Ageing by Tech Level

[Straybow]

Looking at Boughene/Regina (SM 1904), Pop 5, the Imperial representative is a Knight (Soc B).
The world/station's governing Executive Council members (the top eschelon of the Self-perpetuating Oligarchy) top out at Soc A, regardless of their formal governmental titles.

However, it's also the corporate headquarters for the megacorporation General Products. It's entirely possible that some of GP's high-level executives are Soc C or possibly higher, at least in effect if not formal title, due to the megacorporation's scale and economic power. Nonetheless, if they're landed nobility their fiefs are not on Boughene, nor do they entitle Boughene itself to a vote in the Moot.

Such Noble executives would not be in the direct line of authority over the planetary Knight (which passes through the Count of Menorb).

I'd expect that worlds whose ranking noble is Soc C or higher could have planetary-government leaders with what amounts to Soc B (but without the Imperial title, unless explicitly granted).

I can't imagine that the headquarters of a megacorp could have a mere Pop 5, roughly 10k but in any case substantially less than 100k. Can you actually picture running a megacorp headquarters with only a few thousand hands? No way.

It gets worse. For each employee one can expect an average of at least two non-employee family members. In addition, economically speaking, for each corporate employee there would be four or more jobs outside the corporation, from stores and restaurants directly serving employees as a significant portion of their total revenue to businesses unrelated to the megacorp serving employees and dependents of those non-megacorp businesses. Employees of these businesses likewise are going to average at least two family members not working directly with the business.

Allowing for some crossover (one business employee with a spouse who is employed at another business) we still come to the megacorp directly employing around 7-12% of the total population. So for a middle pop 5 world of 10k the megacorp HQ employs 700-1200 people. You couldn't manage a decent sized nowhere-near-mega corp (say, Dell Computers) with so few. At high pop 5 with 50k the size would still be laughably inadequate. Apple HQ in Cupertino (still nowhere near megacorp size) has around 12k workers, which couldn't be supported on a 50k world. Even a ten-fold increase in productivity couldn't allow a mere 12k to manage a sector-wide junior megacorp.

Soc is not confined to noble ranks. Soc is social standing and influence. The CEO and the Board Chair of General Products or equivalent would both probably be Soc E unless newly elected and the market were unsure of their quality. That's how much economic sway they hold. Other C-suite and Directors would be Soc C and Soc D. Division Pres and VPs could be Soc B, maybe Soc C if the division were the core of the business.

Somebody ruling a high Pop

 

[Spinward Flow]

Can you actually picture running a megacorp headquarters with only a few thousand hands?

At TL=13 with "robots" and expert systems software magnifying productivity?
Easily.

Boughene Station hosts a population of 600,000 (or so) aboard orbital facilities.
If General Products were even 5% of that population, that's still some 30,000 employees ... enough for a "minor" megacorporate headquarters.

It would also make General Products a "too big to fail" employer within Boughene Station's internal economy, letting General Products "throw their (economic) weight around" very nearly with impunity in a place ruled by self-perpetuating oligarchs under a law level of ONE (1) ... just enough to sign contracts under, but not enough for corporate execs to have to worry about legal red tape entanglements (that they don't want).

Makes perfect sense to me why GP would want to be based out of Boughene Station. They get to be the biggest fish in a small pond there, allowing them to wield outsized influence over system affairs. They basically get a "fiefdom" (of sorts) without needing to directly pay for and "own" everything there is going on in the Boughene system. They can reap the profits to be made without necessarily being forced to shoulder the blame for anything bad that happens.

 

[Straybow]

Haha, brain fart. Yes, Pop 5 is 100k not 10k. Serves me for staying up late, falling asleep and not reviewing before posting.

Apparently TL 13 automation can't calculate a jump, navigate a ship, or other really well defined and modeled tasks. I don't hold out much hope for productivity gains in a massive corporate bureaucracy thousands of years old. Same reason why Traveller "standard hull configurations" don't correspond to well designed ships even after thousands of years game time and decades of game design time.

