OTU Only: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way from Collace

[Grav_Moped]

I was hoping for an analysis of a straight-outbound Escher Staircase route (start at a TL-15 world and have every successive destination lower-tech than the last) with a stripped-down high-Jn sneak return.

Carrying extra drives and crew would be a penalty, but it'd be using all of them in big-ship configuration until the jumpback (1/3 or maybe even down to 1/6 of the time). It'd be tied to the specific route and direction permanently, and would therefore likely have agents at each stop to prepare full cargo loads with minimal layovers.

 

[mike wightman]

I was going to reply to this, so I fired up the LBB2 81 pdf.

And read it from the last sentence backwards.

But for two ships of differing jump numbers going to the same destination in one jump, each would charge the same cargo or passage price.*

A jump3 starship charges the same passage price as a jump-1 starship. The difference is that a jump-3 ship can reach a destination in one jump, while the jump-1 ship would take three separate jumps (through two intermediate destinations, and requiring three separate tickets) to reach it.**

Interstellar travel is priced on the basis of accommodations; prices cover a trip from starport to starport, encompassing one jump, regardless of length.***

*a jump1 ship can only jump 1 parsec so a jump 3 ship going to the same destination charges the same.
** a ticket is for 1 jump, they cost the same. For a journey to a world 3 parsecs away it is cheaper for the passenger to take a jump 3 ship.
*** confirmation of price is fixed by jump distance

 

[Spinward Flow]

I was going to reply to this, so I fired up the LBB2 81 pdf.

This is what I use as the basis for my assumption that in CT, ticket prices are PER JUMP ... not per PARSEC.

At the time that LBB2 (77 and 81) was written and edited, there was an underlying assumption beneath the phrasing used. That assumption was that EVERY jump would be to an occupied parsec hex ... not to an empty hex.

Part of the reason for that assumption was that in LBB2.77, jumping consumed ALL of the available jump fuel, regardless of distance.

• LBB2.77 Scout/Courier: J1 = 20 tons of fuel ... and J2 = 20 tons of fuel also

This meant that unless you carried a "double fuel load" you couldn't double jump.
No double jumping, no jumping "through" an empty hex to reach a destination on the far side.
After all, if you burned through your entire jump fuel reserve EVERY TIME you jumped, then empty hexes were basically Death Traps™. You wouldn't have enough fuel to jump again and because the hex was empty there was no opportunity to refuel. Your starship is now an overpriced coffin ... and YOU (the Player) need to go through character generation again (try not to die this time when you reroll).

LBB5.79 took the first step towards "rectifying" this problem by introducing the workaround of the Jump Governor, which modulated fuel consumption by parsec (the way we now assume that jump fuel consumption has "always" worked). That then made it possible for a Scout/Courier to consume 10 tons of fuel for a J1, or 20 tons of fuel for a J2. This then made it possible to double jump with a Scout/Courier (in theory), but in practice it was simply more practical to execute J2 instead of J1+1.

Still, the fundamental assumption underlying everything was that starships are designed for single jumps ... AND ... consequently, ALL of those single jumps must therefore be to destinations where fuel is available (meaning, NOT empty hexes).

The LBB2.81 example provided by @mike wightman above exemplifies the contours of this thinking. In a starship design universe in which single jumping is the norm, you're ALWAYS going to be jumping from starport to starport on the subsector/sector map.

The key thing is, that the example provided very explicitly supports the notion that interstellar ticket prices are charged PER JUMP ... NOT PER PARSEC. This is why the "intermediate destinations" clause matters the way that it does and carries the weight that it does in affirming this interpretation.



It is then barely a stretch to posit that starships capable of double jumping, which enables movement THROUGH empty hexes to reach destinations on the far side, can make use of the "intermediate destinations" clause that enforces ticket per jump pricing. The empty hex is not a "final destination" (in the typical sense), but rather an "intermediate destination" along the way to reaching the final destination that passengers and freight cargo are contracted to be delivered to.

If necessary, I can use a map to demonstrate what I'm talking about, but hopefully everyone reading what I'm writing here can grasp the implications, now that I've spelled them out.

 

[kilemall]

I was going to reply to this, so I fired up the LBB2 81 pdf.

And read it from the last sentence backwards.




