Understanding the Economic Extension on Travellermap and Traveller Wiki

[john_q_traveller]

To be clear, the following questions are not specific to Mongoose Traveller, but I am hoping there is somebody here with enough knowledge of the other flavors of Traveller to be able to shed some light on my current predicament.

I have been trying to get my head around the Economic Extension data on Traveller Map, specifically to understand what the budget available to a world government is in practical terms (Credits). For reference, the world in question is Nasemin, which has a UWP of B98A422–B, and an EE of 934−3 on travellermap.com as well as wiki.travellerrpg.com.

Based on some reading in the wiki, I found some information in T4 - Pocket Empires about how to generate / use the EE, but it became clear that the EE on travellermap and the wiki was generated using some other means, as that system does not allow for negative values in the fourth position. Doing some reading on the wiki, what is referenced is the T5 core rules, but there is no specific note of where in the T5 core rules. No small amount of reading later, it seems T5 core rules do allow for a negative value in the fourth position, but I have not been able to find anything about how to use that to determine anything about the world in practical terms, aside from the fact it means the RUs for the world are negative. The wiki seems to contradict this, as it indicates 76 RUs for Nasemin (a number I have not been able to duplicate using any combination of explanations / rules found up to this point). To further confound the matter, the wiki indicates a GWP of 0 (Cr1Billion) but a trade volume of 265 (Cr1Million).

I can actually understand the trade volume being non-zero if we simply rounded down on the GWP. The question though, is how is the EE as listed on travellermap / the wiki supposed to be used? More specifically, how can I use it to determine the actual budget available to the world government? This is explained in T4 - Pocket Empires, but I have not been able to find an explanation of this for T5, which seems to be how the EE was generated.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Geir]

Big disclaimer: I'm not a fan of the Efficiency value in the Economic Extension as written in T5. But, book 3 page 27 (of the T5 5.10 edition) calls it out as 'Flux', which is basically 2D-7, giving you possible values from +5 to -5 - with the caveat that 0 is treated as +1. And I can see in some instance how this can make sense in a pocket empire if you're dealing with a 'transfer of payments' sort of deal - as in some worlds are effectively subsidizing others. But from a pure economic standpoint the negative values make little sense.

In the World Builders Handbook (this is the plug for February), I kept it for capability sake, but modified it so that it was less extreme at higher populations (2D3-4 instead), to prevent a single high population world from making an entire region negative. And then for computing actual GWP I made the Efficiency factor a multiplier if positive, but used it as a devisor if negative: 1/-(Efficiency-1) .