On a tangent, a megacorp could build a station that size with the change collected from employee lounges and make their own Law 1 company town in any star system. With trillions of sophonts to draw from they'd have no difficulty recruiting employees and independent entrepreneurs to fill out the local economy in a decade. The only reason to not do so is to enjoy the perks of high Soc status in a larger and higher class society.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Apparently TL 13 automation can't calculate a jump, navigate a ship, or other really well defined and modeled tasks.

Sometimes you need to use an image to explain things properly. Fortunately, I know where to find such an image ...

And if that isn't convincing enough ... how about this 34 second video (of which only the first 17 seconds are relevant to this part of the discussion) ...

 

[Grav_Moped]

Haha, brain fart. Yes, Pop 5 is 100k not 10k. Serves me for staying up late, falling asleep and not reviewing before posting.

Apparently TL 13 automation can't calculate a jump, navigate a ship, or other really well defined and modeled tasks. I don't hold out much hope for productivity gains in a massive corporate bureaucracy thousands of years old. Same reason why Traveller "standard hull configurations" don't correspond to well designed ships even after thousands of years game time and decades of game design time.

On a tangent, a megacorp could build a station that size with the change collected from employee lounges and make their own Law 1 company town in any star system. With trillions of sophonts to draw from they'd have no difficulty recruiting employees and independent entrepreneurs to fill out the local economy in a decade. The only reason to not do so is to enjoy the perks of high Soc status in a larger and higher class society.

On the other hand, you've solved part of my problem with Boughene Station: What are 600,000 people doing living in a single tin can in orbit around a gas giant and a particularly inhospitable planet? The answer: A megacorp headquarters is going to have a huge personnel footprint. For example, Google has about 120,000 employees, and in the context of the real world (this one) it's definitely a megacorp.

Their presence on the Station is going to mostly be administrative and executive staff, R&D (though mostly just overall management and direction rather than the actual technical work for the latter), and their families. Canonically, despite the Class A starport, there isn't much if any actual production capacity, just maintenance. Scale up for operations on scores of worlds, then crop it back down to just the upper executive echelons, and maybe 100k employees and another 200k dependents isn't an unreasonable approximation. Then there are the contractors, subcontractors, and their dependents as well.

 

[Straybow]

Offhand, I'd say a Traveller-scale megacorp would need about 100k per subsector with activity, plus 100k for major ops hubs, plus 10k for any planet/system with a substantial chunk of business (probably most hi-pop and ind planets within active area). The first and second would often be lumped together, having a subsector HQ at a major hub. That's just the minimum...

 

[Straybow]

Sometimes you need to use an image to explain things properly. Fortunately, I know where to find such an image ...

<LBB 8>

And if that isn't convincing enough ... how about this 34 second video (of which only the first 17 seconds are relevant to this part of the discussion) ...

<Musk fanboy stuff>

No, I mean the crew member sits down at the workstation and starts the Nav program, which automatically retrieves current ship status and position and star system info. Crew enters destination system from drop-down menu. Nav automatically retrieves current star system data for destination. X minutes later the jump solution is calculated and the workstation chimes. Solution is good for about a day, so whenever the crew feels ready, click on the "Jump" button, enter Admin password to confirm, and we're done.

 

[kilemall]

No, I mean the crew member sits down at the workstation and starts the Nav program, which automatically retrieves current ship status and position and star system info. Crew enters destination system from drop-down menu. Nav automatically retrieves current star system data for destination. X minutes later the jump solution is calculated and the workstation chimes. Solution is good for about a day, so whenever the crew feels ready, click on the "Jump" button, enter Admin password to confirm, and we're done.

One IMTU wrinkle I've added is the jump solution assumes the ship hitting the exact jump point calculated at the exact speed at X time- else the gravitic and subspace elements have altered because planets and stars keep moving. Delay and you have to recalc for a different point in time and space to execute. It's more like a bombing run then an easy peasy transition, and the navigator is the bombardier taking control of the ship for the final run-in.