*a jump1 ship can only jump 1 parsec so a jump 3 ship going to the same destination charges the same.
** a ticket is for 1 jump, they cost the same. For a journey to a world 3 parsecs away it is cheaper for the passenger to take a jump 3 ship.
*** confirmation of price is fixed by jump distance

Yes that is the RAW, but the vicious costs of the higher jump ships without time or unique distance remuneration dissuades from ever operating them.

At the least there should be more cargo lots making themselves available for a faster cheaper transit, allowing for larger sure thing cargo bays or certain loading at lower pop worlds.

 

[mike wightman]

The larger the jump number the more potential worlds you can reach with your speculative cargo...

 

[warwizard]

I was hoping for an analysis of a straight-outbound Escher Staircase route (start at a TL-15 world and have every successive destination lower-tech than the last) with a stripped-down high-Jn sneak return.

Carrying extra drives and crew would be a penalty, but it'd be using all of them in big-ship configuration until the jumpback (1/3 or maybe even down to 1/6 of the time). It'd be tied to the specific route and direction permanently, and would therefore likely have agents at each stop to prepare full cargo loads with minimal layovers.

Yeah, I've been looking at this "shoestring trader" for about 40 years as an excercize. The initial excercizes were with a 100DT asteroid so only 80DT available internally with external cargo and fuel, sometimes just a jump mesh layed over a couple of hundred DT of raw ores. Many of the efforts did everything to reduce the cost, drives were oversized so the ship could J-1 with 300 to 400 DT of external cargo and fuel but were still TL-9 drives that are J-1 rated and had the value of the drives discounted due to the value of the local Cr bought the drive and had it shipped to a B-9 AS system where the asteroid was hollowed out and had the imported drives installed, everything was bought at the lowest TL possible except where the higher tech provided a significant advantage. Once T4 FF&S came out and the TL 15 power plant was priced at per m3, I started using that power plant as it cost less than the TL-10 one for the same power. Many of these designs were extreamly efficient making big profits just hualing bulk external loads. I was always careful to make sure they could be crewed by one crazy old coot that owned the ship. Other things I have tried through the years is installing batteries to hold perhaps 110% of the power needed to jump, with a power plant scaled to recharge the batteries in 6 days of normal operation. If YTU needs contuning power to the jump drive while in jump, the batteries +power plant are scaled to provide this with the batteries at 0 charge at the longest time to breakout.

 

[Grav_Moped]

@warwizard :
I like that idea, though it could be even simpler: say, about a 50Td boat with a starship bridge and a jump drive.

Your "old coot" just finds a likely asteroid, blasts a hole in it, parks the jump cutter in the new hole, then jumps the whole thing to the processing station.

 

[Spinward Flow]

the vicious costs of the higher jump ships without time or unique distance remuneration dissuades from ever operating them.

If you keep playing "the same game" (chasing after ticket revenues, primarily), then you are quite correct.
Why?
Because if ticket prices are "fixed" per jump ... not per parsec ... then starships with more powerful drives are hit with a quadruple whammy to their profit margins.

1. Construction costs are higher
2. More powerful drives require more crew positions
3. Revenue tonnage fraction is lower
4. Fuel requirements increase (to ruinously expensive levels if needing to buy fuel from starports)

You can't do anything about 1.
You can't do anything about 2.
You can't do anything about 3.
The only thing you can mitigate from a design standpoint is 4 ... using a streamlined hull, a fuel purification plant and wilderness refueling at every opportunity (because the "price" for wilderness refueling is "free" if the local authorities do not object).

All of those factors combine (conspire? ) to make high power drive starships "uneconomical" if all you're relying on for profit margins is ticket revenues. Worse, under most nominal conditions, your operating expenses will often exceed what you can reasonably obtain in ticket revenues, even with a 100% full manifest, simply because your starship is so expensive to construct and expensive to crew/sustain/maintain.



However, as we all know ... the REAL profit margins are "not to be had" from dealing in penny ante services like passengers and freight ticket revenues.

The REAL PROFITS are to be found wheeling and dealing in speculative goods arbitrage ... and for THAT business, which is a VERY DIFFERENT GAME from passengers and freight ticket revenues ... you actually DO want a starship with a long jump range (either by single or double jump) in order to move QUICKLY between markets of optimal buy to optimal sell. The faster you can move speculative goods for increased profits, the better ... because speculative goods arbitrage can rapidly exceed Cr2000 per ton profit levels.

