Using real world ship building to explain Traveller

[Terry Mixon]

You mean after the Traveller jump drive and fuel already robs them of most of the space in their ship for cargo?

Time for drop fueling!

 

[MasterGwydion]

In the US, maintenance makes up about 65% of all money spent on infrastructure and about 35% is spent on new projects, including complete replacement of non-repairable older infrastructure. About 3% of the GDP.

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

You mean after the Traveller jump drive and fuel already robs them of most of the space in their ship for cargo?

Cut their cargo you cut their income. Your proposal is to take their income away. Ends the same way they have less money to do anything with.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Cut their cargo you cut their income. Your proposal is to take their income away. Ends the same way they have less money to do anything with.

It isn't though. My way gives pirates more cargo to go after. Your way does not. All mine does is change the money. It changes absolutely nothing else. Your way seems to have more collateral consequences.

Whatever works in YTU though, as long as everyone is having fun, who cares.

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

I don't think pirates are very practical. You pretty much need to sell your cargo somewhere within 1 jump of your ship. Too much of your ship is taken up by the extra weapons, defences and crew to carry much so you need to know precisely what ships to hit with worthwhile cargo. This means an intelligence system which raises costs and vulnerabilities making it even less possible to be profitable.

It isn't like the old privateers who could just sail home and sell the cargo, most everywhere they go there will be either no one who would be able to buy it or observers going "suspicious lack of documents on this cargo lets do an audit and send to the systems they trade with to cooperate with us" and next thing you know your ship is impounded or destroyed by a cruiser.

 

[MasterGwydion]

I don't think pirates are very practical. You pretty much need to sell your cargo somewhere within 1 jump of your ship. Too much of your ship is taken up by the extra weapons, defences and crew to carry much so you need to know precisely what ships to hit with worthwhile cargo. This means an intelligence system which raises costs and vulnerabilities making it even less possible to be profitable.

It isn't like the old privateers who could just sail home and sell the cargo, most everywhere they go there will be either no one who would be able to buy it or observers going "suspicious lack of documents on this cargo lets do an audit and send to the systems they trade with to cooperate with us" and next thing you know your ship is impounded or destroyed by a cruiser.

IYTU pirates may not be practical, but in Canon they must be otherwise they wouldn't have so many pages dedicated to writing about them and how they ply their trade, including a whole campaign written about being pirates and other campaigns about hunting pirates. Also, q-ships wouldn't exist. Most Patrol craft wouldn't exist either.

Edit - I have to say, I'd rather be a pirate in Traveller than in Star Trek. lol

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

In Star Trek their ships are really fast and have a quadrant wide system for selling the stolen materials. I'd rather be a pirate there where the intelligence network says "They've sent for a task force to hunt you, here is where you should go for better hunting while things are hot here".

 

[MasterGwydion]

In Star Trek their ships are really fast and have a quadrant wide system for selling the stolen materials. I'd rather be a pirate there where the intelligence network says "They've sent for a task force to hunt you, here is where you should go for better hunting while things are hot here".

Ummm... Almost instantaneous communication for law enforcement across Federation Space and all of the damn cops have faster ships, better sensors, and better weapons and shields than I do. lol Romulan or Cardassian Space? Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order? No thanks. lol

I'll take my chances with slow communication, slower ships tactically, faster ships strategically, better weapons, but equal shields (none). Also, Imperial Intelligence? Staying ahead of them isn't hard. Just ask the Ine Givar.

 

[ross]

As for specialty engineering and large ship construction, the Imperium Navy already has large installations like Depot that probably serve this function. It’s just not mentioned explicitly in Canon.

 

[Fluffy Bunny Feet]

Ummm... Almost instantaneous communication for law enforcement across Federation Space and all of the damn cops have faster ships, better sensors, and better weapons and shields than I do. lol Romulan or Cardassian Space? Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order? No thanks. lol

I think you are forgetting all those time Kirk's Enterprise was weeks round trip communications away and only received permission to act long after they had acted. Pirates can come and go while the communications asking for help are still on the way let alone the actual help arriving. The pirates were also far faster than Enterprise when they wanted to be.

 

[MasterGwydion]

I think you are forgetting all those time Kirk's Enterprise was weeks round trip communications away and only received permission to act long after they had acted. Pirates can come and go while the communications asking for help are still on the way let alone the actual help arriving. The pirates were also far faster than Enterprise when they wanted to be.

Star Trek did always have a problem with consistency.

 

[swordtart]

There is no degradation of spacecraft components, except that of damage, and acquiring quirks.

Ensure regular maintenance, and don't get into combat, your spacecraft could last millenia.

I assumed regular maintenance includes the replacement of degraded components. Barring incident your jump drive likely not fail sufficiently to require complete replacement, but over the years you will have replaced the parts that are subject to wear. Some parts might not realistically wear or break down and sacrificial components might be fitted to protect others. 0.1% is quite a low cost for maintenance but this is just the cost to keep it operational, not for it to retain its original value. You pay this 0.1% per year on every single component whether you take it out of the space garage or not. After a millenia you will have paid the original purchase cost in maintenance and probably little of the original ship will remain.

As you point out you can BUY an aging ship at a discount (with quirks), I also tend to assume you can sell it for half that (that is a house rule though). A ship only 6 years old will have lost at least 5% of its value (10% with my rule). You will have paid another .6% of its value in patching it up. You also have the residual costs of fixing those quirks. A 250+ year ship has lost 40% of it's value (80% of it's sale price under my rule) and have 10 quirks to deal with. It does not say that Quirks can be repaired (if you can save a significant % of the cost of a ship by paying a few MCr in hull repairs or replacing a component it seems too much of a bargain).