 

[Spinward Flow]

One IMTU wrinkle I've added is the jump solution assumes the ship hitting the exact jump point calculated at the exact speed at X time- else the gravitic and subspace elements have altered because planets and stars keep moving. Delay and you have to recalc for a different point in time and space to execute. It's more like a bombing run then an easy peasy transition, and the navigator is the bombardier taking control of the ship for the final run-in.

A reasonably fair interpretation.
Terra moves a distance of the planetary diameter around its orbit every 7.5 minutes, so there are definitely going to be "windows of Now-Now-Now" continuous computation involved right up until making the transition into jump space.

 

[Grav_Moped]

One IMTU wrinkle I've added is the jump solution assumes the ship hitting the exact jump point calculated at the exact speed at X time- else the gravitic and subspace elements have altered because planets and stars keep moving. Delay and you have to recalc for a different point in time and space to execute. It's more like a bombing run then an easy peasy transition, and the navigator is the bombardier taking control of the ship for the final run-in.

And this is where Nav skill comes in -- figuring out the corrections on the fly without doing a full re-computation if the ship isn't quite going to hit the time/location mark exactly.

 

[mike wightman]

A reasonably fair interpretation.
Terra moves a distance of the planetary diameter around its orbit every 7.5 minutes, so there are definitely going to be "windows of Now-Now-Now" continuous computation involved right up until making the transition into jump space.

It moves a lot further than you think since the entire solar system is moving relative to the galactic centre and the galaxy itself is moving relative to an arbitrary fixed point. Put another way unless the jump drive is mapped to be jumping relative to something it is going to miss by a long way due to temporal uncertainty - which is why in universe I don't think they have uncertainty, the time in jump is known to the ship. otherwise, it cannot be accurate to 1000km...

 

[mike wightman]

And this is where Nav skill comes in -- figuring out the corrections on the fly without doing a full re-computation if the ship isn't quite going to hit the time/location mark exactly.

This is edition specific - in CT all the navigator does is carry program cassettes to and from the computer, make the tea, and study until their skill level is high enough that they can join in writing the generate program and jump cassettes

 

[Spinward Flow]

It moves a lot further than you think since the entire solar system is moving relative to the galactic centre and the galaxy itself is moving relative to an arbitrary fixed point.

You're not jumping from (or to) an "absolute" frame of reference.
It's all relative(-ity).

ALL motion in space is ... relative ... in that sense, rather than being absolute in reference to an arbitrary fixed point.
Arbitrary fixed point in space navigation is nigh useless in a universe where EVERYTHING is in motion (galactic cluster, galaxy rotation, star system, planetary orbit, everything).

Interstellar navigation is all about figuring out the vectors in a moving frame of reference, not in a static one.

 

[mike wightman]

Which is why you have to be careful - it's no use the fanon declaring temporal scatter without realising how the various reference frames have to be defined.

Canon states that a ship retains its velocity of entry when it drops out of jump, but velocity is relative. So do you just pick up the reference frame of the ship on entry and dump it into the destination system? The entire destination system will have moved a long way from your desired arrival point if your jump has unknown duration to you.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The entire destination system will have moved a long way from your desired arrival point if your jump has unknown duration to you.

Yes, the destination system will have moved ... but it will move in a predictable way.
If the motion of the origin system and the destination system are not predictable, you're stuck with a Zeno's Paradox that prevents you from getting ANYWHERE (at which point, jump tech "doesn't work" anymore).

 

[mike wightman]

Maybe pictures will help:

 

[Straybow]

Which is why you have to be careful - it's no use the fanon declaring temporal scatter without realising how the various reference frames have to be defined.