When 40-60 tons worth of speculative goods arbitrage can net you profits in the MCr range for a single delivery, it's "okay" to operate in the red when dealing in ticket revenues only. It's something I "found" during my Race to Profitability starship design comparison exercise almost 3 years ago now. All of the "dice rolls" for opportunities were exactly the same (so parallel universe type stuff), so that the difference in capabilities between the two starship designs and business philosophies could be brought to the forefront.

The big takeaway was that the "ideal" ACS scale merchant (who wants to get filthy rich) is a tramp that relies on ticket revenues "to pay the bills" between the "lucky hits" on speculative goods opportunities. The main source of profits doesn't come from ticket revenues, it comes from speculative goods arbitrage. After that, it's largely a question of finding the right "balance point" where your starship can transport useful quantities of "most" of the speculative goods cargoes as quickly as possible to destinations with the highest odds of selling for advantageously high prices (and thus, profit handsomely).

Really low end merchants, like the J1 Free Trader, more or less have to make ends meet using ticket revenues as their primary source of income ... with speculative goods arbitrage providing the occasional windfall. The reason for this is because their short range (1 parsec) severely limits their available destinations at any particular point along their route. With J1, you can't get "anywhere interesting" in a hurry.

J2 merchants, like the J2 Far Trader, are beginning to shift away from depending on ticket revenues as their primary source of income. With a 2 parsec range, it starts becoming practical to get serious about "gambling" with the speculative goods market, when it is advantageous to do so.

At J3+ ... you're probably "never" going to be able to cover your operating expenses on ticket revenues alone. With "clipper" starships capable of J3+, your primary source of income is speculative goods arbitrage. Passenger and freight ticket revenues diminish in importance down to the level of being a "side hustle" to your speculative goods tramp trading arbitrage capability.

What's unexpected (or at least, I didn't anticipate it enough when I first encountered the notion) is that J2+2 range can ALSO break into that J3+ "clipper" starship arena, in which passenger and freight ticket revenues are "nice to have" but what you're mainly after are the speculative goods arbitrage opportunities. The difference is that with collapsible fuel tanks enabling the double jumping performance, you're able to more "flexibly" manage your revenue tonnage fraction between needing to go long distance or short distance to pursue speculative goods arbitrage opportunities.

 

[warwizard]

Not having found my T4 FF&S book yet I opened up my T4 CD case... found the 2nd CD for TNE in the case :-(. Back out to the storage connex to find either the book or the CD.

 

[kilemall]

If you keep playing "the same game" (chasing after ticket revenues, primarily), then you are quite correct.
Why?
Because if ticket prices are "fixed" per jump ... not per parsec ... then starships with more powerful drives are hit with a quadruple whammy to their profit margins.

1. Construction costs are higher
2. More powerful drives require more crew positions
3. Revenue tonnage fraction is lower
4. Fuel requirements increase (to ruinously expensive levels if needing to buy fuel from starports)

You can't do anything about 1.
You can't do anything about 2.
You can't do anything about 3.
The only thing you can mitigate from a design standpoint is 4 ... using a streamlined hull, a fuel purification plant and wilderness refueling at every opportunity (because the "price" for wilderness refueling is "free" if the local authorities do not object).

All of those factors combine (conspire? ) to make high power drive starships "uneconomical" if all you're relying on for profit margins is ticket revenues. Worse, under most nominal conditions, your operating expenses will often exceed what you can reasonably obtain in ticket revenues, even with a 100% full manifest, simply because your starship is so expensive to construct and expensive to crew/sustain/maintain.



However, as we all know ... the REAL profit margins are "not to be had" from dealing in penny ante services like passengers and freight ticket revenues.

The REAL PROFITS are to be found wheeling and dealing in speculative goods arbitrage ... and for THAT business, which is a VERY DIFFERENT GAME from passengers and freight ticket revenues ... you actually DO want a starship with a long jump range (either by single or double jump) in order to move QUICKLY between markets of optimal buy to optimal sell. The faster you can move speculative goods for increased profits, the better ... because speculative goods arbitrage can rapidly exceed Cr2000 per ton profit levels.

When 40-60 tons worth of speculative goods arbitrage can net you profits in the MCr range for a single delivery, it's "okay" to operate in the red when dealing in ticket revenues only. It's something I "found" during my Race to Profitability starship design comparison exercise almost 3 years ago now. All of the "dice rolls" for opportunities were exactly the same (so parallel universe type stuff), so that the difference in capabilities between the two starship designs and business philosophies could be brought to the forefront.

