Abstemious Starship Traffic
- Thread starter robject
- Start date
I don't rule out the possibility; being able to refuel and jump would cut down on the time the ship is wasting time in-system, its expensive jump drive idle and nonproductive. But it would require a certain level of traffic to justify the expense of building and maintaining a farport.
Hans
There is a difference "in kind" that is relevant to considerations of farport costs, namely that they are little more than transfer stations (typically parked at the mainworld's Lagrange Point 4 or 5 or even 2) for fuel, cargo, and occasionally passengers. Farports will lack most of the amenities -- including customs and repair/maintenance facilities -- of proper highports. No restaurants, no accommodations (other than per-hour "coffin hotels"), no recreational facilities, nothing much beyond tankage and warehouse space and lots of docking ports.
In contrast to highports -- full-featured complexes which orbit redundantly mere minutes above otherwise-perfectly-good class A or B downports -- farports are a much more economically-viable concept than conventional highports are. The shuttle tickets, handling fees, and fuel sales could easily cover operating expenses, and should scale up or down well. Farports might be an excellent revenue-and-traffic-generator in otherwise-backwater starport-C-or-less worlds, and be viewed as economically advantageous over some sleepy, small-time downport that only sees incidental visitors and the mail packet once a month...
Boomslang,
Your points about the differences between high and far ports are spot on.
IMTU, a farport is more than usually a corporate operation. The normal presumptions of extrality and services for any who can pay that are part of Traveller's starport descriptions may or may not apply to a farport.
IMTU, there is a farport located in the Burtson/Trin's Veil system. Several major trade routes pass through the system; pass and not stop. Squanine, Burtson's owner, operates a farport in the system well beyond any 100D limits to resupply and refuel the corporate vessels whose routes pass through the Burtson system. Tramps traders or smaller companies are only be able to use the farport in the case of emergencies, otherwise they must travel further inward and use the planet's Class C port.
Putting it simply, Burtson is a "tank town". Huge amounts of trade pass through the system because the system because of it's astrographical position and not because of anything Burtson offers.
Regards,
Bill
Your points about the differences between high and far ports are spot on.
IMTU, a farport is more than usually a corporate operation. The normal presumptions of extrality and services for any who can pay that are part of Traveller's starport descriptions may or may not apply to a farport.
IMTU, there is a farport located in the Burtson/Trin's Veil system. Several major trade routes pass through the system; pass and not stop. Squanine, Burtson's owner, operates a farport in the system well beyond any 100D limits to resupply and refuel the corporate vessels whose routes pass through the Burtson system. Tramps traders or smaller companies are only be able to use the farport in the case of emergencies, otherwise they must travel further inward and use the planet's Class C port.
Putting it simply, Burtson is a "tank town". Huge amounts of trade pass through the system because the system because of it's astrographical position and not because of anything Burtson offers.
Regards,
Bill
Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
There's nothing to stop anyone setting up their own Farport outside the 100d limit. You could do it with just a SubMerch with extra fuel tanks (for the "port") and a pair of Cutters (1 to ferry passengers & cargo, the other to get more fuel).
The other nice "hook" about farports is they create a new context for hijacking and piracy activities to occur in... so you'd best beef up security along with your tanking and cargo operations...
Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
Maybe the 'port *is* a pirate ship...
Or a shoal of several captured ships locked together...
I've used that in several games.
Strangelove
SOC-6
Or maybe that "ship" coming into dock with the pirate ship is simply packed with explosives.:devil:
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
But most small aviation doesn't share space with the heavies. They only land in the big airports, or have the plane hangered there, if it is convenient for their business or residence. For every PDX there are many smaller municipal fields like Bend, Klamath Falls, Medford, Madras, Redmond, where you'll not see anything bigger than a Bombardier CRJ.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
I think the aviation analogies work best if you think of the big planes as Starships and Spaceships (i.e. large craft that routinely fly internationally/interstellar but also service major continental/system routes) and the small planes as Small Craft. So Starships and Spacecraft generally go to THE Starport while Small Craft generally use local Spaceports but may be found at THE Starport (especially if they are foreign, i.e. attached to a Starship).
This may have been addressed... I'm playing catchup on this thread as I type. But, small craft are allowed to land at SFO, which primarily caters to jumbo jets; freight and passenger. You can land a single engine Cessna there, but you're given something half of an unused runway to set down. That little tidbit comes to me from a couple of pilots... one of whom used to buzz my home in his twin engine job.
He was also my lab partner when I persued an engineering degree in the mid 90s :rofl:
I hope I'm getting to the heart of the matter here, but traffic levels, to me, always seemed to be high at the hubs and sparse at the backwaters. And the reason there were so many starships at the major hubs was because most everyone was in hock and/or up to the ears in debt in paying off their newly constructed and/or purchased vessel.
I can't recall if it was in the basic book or one of the FASA adventure class modules that I read about starship construction time. You talk with a naval architect, he lays out some plans, you make the big downpayment, the ship goes into construction, and you hang out while the thing is being built (after having cashed in all your 401Ks to pay for the down payment).
I always understood the Traveller version of mercantilism to be that there was a heavy credit industry driving the entire Imperial economy. You bought your ride, then hoped to hell that you could make the thing work for you to pay it off. If you couldn't, then you squared off with a repo team who may or may not be backed up by local starport security (usually in the form of BD marines... system depending).
For my various groups that was part of the drive for the campaign; pay off the ship. And we assumed that the bigger the ship, the more in debt the company was. So, if your firm owned a couple of Al-Morai behemoths, then, presumably, said firm had a scheme to make the ship payments, which would in turn ramp up the stock and pay dividens to make another downpayment on another vessel, and so on and so on.
Problems arise when said ships fall off the radar, or reapper only to drift as a lifeless derelict with some mystery to be solved by either a band of hired adventurers, or the local insurance adjuster.
To prop up this argument, one time I had one of my groups simply trade for the next to gaming sessions. No gunplay, no sneaking around ruins or firebases or slugging it out with pirates or corsairs, but simply buy stuff at System A for resale on System B using the merchandise charts booklet from the Starter set. They had a blast trying to pay off their stuff and trying to skim a couple of ACRs or Vacc Suits from a bulk cargo shipment
Anyways, to me, that's how the economic lifeblood of the Imperium and elsewhere keeps so many vessels operational.
As an aside my group tried to resell newly purchased ships for the full price (MSRP), but then I (and Marc Miller via his authorship of how real world financing works in the basic book) had to explain that they were actually selling debt. It put a crimp in their style.
Then we went a pirating :smirk:
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