because those huge freighters only function when they have their cargos guaranteed to be full weeks ahead of time. So even if you have a class A starport that can handle that kind of ship, you have to actually be able to guarantee the cargo is full both ways, week in and week out. That requires A LOT of people in both places.

Asia is a pop 9 planet. North America and Europe are Pop 8 planets. 9 of the top 10 container ports are in Asia. Rotterdam is 10th. (If you cheat and combine LA and Long Beach together, they bump Rotterdam from 10th). Now look at Regina. Its pop 8 (like Europe or North America). There is ONE other pop 8 planet with a good (B) starport within Jump 2 of Regina (Extolay). Dinomn has a class B starport, but its only Pop 6 (like Latvia). Feri is Pop 8, but its Jump 5 away and the intermediate stop is an Amber zone. Jenghe and Yori are pop 6 and 7, respectively, but they are only class C ports. No one is sending a mega freighter to a planet that may not even have a highport and definitely doesn't have high quality fuel and maintenance facilities. Ruie has pop 9, but its an Amber zone, has a class C port, and is outside of the Empire.

So who is Regina trading with in these massive freighters? How many jumps are you paying for with all these unprofitable intermediary stops. Its not like maritime trade, where you can go straight from Shanghai to LA. You have to pass through all these intermediary, unprofitable systems. So now you've got months of salaries, maintenance, fuel, etc going into the freight charges you are paying to get to these more distance worlds. What's worth shipping that far? It's hard to explain Regina not getting raw materials from its own solar system. So what's being imported into Regina in that kind of volume?

And as far as size goes, consider this. Hawai'i is an island. It imports 80% of all the goods it needs and almost all of that comes by ship, because the only other route is by plane. Its a pop 6 world. And the largest container ships to use the Port of Honolulu are 3600 TEUs. Whereas the container ships going into Shanghai and Guangzhou are up to 24,000 TEUs.

I'm all on board with having lots of interstellar trade, though most of the traveller settings (Spinward Marches, Reaver's Deep, Great Rift, Spinward Extents, Trojan Reach, Trailing Frontier) are all considered frontiers, not stable developed regions. But all that trade having to be on mega freighters? Not so sold on that. I like my LASH idea, but that's just my preference. I can totally see trade being more limited and even the 'big' freighters being in the 5 to 10k range that we have several examples of rather than 50k or 500k ships like get mentioned but never detailed.

Well, when the massive maritime trade of our earth now is not the reasonable model for third imperium, then the whole imperium has not much income and does not work as described. We know there are only a few directly ruled fiefs and mostly the imperium rules the "space between the worlds" which is another word for taxes from trade activity. Without enough trade activity and cheap transport the way the imperium is defined is not possible. Without massive trade taxes any political entity which rules only "space" and not the planets could not exist.
Additionally your argument that shooting cargo into space is expensive is true today but takes not into account futuristic techs like anti-gravity.

I never said that all trade has to be mega-freighters. For logical reasons XL freighters should be the minority even if there should be thousands of them. But they are supplemented buy tens of thousands smaller freighters and tramps.

 

[Condottiere]

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 is a United States federal statute that provides for the promotion and maintenance of the American merchant marine.[1] Among other purposes, the law regulates maritime commerce in U.S. waters and between U.S. ports. Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act is known as the Jones Act and deals with cabotage (coastwise trade). It requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents.[2][3] The act was introduced by Senator Wesley Jones. The law also defines certain seaman's rights.

 

[MongooseMatt]

High Guard Update 2022 has the Galika Megula Freighter on page 274, a 200,000 ton beast of a merchant with a cargo bay big enough for a squadron of destroyers

 

[Annatar Giftbringer]

Should be large enough 😛

In addition, Pirates of Drinax has the 30k dton Galoof, and Trailing Frontier has the 40K dton Beckann.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Whatever happened to the free deckplans pdf that went with the Mongoose The Traveller Adventure?

 

[Vormaerin]

Well, when the massive maritime trade of our earth now is not the reasonable model for third imperium, then the whole imperium has not much income and does not work as described. We know there are only a few directly ruled fiefs and mostly the imperium rules the "space between the worlds" which is another word for taxes from trade activity. Without enough trade activity and cheap transport the way the imperium is defined is not possible. Without massive trade taxes any political entity which rules only "space" and not the planets could not exist.
Additionally your argument that shooting cargo into space is expensive is true today but takes not into account futuristic techs like anti-gravity.

I never said that all trade has to be mega-freighters. For logical reasons XL freighters should be the minority even if there should be thousands of them. But they are supplemented buy tens of thousands smaller freighters and tramps.

This discussion started because another poster was insisting there was only one way space trade can work and said that the designers were ignorant for not portraying that with ship designs and usable deckplans.

My point is just that there is not just one viable vision of how trade works, particularly considering how low the population is. Aramis subsector, which is used for several tramp trader campaign adventures, has less population than Earth today in total if you exclude just two worlds (Aramanx and Junidy), both of which are war torn Amber Zones. I think the longest shipping run today is around 5 weeks (Rotterdam direct to the Asian ports). So that's about 3 jumps in Traveller. So 6 to 9 parsecs (above Jump 3, you really need to have a hyper profitable route because of how much space is devoted to fuel and engines). Regina just has Efate and Exolay in that range as hi pop, quality starport trading partners. Can reach Frenzie and Rhylanor if you cut your margins with a jump 4 mega freighter.

