We Got Ourselves A Convoy!

[alex_greene]

You know that I occasionally come up with weird and wonderful ideas in my dreams - such as the dream sequence which led to my first Traveller short story, "What Is Good In Life?"

Well, I had another weird dream - a group of a dozen or so Free Traders, each crewed and manned by family groups, operating in a kind of a ragtag convoy, looking for cargoes or one-off paying jobs, perhaps occasionally picking up passengers who need to get from A to B on the Q.T., and generally plying the spacelanes together.

Part of the dream involved multiple such convoys of ships, loose families organised in extended clans, raising kids on board and generally living their lives out between planets and stars, with some people never setting foot on planetary soil and calling the void their home.

True Travellers, in every sense of the word.

Now The Blood Path for Legend has come out of such a dream. I'm wondering - would you like me to turn this dream into a short story ... or a campaign setting?

 

[F33D]

Watch out! They weel steal your children.

 

[GypsyComet]

I says, "Callin' all trucks, this here's the Duck.
"We about to go a-huntin' bear."

 

[locarno24]

Essentially an OTU version of the Romany? Why not, I guess.

It'd be something you could just as easily make a background/race sourcebook (ish).

You'd have an interesting education/background - more than simply an asteroid colony, or whatever, you'd probably have children picking up engineer/0 or pilot/0 in their background skills, and the careers would be something significantly beyond 'merchant spacer'.

Also, you can imagine the Free Traders in a convoy/clan/whatever would get modified a lot over the generations, leading to some unusual ships. They'd all start as standard designs (albeit possibly obscure ones) but get changed to whatever role is needed over the years.

For instance, one thing that the historical parallel had was the tinker - that is, a travelling expert intermittently providing an industry/service to a region that it couldn't afford to support on its own. 'Then' might be mending pots, 'now' might be mending grav plates - with a decent TL and some 'machine shop' ships you can do a decent bit of trade whilst you're down on a world servicing stuff the locals can't mend - and you mostly need all that stuff to keep the ship running anyway.

Plus, it would be a natural place for more detailled rules for 'maintenance whilst underway' - something which isn't reflected in current rules too much.

 

[dragoner]

Essentially an OTU version of the Romany? Why not, I guess.

That is what my Blue Darrians are, they work out well.

 

[GypsyComet]

The concept has been toyed with before, though I don't know if the writer is still in the fanbase. That was more than 20 years ago during the HIWG days.

 

[rust]

Part of the dream involved multiple such convoys of ships, loose families organised in extended clans, raising kids on board and generally living their lives out between planets and stars, with some people never setting foot on planetary soil and calling the void their home.

The German science fiction series Perry Rhodan has something very
similar, an extended network of family / clan owned merchant star-
ships. It began as a "family business" of free traders of one species,
and over the centuries these traders developed into a separate spe-
cies with a distinct type of starship, got a monopoly on space trade
in one of the interstellar empires and for a time became the domi-
nant economical power of most of the galaxy. I did play a member
of this culture in the German Perry Rhodan roleplaying game, and
it was an interesting change from the adventures of the more "nor-
mal" space travellers.

 

[F33D]

One little rule change might help. Coordinated jumps. All ships in a convey share an astro plot and have the same result and time in jump.

 

[locarno24]

One little rule change might help. Coordinated jumps. All ships in a convey share an astro plot and have the same result and time in jump.

If you're doing a combination career/race sourcebook (even a small-scale one), then it's perfectly in keeping with prior examples to add extra items of personal or ship equipment.

Since it's not in High Guard - the obvious other place for it - why not?
I'd propose a new bit of ship software - Jump Co-Ordination.

Jump Co-Ordination allows you to tie together the jump calculations of a number of other ships up to the specified software number (so Jump Co-Ordination/1 allows a ship to jump with a partner). A ship using Jump Co-Ordination must be capable of running Jump Co-Ordination and Jump Control simultaneously. Following ships need only run appropriate Jump Control software.

Only the 'lead' ship needs to make Astrogation rolls, but each ship must make Divert Power rolls using the DM from the 'lead' ship's Astrogation. If an accurate jump is rolled, other ships will emerge from jump in the same formation relative to the 'lead' ship and use the same jump duration. Inaccurate jumps roll for duration normally.

Other than that you might have some sort of 'dry dock' frame (a modified docking clamp designed to support maintenance activities).

Career skills might be an interesting one. Rather than an advanced education or officer table, you might have a 'what worlds have you been spending time on?' table and let you take appropriate skill(s) (from the background skills). I'd imagine as a career, aside from ship care and operations, you'd pick up lots and lots of skill/0 rather than specialising.

 

[Fovean]

Heinlein's 'Citizen of the Galaxy' has a similar idea running through it, the merchants are different clans, all living on individualized starships and have a giant gathering every decade or so.

I have an alien race IMTU that uses coordinated jumps and convoys, no one else has the tech yet so it gives them an advantage over the other races (who all have different advantages of their own). I would suggest making the jump coordination a closely guarded secret and hard to duplicate outside of the convoy.

 

[F33D]

I would suggest making the jump coordination a closely guarded secret and hard to duplicate outside of the convoy.

That wouldn't be realistic if you had huge interstellar gov's who could research and duplicate it.