The big takeaway was that the "ideal" ACS scale merchant (who wants to get filthy rich) is a tramp that relies on ticket revenues "to pay the bills" between the "lucky hits" on speculative goods opportunities. The main source of profits doesn't come from ticket revenues, it comes from speculative goods arbitrage. After that, it's largely a question of finding the right "balance point" where your starship can transport useful quantities of "most" of the speculative goods cargoes as quickly as possible to destinations with the highest odds of selling for advantageously high prices (and thus, profit handsomely).

Really low end merchants, like the J1 Free Trader, more or less have to make ends meet using ticket revenues as their primary source of income ... with speculative goods arbitrage providing the occasional windfall. The reason for this is because their short range (1 parsec) severely limits their available destinations at any particular point along their route. With J1, you can't get "anywhere interesting" in a hurry.

J2 merchants, like the J2 Far Trader, are beginning to shift away from depending on ticket revenues as their primary source of income. With a 2 parsec range, it starts becoming practical to get serious about "gambling" with the speculative goods market, when it is advantageous to do so.

At J3+ ... you're probably "never" going to be able to cover your operating expenses on ticket revenues alone. With "clipper" starships capable of J3+, your primary source of income is speculative goods arbitrage. Passenger and freight ticket revenues diminish in importance down to the level of being a "side hustle" to your speculative goods tramp trading arbitrage capability.

What's unexpected (or at least, I didn't anticipate it enough when I first encountered the notion) is that J2+2 range can ALSO break into that J3+ "clipper" starship arena, in which passenger and freight ticket revenues are "nice to have" but what you're mainly after are the speculative goods arbitrage opportunities. The difference is that with collapsible fuel tanks enabling the double jumping performance, you're able to more "flexibly" manage your revenue tonnage fraction between needing to go long distance or short distance to pursue speculative goods arbitrage opportunities.

All correct within its own context, but does not address that cargo slows down unnecessarily because of this unnaturally constrained pricing regimen.

 

[warwizard]

@warwizard :
I like that idea, though it could be even simpler: say, about a 50Td boat with a starship bridge and a jump drive.

Your "old coot" just finds a likely asteroid, blasts a hole in it, parks the jump cutter in the new hole, then jumps the whole thing to the processing station.

Lanthinum grid mesh to wrap around the asteroid and presto a 100DT totally legal jump ship.

 

[Condottiere]

Jump net.

 

[Spinward Flow]

All correct within its own context

At last.
We finally agree on something.

but does not address that cargo slows down unnecessarily because of this unnaturally constrained pricing regimen.

And ... wait. Why did you jump out that window?
Do not conflate the starship operator's business priorities with the services buyer's business priorities.
For one thing, the respective priorities are somewhat adversarial rather than cooperative.

The starship operator wants to generate the highest revenue possible per revenue ton capacity available. If that means needing to make multiple jumps to reach a destination (and therefore requires the sale of multiple tickets), then that's what the starship operator is going to do ... because Enlightened Self Interest™.

The services buyer wants to pay the lowest revenue possible per revenue ton capacity needed. If that means booking on starships that can get there in 1 jump rather than 2, that's the way the tickets will tend to flow.



So, for example ...

A J1 Free Trader and a J2 Far Trader are both scheduled to go to the same destination, 2 parsecs from the point of origin.
The J1 Free Trader will have to bill customers for 2 tickets to reach that destination.
The J2 Far Trader will have to bill customers for 1 ticket to reach that destination.
Guess who the customers will gravitate towards to carry their freight to that specific destination.

Go on ... guess.

However, that's just the Ideal Scenario™ taking place in a vacuum.
What happens when interstellar traffic to a particular world is "intermittent" and not exactly predictable.
The customers may WANT to book for services on a J2 Far Trader (because it will be cheaper for them), but if J2 Far Traders are an "uncommon" occurrence then you start getting into questions of perishable/expiration for some types of cargoes.

This then becomes one of those "a bird in the hand is safer than the one overhead" kinds of situations.

A J2 Far Trader may be cheaper (it is) and faster to transport (it is), when one is available to contract with ... if a J2 Far Trader is "never around when you need one" for time sensitive shipments, services buyers may be in a position of "beggars can't be choosers" as to which types of starships show up to offer contract services. If all you've got are J1 Free Traders stopping by (mostly) with the occasional J2 Far Trader showing up irregularly ... it all comes down to time sensitivity.