A streamlined ship that has been used for 5 years will probably have made hundreds of pilot checks for landings. CRB p60 tells us that "landing a ship in optimum conditions with computer assistance" is a routine check. Even if you take your time you need a 4+ to succeed. Anyone with less than Pilot 2 is going to fail eventually (probably once a year given two week cycles but far more regularly for spaceships*). Not all landings are under optimal conditions and you may not always be able to take your time which will increase the frequency and severity of failures. The consequences of a bad landing poorly set out in CRB, Companion gives us more nuanced rules for wilderness landing but nothing explicit for ordinary landings. It is for the DM to judge, but a point of hull damage per negative effect or a roll on a table with the effect as a modifier wouldn't be unreasonable. Regardless of the number you choose it will happen at some point and each Hull Point is another KCr100 in spares. Just because we do not often consider this does not mean that it doesn't happen.

If you pay a extra for a better pilot to avoid ship damage you are effectively buying your way around the issue. Logically the extra salary needs to be less than the cost it helps you avoid for it to make economic sense. For the majority of ships making economic sense will be their core aim. Players will be illogical, but even military craft will be looking to eliminate unnecessary costs. On the basis that Pilot 2 will likely eliminate any risk in Routine landings the repair cost floor per year for bad landings would be expected to be more than KCr36 per year.

Other non-combat causes of ship damage are set out in the game. These are things that should not "just happen" and be bundled into an overall maintenance cost as that removes player agency (and if you go that route you might as well not have any rules for space travel). As 2d6 is the core Traveller mechanic any random result depending on it will not be particularly granular. Nevertheless a ship in actual use will pick up the occasional Hull point damage and possibly a component critical. The longer it is in use the greater the frequency and the more it will have cost in its life just to regain functionality.

It's the Ship of Theseus in spaaaaace.

* A shuttle pilot that makes several landings a day at the same port should probably get a boon to their Pilot check representing familiarity with local conditions. This will reduce the chance of a failed landing by a factor of 6. Small craft pilots might have lower formal qualifications to keep costs down so High DEX pilots might be a more cost effective than highly trained pilots and will therefore find more work. They are probably incentivised to increase turn around (i.e. don't take their time) whilst still minimising repair bills.

 

[MasterGwydion]

I assumed regular maintenance includes the replacement of degraded components. Barring incident your jump drive likely not fail sufficiently to require complete replacement, but over the years you will have replaced the parts that are subject to wear. Some parts might not realistically wear or break down and sacrificial components might be fitted to protect others. 0.1% is quite a low cost for maintenance but this is just the cost to keep it operational, not for it to retain its original value. You pay this 0.1% per year on every single component whether you take it out of the space garage or not. After a millenia you will have paid the original purchase cost in maintenance and probably little of the original ship will remain.

Actually, when things are put into storage properly, they no longer need maintenance to be done on them. Check the Robot rules for examples of this.

As you point out you can BUY an aging ship at a discount (with quirks), I also tend to assume you can sell it for half that (that is a house rule though). A ship only 6 years old will have lost at least 5% of its value (10% with my rule). You will have paid another .6% of its value in patching it up. You also have the residual costs of fixing those quirks. A 250+ year ship has lost 40% of it's value (80% of it's sale price under my rule) and have 10 quirks to deal with. It does not say that Quirks can be repaired (if you can save a significant % of the cost of a ship by paying a few MCr in hull repairs or replacing a component it seems too much of a bargain).

A streamlined ship that has been used for 5 years will probably have made hundreds of pilot checks for landings. CRB p60 tells us that "landing a ship in optimum conditions with computer assistance" is a routine check. Even if you take your time you need a 4+ to succeed. Anyone with less than Pilot 2 is going to fail eventually (probably once a year given two week cycles but far more regularly for spaceships*). Not all landings are under optimal conditions and you may not always be able to take your time which will increase the frequency and severity of failures. The consequences of a bad landing poorly set out in CRB, Companion gives us more nuanced rules for wilderness landing but nothing explicit for ordinary landings. It is for the DM to judge, but a point of hull damage per negative effect or a roll on a table with the effect as a modifier wouldn't be unreasonable. Regardless of the number you choose it will happen at some point and each Hull Point is another KCr100 in spares. Just because we do not often consider this does not mean that it doesn't happen.

Did you forget that no check is made if it is not difficult, under stress, or dramatic? So, no, most of the time a pilot lands they are not making a pilot check.

 

[Condottiere]

At oh point one percent annual maintenance cost, whether that actually has an effect when the spacecraft is stored and powered down, could be debatable.

Though I think that Trillion Credit does have the option to mothball them.

Even as a Ship Of Theseus, that's about the equivalent of our body cells regenerating.

I've come to the conclusion that while, as a whole, spacecraft in Traveller are actually cheap, macro, on the micro level that player characters operate, they're expensive to obtain, if they aren't gifted.

Or spacejacked.

So, I made it my mission to find the cheapest possible starship, legally, and I think I've succeeded within the current set of rules.

And the parts, are usually worth more than the whole.

 

[Sigtrygg]

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

Thank you for finding and posting this, there is some interesting stuff in there.

 

[swordtart]

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:

These are fascinating and underpin how the real world is far more complex than even the crunchiest RPG system can portray. It's also why a lot of online games economies are broken. People (either the coders or the players) don't understand the complexity and interrelated nature of things.

I played an old DOS game that was about global shipping and it was pretty accurate based on this. Most of the money going around was not from actually moving things. Freight is just a way of covering your expenses, the real money was is in building, buying and selling ships, but unless you did the shipping there was no market for the ships. It also covered loans (both ways) and was really complex and absorbing - far too much so in the end, it got very distracting.

Dammit, getting the itch to play it again

 

[Condottiere]

You can always make money on future expectations of performance.