 

[alex_greene]

Why not? Naval fleets coordinate Jumps all the time, especially the capital ships and all their associated smaller support vessels.

It doesn't take much effort. One ship sets out the computations for the jump, feeds the coordinates to the rest of the fleet and coordinates the timings of the jump engines so each ship in the convoy activates at a specific time in the sequence, to the millisecond.

 

[alex_greene]

I was thinking more along the lines of what the community's rules are like.

Something like:

- 10% off the top of any profits you make go to the community pot, to pay for replacement spare parts, food, maintenance and so on.
- Anyone who gets too old to run their ship any more, the community assigns the ship to a crew and they look after the old one in his old ship in what time he has left.
- A kid who loses their family gets assigned to a new ship, that looks after the new kid as if it were their own.
- You don't steal from your own.
- You don't sell your own out to outsiders.
- Don't offer your hearth to bindlestiffs (exiles from the community that rob their own).
- Your word, and spit in your hand when you shake, are your bond.

Communities are like extended clans, and they don't always get along well - but when there's conflict, they usually resolve it with an Air/Raft or grav belt race. What nobody tells the outside world is that the winner of such races is determined long before, by the elders of both communities - the aim is not winning; it is symbolically showing the supremacy of the clan and, by doing so, resolving the conflict. The winner of the race basically shows both conflicting clans that the winner's clan is the right one, and so it goes down in the clans' annals.

Allied communities help one another out. If they see some pirate scum trying to rip off a ship of the community, even if it's not of their clan, the community will rally around to protect the ship being attacked. Unless, of course, it's a known bindlestiff - in which case, the community ships leave the poor benighted outcast vessel to its fate.

Outsiders are best avoided, unless they are willing to pay. If they are honourable, you charge them a good rate and do a good job though bear in mind that they are still outsiders; if they are stiffs, you can gouge them for all the money they are worth. If it is internal, the going is mates' rates. Ten percent of the usual, and half of those earnings go straight into the community pot.

Most of all, it isn't about the money. It is never about the money. It's about the community, and about keeping the ships flying together, no matter what. The day you start putting the profits above the safety and well being of others is the day you stop being in with the community, and start living the life of the bindlestiff.

 

[F33D]

I was thinking more along the lines of what the community's rules are like.

I see 4 ship max groups. Getting together once a year to marry up the children that are of age, etc.

 

[phavoc]

I was thinking more along the lines of what the community's rules are like.

I see 4 ship max groups. Getting together once a year to marry up the children that are of age, etc.

That is something along the lines of CJ Cherryh's Merchanter series, where most freighters are crewed by families who meet up at stations, and occasionally at safe places in deep space. Though they are much larger, with crews around a hundred or so. The women get pregnant by other merchanters (usually) and the couple decide which ship family they'll join to raise their kids.

 

[locarno24]

Why not? Naval fleets coordinate Jumps all the time, especially the capital ships and all their associated smaller support vessels.

It doesn't take much effort. One ship sets out the computations for the jump, feeds the coordinates to the rest of the fleet and coordinates the timings of the jump engines so each ship in the convoy activates at a specific time in the sequence, to the millisecond.

That's why I suggested making it a specific piece of software.

The unique thing is that it's a bunch of small-ish civilian ships doing it. Megacorps generally don't - it's more cost-effective to build a massive superfreighter than a bunch of small vessels - whilst navies canonically do do squadron jumps (see Sector Fleet) - there's just no rules for them at present. The key thing is that such jumps are generally co-ordinated from a capital-class flagship with a core/3 computer array on board - the unique thing about the trader convoy is that they're doing it on 'normal' civilian ships. It's not that no government could manage it, more that they don't need the capability because in situations where it's relevant they have something better. There's nothing 'secret' about hot-rodding cars or building ham radios, either.

Community rules will depend on the family structure.
If you've got 2-4 far trader-ish ships for a family/clan/convoy/whatever, then realistically you've got 12-24 staterooms to play with. When the place is actually your home, you can't really afford to have double occupancy, so that means about 20 people.

Between these people you've got to make over KCr 36 a month to keep yourself in life support, which is non-negotiable. You might claim that maintenance can be reduced if you've got some ability to do it yourself but it's still a non-trivial cost. I'm not sure you're going to cut it on 10% of people's income. If anything it's going to be the reverse; if the clan earns money, in a month, first it goes on the ships, then a payment goes into a communal emergency fund, then what's left gets divvied up in proportion to how much you brought in.

 

[nDervish]

whilst navies canonically do do squadron jumps (see Sector Fleet) - there's just no rules for them at present.

Mongoose hasn't published rules for them so far, but I've seen references over on the COTI forum to a rule that, when making a coordinated jump, you roll normally for the formation's average jump duration, then each individual ship will arrive within +/-2 hours of that time. So the arrivals will be at close to the same time, but not actually simultaneous.

I'm not clear whether this is official canon (or, if so, for which edition of Traveller) or if it's just a commonly-used house rule.

 

[locarno24]

As I said, there's no canon MGT squadron jump rules in game at the moment, but Sector Fleet - an official MGT book - openly talks about the Imperial Navy doing it.

 

[FreeTrav]

http://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/culture/societies/ipermar.html is another take on a nomadic culture within the TNE Regency.

 

[AndrewW]

One might be able to find a group of traders within a species in some upcoming minor alien material.