Canon states that a ship retains its velocity of entry when it drops out of jump, but velocity is relative. So do you just pick up the reference frame of the ship on entry and dump it into the destination system? The entire destination system will have moved a long way from your desired arrival point if your jump has unknown duration to you.

You're aiming at a gravity bubble, typically it's the primary's 100 D radius. Jumpspace connects your current location to the gravity bubble (if you're aimed correctly) and drags the path with it. The ±10% doesn't matter so much since the 100 D shadow will precipitate you out of jump. If you're jumping to the outer system farther from the primary, then you need to lead the target and that ±10% could set you far away from your intended destination. You might end up precipitated by the primary's shadow.

If you have a jump cassette, it contains everything needed to compensate for your time on target to the jump point, valid for a whole week. Using a stale cassette could again drop you far from your desired destination in the system, but you would still likely be precipitating out at the primary's 100 D, since it's easy to get dragged into it the way jumps are calculated.

 

[BackworldTraveller]

The thing is that the motion of the major bodies are defined by gravity and as such as easily predictable in systems with single stars; trickier with two and the three-body problem is a nightmare (although to have planets the solution probably resolves to something basically predictable in the short term). In any case, the quality of the IISS survey is critical. Lacking that you have a very different prospect to work with - and you need a better-than-good telescope just to see your target.

The issue that is the elephant in the room will be the structure of the jump-space. How predictable is that? That AIs cannot do jump suggests that it isn't mechanically predictable and the best navigators have some level of intuition that bypasses the chaos of the underlying system. That it is chaotic is also suggested by the dead zones and other noted phenomena.

What is jump-space like near a black hole? Horrible or simple? Could be either.

 

[mike wightman]

Where are you getting AIs can't do jump from?

Pilot robots are a canonical thing in the OTU.

 

[whartung]

Canon states that a ship retains its velocity of entry when it drops out of jump, but velocity is relative. So do you just pick up the reference frame of the ship on entry and dump it into the destination system? The entire destination system will have moved a long way from your desired arrival point if your jump has unknown duration to you.

The game is that it's within the margin of your M drive.

Any reference will do, you just have to compensate. The relative vectors of each system will be well know to the navigation community (it would be part of the system survey). The system velocity vector should be quite stable.

All you need to do is determine your velocity relative to the primary in your current system, jump, then determine your velocity relative to the new primary. This is enough to discern the difference between the two systems. All of these system vectors can be normalized to some norm, any norm.

Given that, part of the navigation task is to compensate for all of these things.

The two factors are the relative system velocities plus the orbital velocity (and path) of the destination planet. Both impact "where stuff will be" when you arrive at the new system.

This is why I believe that there are common jump lanes between nearby systems. If ships are going from A to B, then there will be value in building up velocity in the current system as you head to 100D to minimize the trip time when you arrive at the other system. Given such values, most going from A to B will be performing the same maneuvers, so there will be a noticeable pattern of ships take specific vectors while leaving the system. Casually you can say that if you see a ship on vector X, they're probably heading for system B. Not guaranteed, you can jump anywhere, but given the space and time to do so, you would optimize the route, and it's no secret so "everyone else" would do it also. It would just be common knowledge or all of the nav computers coming to the same conclusion, or a mix of both.

Those routes are what I would consider a "jump lane". They're informal, and ah hoc, but they exist.

It's a good thing because it can help minimize patrol space. Patrol can formalize such lanes. Starship control can direct traffic to these lanes.

Similarly, there will be common incoming streams as well. Nobody wants to chase a planet in orbit if they jump in front of it and reduce arrival time.

Note, these vectors may not be intuitive at a glance, they're not based on the positions of the systems, but of the planets relative to each other within the systems. While System A may be "northwest" of System B, the jump lane can easily be "southeast".

There are other considerations. For example, if the destination is consider "hostile", or whatever, the ships may go to great lengths in their current system to establish the perfect maneuvering vector so as to minimize the time to get to orbit once they arrive. The overall time would be the same, it's just a matter of which system you wish to spend the time in.