If you need a shipment to be delivered "within 30 days of today" and there's a J1 Free Trader at the starport RIGHT NOW which is "going your way" for where you need to send stuff ... are you going to take the "sure thing" (and pay 2 tickets for 2 jumps @ J1) to make your delivery ... OR ... are you going to WAIT and HOPE that a J2 Far Trader will show up in the next 2 weeks and be "lucky enough" that the J2 Far Trader just happens to be going where you need to send your shipment to.

Bird in the hand ... versus the one overhead.

 

[mike wightman]

I have posted this so many times over the years.
A Traveller is character who is now in the adventuring phase of their mid-life crisis whether by choice or accident.
The free trader and the trade rules are designed for the free trader to just about break even just in case the PCs choose to make trade part of their adventuring.

Using a free trader you move freight and cargo and the occasional speculative cargo.
Make enough profit and you can start buying the more expensive speculative trade to make more potential profit.
A big adventure payoff, a few speculative trade successes, and you can pay off the mortgage.

You are now making a lot more money, you can afford to deliberately go to an air/raft dealer and buy as many as you can carry and ship them to a world where you can sell them for a great profit, all the while concentrating on speculative trade.

Make enough money and you buy your jump 2-6 ship outright.

You can sell or hire a crew for your first ship.

I have yet to find a group who can be bothered with the twenty year trade campaign it would take...

Start in the SM in 1105, by the time you are ready to get your jump2-6 ship there has been a frontier war, an Emperor has been assassinated, and there is an Aslan encroachment into the SM.

 

[Carlobrand]

...
Do not conflate the starship operator's business priorities with the services buyer's business priorities.
...

You have to conflate the starship operator's business priorities with the services buyer's business priorities because this setting has megacorporations and other large entities. If the services buyer is sufficiently large and dissatisfied with the starship operator's priorities, the service operator may decide to buy a starship of his own, and the starship operator loses a customer. If he sees enough money in it, he may expand into starship operations and compete head-to-head with the starship operator, offering the incentive of services that meet the priorities of service buyers rather than of starship operators. Arbitrary standards don't tend to endure in a natural economy unless there's some outside power imposing those standards.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Arbitrary standards don't tend to endure in a natural economy unless there's some outside power imposing those standards.

Running subsidized merchants can put a ceiling on cargo rates.

The other thing is that if you're charging per jump, this pushes cargo rates to the cheapest jump cost -- that is, Jump-1. Longer trips will be made up of multiple jump-1s and billed that way. And that yeilds per-parsec pricing, by default!

 

[kilemall]

The scenario you paint is more for starport C- or low pop/low tech planets. The time pressure to go with J1 and pay per parsec would be greater.

But otherwise J2 and J3 should be expected at interstellar average TL and pop 5+ paired worlds. J4+ would be more along the xboat route, or alternate megacorps liner maxed to high speed pairs. There is no standard roll to determine what ships are available for any given target system for the shipper or passenger perspective short of going full Gurps Trader.

Yes shipper and shipowner can be adversarial, but the argument for the Cr1000 per jump does not convince. Of course it’s a game time simplification, and one could refsplain it as a 3I enforced trade promotion standard, but in any reasonable rate negotiation regimen there would be room for lower then Cr1000 for bulk guaranteed runs, and much higher for express speed/special handling/hazardous cargo/dangerous run.

Most players and many refs don’t want to go there but may still want something more rational to make higher jump ships viable. Per parsec fits that bill.

As for ship availability, I would repurpose the cargo lot and passenger roll. This wouldn’t be rolling for actual traffic, just available ships that have room. Add in a negative DM for jump number required.

Use the high passage and major cargo lot roll, the result is the number of ships available that week for the destination rolled for passenger and cargo booking respectively.

In many cases the result will be zero. Add in the number of weeks it would take for the roll to generate 1+ ships, that will be the number of weeks before the destination can be arranged.

Pre booking weeks in advance is probably the norm for scheduled service such as subsidized routes, you can give that impression by quoting a subsidized passage several weeks in advance then report a possible trader arrival at your roll.

To speed along leaving a low pop/low tech backwater, passage/shipping may have to go through a pop 8+ destination.

Final thought- shipper and shipowner does not have to be adversarial, in the cozy high SOC world of megacorps and megalines they could work together to dominate regions.

