karmarainbow
Mongoose
I'm a long time fan of Traveller, and have been delighted with the Mongoose relaunch. I don't want to start a flame war, but in terms of running the game I do worry that the economics are a bit wonky (and this isn't an issue confined to this version of the game).
In short, starships are so vastly expensive that they make the rest of the economy meaningless. Ships are worth so much money that doing any other kind of mission is pointless: PCs should be out hijacking.
GMs can discourage this in a number of ways e.g. make every ship have a mandatory and uncrackable transponder; make every starport check the ownership of every ship on landing (DNA checks on captains to check registered ownership?); say starports have powerful surface to air batteries to target pirates; say that ships reported stolen are hot news which is delivered at jump 6 by the x-boat network, etc....
However, even ship’s boats, drones and fighters are worth millions of credits...and it does not really seem credible to impose the same level of restrictions over those. Which starport is going to send officials on board to check that your ship’s launch is really yours...?
PCs don’t even have to make a career out of being a pirate. 25% of one ship will give them several million credits each. After that why would they want to do dangerous jobs for 100k a pop?
You could say that there is no market for second hand ships or boats, but this seems unrealistic. Even assuming there are no wilder areas of space where criminal purchases would be accepted, all sorts of settlements or worlds would welcome additional cheap space hardware (perhaps they could say it was manufactured there). Realistically there would be a black market.
Even without the means to sell stolen ships, PCs could act like Somali pirates and hold ships for ransom e.g. 5Mcr for return of your 58Mcr ship....
Could you abolish ownership? In other words could you say that private ownership of starships simply didn’t happen (except perhaps for the megarich), and that all ships are owned by the military, scout service, or a merchant guild? This avoids PCs having to pay off a mortgage, and helps to avoid starship theft because any organisation capable of buying a starship would not buy them - they’d make their own.
There’s still going to be some black market (rogue worlds perhaps), but it would seriously limit the possibility of stealing and selling ships (in fact we could stop saying how much they are worth - it’s meaningless). This wouldn’t prevent there being rogue elements e.g. there could be pirate guilds whose members also do not own their ships, but operate them on behalf of the guild.
The down-side to this idea is that if the PCs don’t own a ship, but it’s given to them by an organisation, then they may not mind if it is destroyed or damaged. It could be made clear to them that they won’t get another, but that could be hard to enforce if a large part of the campaign concept is that PCs are mobile and able to jump around. Instead they’d keep needing to charter flights (with much increased scrutiny over things like weapons carried etc), and they wouldn’t be able to own ATVs, etc (possibly they could hire them, but expensively)
This could help - up to a point. However even if there is no private ownership of starships and ship’s boats, there could still be theft and sale of starship components. For example, if the PCs can remove a wrecked enemy ship’s computer model 4, it’s worth 5Mcr. Simply removing the (presumably uncopyable..?) programmes could net millions of credits (Evade 1 = 1Mcr, Fire Control 2 = 4Mcr etc). Ammo can also be sold, although that presents less of a risk (cr45k for 12 nuclear missiles!!).
Again, it’s hard to see what activity could be more lucrative in Traveller than piracy.
If PCs are going to own starships, it strikes me that these need to be on a different order of magnitude from ships than cost 50Mcr+. There should be a class of small cheap tramp starships that PCs can use, and which cost 5-10Mcr. They would typically be confined to jump 1, have no weapons (or even hard points), a few cramped staterooms and a few tonnes of cargo space (maybe enough space for an air raft or ATV). PCs could own these ships outright at the outset (or reasonably easily with benefit rolls), but the upkeep costs would be high (to balance there being no mortgage to cover).
There could be a range of different styles and characteristics for these tramp ships (this is sounding like Firefly...). This would be much more like the RW where it might be viable for a small group to own a battered tramp freighter or cargo plane, but certainly wouldn’t own a container ship or frigate. The PC's ship would not be able to attack military or even corporate vessels, and would need to run more often than fight, which is more in keeping with the ‘space vagabonds doing shady jobs’ motif.