The Port of Honolulu is the trade nexus for the equivalent of a pop 6 planet with a B or A starport. Trade doesn't come by land, obviously. Yet it uses cargo ships that are relatively small (3600 TEU or less) rather than the 20 -24k TEU massive container ships you see using ports like Shanghai. And there's maybe 30 ships a day in the commercial harbor, counting freighters, passenger liners,, larger yachts, and sometimes Coast Guard cutters and other service vessels that are in the commercial port for some reason. You might bump that up a little bit to cover the passenger and small package trade, but that's likely small ships.

There ARE a few places that have the right combination of nearby hi pop planets, high end starports, and relatively safe political situations to support maritime liner type trade. But they are not common. And, frankly, they aren't common on Earth either. Only two large container ports exist in the US (the combined LA port complexes and the combined NY/NJ ports). Savannah and Seattle make the top 50, but they are like 1/10th the size of the Asian ports. In Europe, you have Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg. Africa has Tangiers and Port Said in the lower half of the top 50. Panama is the closest thing to a big port in Central or South America.

Modern megafreighters are pretty recent as well. Large container ships like those 18k and 24k megafreighters that everyone thinks of are used because they provide slot efficiency and save on fuel. (Given the way jump fuel requirements work in Traveller, fuel savings are probably not a significant factor). However, they have downsides. To stay competitive, they have to be deployed on trade routes where they contribute to an efficient supply train. That's pretty much Asia to Europe with a side dish of Asia to the US. And they introduce costs to the port and landside shipping that eat up a lot of the savings. You have to have a HUGE port infrastructure to unload and distribute those goods fast enough to make the big ship make more sense than a bunch of smaller ships.

That's why I prefer the LASH model to the Galika style megafreighter. But, again, that's a GM preference to how they want to portray trade working in the region of space their campaign is set. And how well developed they have the rest of their solar systems, since interplanetary trade should be pretty important, too.

I am definitely NOT saying that you can't have megafreighters. I AM saying that megafreighters are not a prerequisite for functioning interstellar trade.

 

[Vormaerin]

High Guard Update 2022 has the Galika Megula Freighter on page 274, a 200,000 ton beast of a merchant with a cargo bay big enough for a squadron of destroyers

Yup. I wasn't clear. I was looking for ships with full deckplans. There's quite a few with the "this big space is a whole bunch of staterooms" type of truncated deckplan, which is more than enough for background ships. But earlier there was a suggestion that playable deckplans for such ships should exist.

 

[MongooseBella]

This has been shuffled again a little bit, nothing removed or added

 

[Arkathan]

Yup. I wasn't clear. I was looking for ships with full deckplans. There's quite a few with the "this big space is a whole bunch of staterooms" type of truncated deckplan, which is more than enough for background ships. But earlier there was a suggestion that playable deckplans for such ships should exist.

Honestly, to fill in a megaship like that, you are better off using the Starship Geomorphs pdf for sections that see action.
Link to Robert Pearce' blog page with the book.

 

[Jakovian]

Jakova,

Not sure what your post means. I do know that the section quoted wasn't written by me despite it saying so, so something is wonky about the post.

Vormaerin - I apologize, I mixed something up with the citation. This is of course my comment, not your post. Mea Culpa.
Can you elaborate on LASH type ships? Is this your idea or are they described in some guides?

Ship plans don't have to be accurate, after all, the plans of large battleships aren't accurate either and somehow it works. As for the rules of how "big trade" works - yes, I think there should be such information and I believe that GURPS additions to Traveller are a model to be followed. And I see a lot of scenarios that can happen during a boring and routine flight on a large cargo or passenger ship. Titanic in space?

As for the volume of trade. In 1619, Poland transported 28,251 dtons of grain through one port in Gdansk in a year. Just one commodity. As I mentioned earlier, an average leather producer for shoes in Poland produces 5 tons of material a day. In 2022, 1,217,787 cars were produced in the Czech Republic. The Azoty Group Puławy in Poland produces 5 million tons of fertilizers a year. Apple producers in the vicinity of Grójec (Polish fruit-growing basin) produced 125,162 tons of apples on about 4,000 hectares in 2017. The entire population of the Grójec county is 100,000 people.
So a state the size of 100,000 people at TL7 is capable of producing trade goods in the quantities of 100,000 tons per year. The average TL is however higher in the world of Traveller, so there will be several times more goods. If we say that in the world of Traveller there is trade that has any impact on the economy of a given planet, then you won't move it with Tramp class ships.
And if you can't move it, you have to transport it differently. And to transport it differently you have to build some infrastructure that the player characters see.

Also note that according to the technology in Traveller, the cost of fuel is practically negligible in the economy, so the cost of moving goods into orbit is ridiculously small.

 

[Vormaerin]

I moved the conversation to its own thread.