The megacorps can be the financier of the J4 ships in exchange for guaranteed service, instead of low ranking peddler runs subsidized by the government.

The line gets guaranteed business, maybe a sideline of express service for their other friends, and a paid off ship at the end of the subsidy.

They both suppress their other competitors by shipping products from high value IND and other worlds, at a rate that undercuts any startup competition line or industry/AG, with products that travel well at that rate.

That’s how I justify the Cr1000 jump rate, but if I have players that want to multi jump, I’ll throw all that exposition out in favor of per parsec.

 

[Carlobrand]

Running subsidized merchants can put a ceiling on cargo rates.

The other thing is that if you're charging per jump, this pushes cargo rates to the cheapest jump cost -- that is, Jump-1. Longer trips will be made up of multiple jump-1s and billed that way. And that yeilds per-parsec pricing, by default!

Depends on the price structure; GURPS did a per jump model that worked reasonably well. Put another way, if it costs Cr3000 and 3 weeks to ship from A to D by way of B and C, but I offer to get it there in one week at Cr2500, I am the better deal. Moreover, I have an incentive to build a jump-3 merchantman to run the route profitably. But that doesn't work everywhere. It works out of Mora because there's enough cargo to fill my ship. It doesn't work out of Aramis where they're using subsidized merchants just to be sure planets aren't left isolated from having too little to trade.

 

[Krikkitone]

Depends on the price structure; GURPS did a per jump model that worked reasonably well. Put another way, if it costs Cr3000 and 3 weeks to ship from A to D by way of B and C, but I offer to get it there in one week at Cr2500, I am the better deal. Moreover, I have an incentive to build a jump-3 merchantman to run the route profitably. But that doesn't work everywhere. It works out of Mora because there's enough cargo to fill my ship. It doesn't work out of Aramis where they're using subsidized merchants just to be sure planets aren't left isolated from having too little to trade.

I think this is the problem. RAW (per jump pricing except for speculative cargo) doesn’t make economic sense.
The cargo owner wants the cheapest price that can get from A to D
The ship operator wants the highest price… but importantly it must cover costs… and costs are mostly per jump…. However

A Jump N+1 ship has higher costs per jump and less cargo space than a JumpN ship. So if prices were all per Jump? then J1 would ALWAYS be the ship that makes the most profit for cargos.

However, on a per parsec ticket cost,
A JN+1 ship might more profit than the JN ship (if going between worlds that are at least JN+1 parsecs apart, and if N is not too …a J4 ship will still make more profit on a 12 parsec run than a J6 ship will because of the reduced cargo space excess cost, etc.)

Basically the best ship for a particular run would be the ship that exactly matches it. (up to J3 or 4…. where J5 or J6 are never the best for a route…except for information…where cargo volume doesn’t matter, but speed does)

One way to do it and still keep it fair is to have the price = parsecs, but have the distance decrease the available cargo (all other things being equal)…. So a J1 ship might pickup different cargos (some to its first, some to its second, some to its third).. wheras a J3 ship would have to hope there was enough of the 3 parsec cargo to make it worth their while (and on small worlds without many important worlds in 3 parsecs, they would only work if subsidized)

 

[Grav_Moped]

No it doesn't.
It's not an ipso facto fait accompli.

If all you're doing is J1 ... then YES ... tickets per jump = tickets per parsec.
If you're doing J2+ ... then NO ... tickets per jump DOES NOT EQUAL tickets per parsec.

I shouldn't need to explain this.
Worse yet, I shouldn't need to point it out.

Run the numbers. Above J1, the only way to make a profit at Cr1k/Td per jump (on the canon 1 jump/2 weeks cadence) is to do it in a ship with Size Z Drives (at least in LBB2'81). Anything else above J1 costs more than Cr1k/jump to run.

Spec cargo is a different matter, and ship owners may choose to sell unused hold space at below operating cost. This isn't something one can take for granted when shopping for a shipper though.

So, if cargo goes for Cr1k/Td, it's going at J1, going at J2 on a 5KTd ship with Z Drives, or taking advantage of someone else's generosity.

And if it's going for Cr1k/Td per J1 jump, it's going for Cr1k per parsec, unless someone with a J2 ship wants to try undercutting the market rate, because 1J2 is a little cheaper than 2J1. They still can't get it down to Cr1k/jump except as noted above.

The default becomes per-parsec, and J2 ships are slightly more profitable on 2-parsec jumps. Doesn't extend to J-3 though