Classic Traveller getting stale?

[mike wightman]

The LBB2 trade rules are intended for a jump 1 free trader. Once you have paid off the mortgage you can start saving for your next ship and put aside money for speculative trade.
Your ideal next ship would be one with similar cargo and passenger potential, but with the jump drive etc that you want to allow selecting the best world trade code for your speculative trade.
If you want to game the system have a cargo hold big enough to carry the maximum amount of the largest speculative trade goods and enough passenger capacity for the maximum number of high passengers.

Once you have enough for that second ship to be bought outright and have sufficient reserves to buy speculative trade for your type A and your new ship then hire a crew for your type A and start having fun with your new ship.

 

[Murph]

I always had a ship rich environment, be it asteroid mining boats, local cargo ships moving from planet to planet, station ships for navigation assistance, local police vessels, etc, none with jump drives, but I always figured to keep a starport working you needed traffic sort of like DFW airport or San Antonio airport. So I had many more than listed in the books by at least a factor of 10. I always figured 4-10 ships at a starport at any given time, with lots of inbound and outbound traffic.

 

[Spinward Flow]

If you want to game the system have a cargo hold big enough to carry the maximum amount of the largest speculative trade goods end enough passenger capacity for the maximum number of high passengers.

If using LBB2 for that, the sweet spot is going to be either 40/50/60 tons of cargo capacity available for speculative goods and up to 8 staterooms (plus a steward) for high passengers. Low berths can vary depending on the destinations you intend to service (or be what "leftover tonnage" that can't be dedicated to anything else gets used for).

According the LBB2.81, p47 (the speculative trade goods table) there are only 9 potential cargoes (out of 36 possible) that can potentially exceed 60 tons for cargo lot sizes (and you can always buy partial lots at a 1% handling fee, as detailed on LBB2.81, p48) so even for those 9 cargo types you can still carry them if you want to. Everything else is unlikely to completely dominate your cargo capacity (of 40/50/60 tons).

40 tons is better for ships that intend to service Amber Zone destinations, because there will be no Major Cargo (10 ton increments) going there, only Minor Cargo (5 ton increments) and/or Incidental Cargo (1 ton increments).

60 tons is a pretty good "sweet spot" for small time merchant ships who want to be able to transport valuable commodities (when they can) or act as simple transports (when the speculative cargo on offer isn't worth the trouble to buy).

 

[mike wightman]

So start there - a 60t cargo hold, eight staterooms for passengers (give each crew member a stateroom but have half of them close enough to the passenger staterooms they can be used for overspill with crew double occupancy). A jump 4 drive should be enough to get to a beneficial trade code, M-6 and a power plant 1 letter higher. Stick in a model 7 computer...

remember you pay for this outright from the profits of your type A operation (your second ship may well be another type A to maximize profit

I wonder what I can fit in a 1000t jump 6 hull...

 

[Condottiere]

I doubt you could really compete against dedicated large freighters.

So it really probably does come down to niche areas that can't be profitably taken over by the megacorporations, or that are subsidized by planetary governments, such as small package deliveries.

Or, Non Fungible Tokens, and a scoutship.

 

[mike wightman]

Not interested in competing. I just want a ship that can pay its way without a mortgage - if the profit from passengers and speculative cargo can cover operating costs then you are free to go where you want.

 

[Spinward Flow]

A jump 4 drive should be enough to get to a beneficial trade code, M-6 and a power plant 1 letter higher.

Funny you should come to the exact same conclusions I just did (albeit with M4 instead of M6) ...

Maneuver-6, particularly with LBB2 standard drives, is punishingly expensive in small ships (the 10Pn fuel formula bites smaller ships harder) and puts some pretty severe technological constraints on the drives (usually needs to be TL=13-15 in order to make things work). At TL=12, you're working with (at most) N-class standard drives, that yields rating 6 inside a 433 ton form factor.

So what you wind up with is a ship that needs H/M/N drives for jump-4/maneuver-6/power plant-6 using LBB2.81 and LBB3.81 @ TL=12.
That combination of drives totals 108 tons.
In a 400 ton form factor, you're looking at also needing 160 tons for jump fuel plus another 60 tons for power plant fuel.
Bridge plus model/4 computer (minimum required) will run you another 20+4 tons.

At that point, you've spent 352 tons out of 400 available ... and you don't even have staterooms for crew, fire control for turrets, or even passenger and cargo space allocated yet.

Higher tech levels (13+) will let you use bigger drives and go for larger hull sizes ... but that's getting EXPENSIVE to build (and overhaul) ...

 

[Grav_Moped]

By the strictest letter of the Bk2 trade rules, you can't fill a 1000Td ship reliably.
You can barely run a 600 Td on a profit if subsidized. And that only if you take every available cargo plus your one load of speculative.

But yeah, the rules mechanics of CT point to low traffic densities. Only with GT was the traffic density suddenly at the stratospheric levels.

Absolutely, you can't -- let alone the 4-5KTd TL-15 ships.

This is where the idea that LBB2 may only be describing what's left over after the big ships take everything else comes in. I don't think it's ever stated outright, though -- nor, obviously, the transition point from "this is the world's entire outbound cargo for destination X" (LBB2 in a small-ship universe) to "this is what's left over after the megacorp freighters scooped up most of it" (LBB2 and Merchant Prince in a LBB2+LBB5 universe) is/was.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Maneuver-6, particularly with LBB2 standard drives, is punishingly expensive in small ships (the 10Pn fuel formula bites smaller ships harder) and puts some pretty severe technological constraints on the drives (usually needs to be TL=13-15 in order to make things work).

Any maneuver above Jn is costly in LBB2'81 in smaller ships. At Jn or below, it's relatively easy -- though not necessarily cheap.

