Sageryne
Cosmic Mongoose
Hi all,
I stumbled across a series of YouTube video on modern ship building. While watching them, I realised that many of the issues brought up in these videos would have close analogues in Traveller:
Why only certain places build ships:
This is a good explanation why it only makes economic sense for China, South Korea and Japan to build large commercial vessels anymore. It talks a little bit about the high priced world of military ship building and why countries still do that. It also talks about the huge value added components, for example, a huge containership might sell for $200M, but the $50M engine and $3M propeller are made in Germany and then shipped there for installation.
From a game point of view, it might make sense that certain very large jump and manoeuvre drives are only built in one or two systems in a sector and then shipped to other smaller shipyards that just do the installation. This works especially nicely with the LBB lettered drives. This might also explain why there are Class A shipyards on TL9 or 10 worlds. Most of a ship can be built with TL9 or 10 components. If engines, computers, and sensors (or other high tech equipment) is mass produced and then sold across the sector, then you don't have to have the highest tech level to build ships.
There have been other discussions on the forum recently about TL12 parts being commonly available in Class A and B shipyards regardless of the TL of their host planet. If you had centralised manufacturing of the higher TL components and then wide distribution, that makes sense.
Ship financing and profitability:
Modern big shipping companies rarely make profits on the actual shipping, but they are actually huge-conglomerates (mega-corporations anyone?) with their fingers in the pie of ship financing and shipping services (resale, insurance, spare parts, supplies, fuel). Also, each ship in their fleet is actually its own corporation, so it can insulate itself if something goes wrong (honest judge, I was just leasing this ship from 123456 inc.).
With Traveller, this could lead to things like a huge corporation stepping in to help finance the PCs ship, but once financed, they realise they are tied to the "company store" and can only get services from other arms of the huge evil mega-corporation.
Shipbreaking:
When a Traveller ship reaches the end of its commercially viable life, it is sold to a "plausibly-deniable" cash buyer, re-registered to a location with little to no regulations on ship-disposal, and then sailed to a place where desperately poor people strip them of valuable items, and then cut the hulls up to be melted down for scrap.
There are a ton of possible adventure hooks for such a process. For example, the PCs get hired to sail a ship to the ship-breakers, but it is in such bad shape they breakdown on route.
Just thought I would share.
- Kerry
I stumbled across a series of YouTube video on modern ship building. While watching them, I realised that many of the issues brought up in these videos would have close analogues in Traveller:
Why only certain places build ships:
This is a good explanation why it only makes economic sense for China, South Korea and Japan to build large commercial vessels anymore. It talks a little bit about the high priced world of military ship building and why countries still do that. It also talks about the huge value added components, for example, a huge containership might sell for $200M, but the $50M engine and $3M propeller are made in Germany and then shipped there for installation.
From a game point of view, it might make sense that certain very large jump and manoeuvre drives are only built in one or two systems in a sector and then shipped to other smaller shipyards that just do the installation. This works especially nicely with the LBB lettered drives. This might also explain why there are Class A shipyards on TL9 or 10 worlds. Most of a ship can be built with TL9 or 10 components. If engines, computers, and sensors (or other high tech equipment) is mass produced and then sold across the sector, then you don't have to have the highest tech level to build ships.
There have been other discussions on the forum recently about TL12 parts being commonly available in Class A and B shipyards regardless of the TL of their host planet. If you had centralised manufacturing of the higher TL components and then wide distribution, that makes sense.
Ship financing and profitability:
Modern big shipping companies rarely make profits on the actual shipping, but they are actually huge-conglomerates (mega-corporations anyone?) with their fingers in the pie of ship financing and shipping services (resale, insurance, spare parts, supplies, fuel). Also, each ship in their fleet is actually its own corporation, so it can insulate itself if something goes wrong (honest judge, I was just leasing this ship from 123456 inc.).
With Traveller, this could lead to things like a huge corporation stepping in to help finance the PCs ship, but once financed, they realise they are tied to the "company store" and can only get services from other arms of the huge evil mega-corporation.
Shipbreaking:
When a Traveller ship reaches the end of its commercially viable life, it is sold to a "plausibly-deniable" cash buyer, re-registered to a location with little to no regulations on ship-disposal, and then sailed to a place where desperately poor people strip them of valuable items, and then cut the hulls up to be melted down for scrap.
There are a ton of possible adventure hooks for such a process. For example, the PCs get hired to sail a ship to the ship-breakers, but it is in such bad shape they breakdown on route.
Just thought I would share.
- Kerry