If they did capture or steal a similar tramp ship, then the profit would be quite manageable. At most they might get the extra cash needed for a weapon or some upgrades. What do you think?
In short, starships are so vastly expensive that they make the rest of the economy meaningless. Ships are worth so much money that doing any other kind of mission is pointless: PCs should be out hijacking.
GMs can discourage this in a number of ways e.g. make every ship have a mandatory and uncrackable transponder; make every starport check the ownership of every ship on landing (DNA checks on captains to check registered ownership?); say starports have powerful surface to air batteries to target pirates; say that ships reported stolen are hot news which is delivered at jump 6 by the x-boat network, etc....
However, even ship’s boats, drones and fighters are worth millions of credits...and it does not really seem credible to impose the same level of restrictions over those. Which starport is going to send officials on board to check that your ship’s launch is really yours...?
PCs don’t even have to make a career out of being a pirate. 25% of one ship will give them several million credits each. After that why would they want to do dangerous jobs for 100k a pop?
You could say that there is no market for second hand ships or boats, but this seems unrealistic. Even assuming there are no wilder areas of space where criminal purchases would be accepted, all sorts of settlements or worlds would welcome additional cheap space hardware (perhaps they could say it was manufactured there). Realistically there would be a black market.
Even without the means to sell stolen ships, PCs could act like Somali pirates and hold ships for ransom e.g. 5Mcr for return of your 58Mcr ship....
Could you abolish ownership? In other words could you say that private ownership of starships simply didn’t happen (except perhaps for the megarich), and that all ships are owned by the military, scout service, or a merchant guild? This avoids PCs having to pay off a mortgage, and helps to avoid starship theft because any organisation capable of buying a starship would not buy them - they’d make their own.
There’s still going to be some black market (rogue worlds perhaps), but it would seriously limit the possibility of stealing and selling ships (in fact we could stop saying how much they are worth - it’s meaningless). This wouldn’t prevent there being rogue elements e.g. there could be pirate guilds whose members also do not own their ships, but operate them on behalf of the guild.
The down-side to this idea is that if the PCs don’t own a ship, but it’s given to them by an organisation, then they may not mind if it is destroyed or damaged. It could be made clear to them that they won’t get another, but that could be hard to enforce if a large part of the campaign concept is that PCs are mobile and able to jump around. Instead they’d keep needing to charter flights (with much increased scrutiny over things like weapons carried etc), and they wouldn’t be able to own ATVs, etc (possibly they could hire them, but expensively)
This could help - up to a point. However even if there is no private ownership of starships and ship’s boats, there could still be theft and sale of starship components. For example, if the PCs can remove a wrecked enemy ship’s computer model 4, it’s worth 5Mcr. Simply removing the (presumably uncopyable..?) programmes could net millions of credits (Evade 1 = 1Mcr, Fire Control 2 = 4Mcr etc). Ammo can also be sold, although that presents less of a risk (cr45k for 12 nuclear missiles!!).
Again, it’s hard to see what activity could be more lucrative in Traveller than piracy.
If PCs are going to own starships, it strikes me that these need to be on a different order of magnitude from ships than cost 50Mcr+. There should be a class of small cheap tramp starships that PCs can use, and which cost 5-10Mcr. They would typically be confined to jump 1, have no weapons (or even hard points), a few cramped staterooms and a few tonnes of cargo space (maybe enough space for an air raft or ATV). PCs could own these ships outright at the outset (or reasonably easily with benefit rolls), but the upkeep costs would be high (to balance there being no mortgage to cover).
There could be a range of different styles and characteristics for these tramp ships (this is sounding like Firefly...). This would be much more like the RW where it might be viable for a small group to own a battered tramp freighter or cargo plane, but certainly wouldn’t own a container ship or frigate. The PC's ship would not be able to attack military or even corporate vessels, and would need to run more often than fight, which is more in keeping with the ‘space vagabonds doing shady jobs’ motif.
If they did capture or steal a similar tramp ship, then the profit would be quite manageable. At most they might get the extra cash needed for a weapon or some upgrades. What do you think?