 

[aramis]

I wonder what I can fit in a 1000t jump 6 hull...

Bk2-81

Item	Td	MCr	Notes
Hull	1000	100	needed custom since drive size
Bridge	20	10
PP X=6	67	176
MD E=1	9	20
JD X=6	115	220	dt=191
PPF	60	0
JDF 1j6	600	0
1 hardpoint &FC	1	.1
Crew SR	40	5	Crew need: P N M 6E G (any bigger would add 5)
Model/6	7	55
Payload	81	-
total	1000	586.1 527.49 474.741	Single one-off; 10% off (either multiple, or a standard in YTU) 19% off (.9×.9)

Bk2 77

Item	Td	MCr	Notes
Hull	1000	100	needed custom since drive size
Bridge	20	10
PP H=1	25	64
MD H=1	15	32
JD Z=6	125	240	DT 160
PPF	10	0
JDF 1j6	600	0
1 hardpoint &FC	1	.1
Crew SR	36	4.5	Crew need: P N M 5E G (any bigger would add 5)
Model/3	3	18	In safe areas a 2/Bis gets enough, but to be able to actually use the thing, you need 5 CPU at a time, and 8 total...
Payload	165
total	1000	468.6 421.74 379.566	Single one-off; 10% off (either multiple, or a standard in YTU) 19% off (.9×.9)

Bk2-77, despite the differences in the Drive Performance Table requiring bigger drives overall, is cheaper for low-G high jump than Bk2-81.
Further, the lower total drive tonnage thanks to a much smaller PP has a knock-on effect on an engineer less, and half the size and abuout 2/5 the price of computer... at 160 Td of payload, it can chase those bigger cargos.

Bk2 costs per jump 6 per payload ton, assuming one-off, 2 jumps per month

Item	Bk2 81	Bk2-77	Bk5-80
Payment	1 221 042.0​	976 250.0​	1 263 958.5​
Fuel	3 150 000.0​	3 025 000.0​	3 150 000.0​	Refined assumed.
Salaries	19 200.0​	17 200 .0​	10 500.0​
Life Support	20 000.0​	18 000.0​	10 000.0​
Annual Maintenance Share	23 444.0​	18 744.0​	25 279.5​	1/25 of Annual maintenance, RU next Cr1
======================	=========	=========	=========	=========================
Cost/Jump, ship	4 433 686.0​	4 055 194.0​	4 459 737.5​
Payload tonnage	81.0​	165.0​	142.0​
Cost/Jump/Ton	54 736.9​	24 577.0​	31 406.7​	Round up next Cr0.1

Remember: ships exactly at 1000 Td don't need command crew.

Bk5-80 J6 1000Td TL15 B Jn/Pn 6 Tons 1000 TL 15 DesTL Comp Model 6 Command 0 Plt 1 Nav 1 Engr 2 Gnny Medic 1 Service 0

Tonnages Bridge 20 Computer 7 JD 70 MD 1G 20 PP 60 Turret (1x1) 1 Fuel, Jump 600 Fuel, PP 60 SR 20 Cargo 142

MCrCosts Hull 6 SL 80 Bridge 5 Computer 55 JD 280 MD 1G 4 PP 180 Turret (1x1) 0.2 SR 2.5 MCr Total 606.7

MoPymt 2527917 AM Share 50559 Salaries 21000 Life Support/mo 20,000 Fuel, 2xJump 600000 Fuel, PP 30000

 

[mike wightman]

That is a very useful analysis, thanks

 

[kilemall]

By the strictest letter of the Bk2 trade rules, you can't fill a 1000Td ship reliably.
You can barely run a 600 Td on a profit if subsidized. And that only if you take every available cargo plus your one load of speculative.

But yeah, the rules mechanics of CT point to low traffic densities. Only with GT was the traffic density suddenly at the stratospheric levels.

To me LBB2 is tramp bulk steamer, the Merchant Prince LBB7 probably should have had something more in line with bulk corporate shipping, predicated on ships built on cash and favored shipping contracts, luxury liners, etc.

Rather then the bitter cardboard taste of the offered trade system.

 

[Grav_Moped]

The problem with the LBB7 trade system is they were stuck with basing it on the LBB2 system and it's flat Cr1K-per-ton-per-jump pricing. Even scaled up, only TL-15 ships (5KTd, LBB2) can make an unsubsidized profit on J-2 at that rate; nothing can at J-3 or above. As I've suggested before, when the only profitable jump is a Jump-1, either the shipping market resolves to per-parsec pricing or nothing moves more than one parsec except spec cargo. (And even per-parsec doesn't help beyond J-3 without bonuses for higher Jn.)

Their generic outbound cargo with characteristic DMs was better than nothing, but not by much. And it didn't do anything to support ships in the gap between 4-600Td and the 1-2000Td typical freighters -- let alone the really big TL-15 ships, or the giants that LBB5 allowed -- as @kilemall notes above.

 

[whartung]

The problem with the LBB7 trade system is they were stuck with basing it on the LBB2 system and it's flat Cr1K-per-ton-per-jump pricing.

Well, they were obvious happy with it. They pretty much stuck with the B7 system through MT, TNE, T4, and I think even Gurps picked it up.

 

[Tobias]

A quick fix I used to apply was to modify freight rates and passenger fares with a roll on the value table, with a DM + Jump Number for Jump-2 and above. (And also Steward skill for passengers IIRC.)
Never made much sense to me that passages and freight rates had fixed rates set in stone across all of known space.

 

[mike wightman]

Almost as if there was some cartel fixing the price to their own advantage...

 

[Tobias]

... across all of know space, crossing the borders of even sworn enemies.

Sorry, but no. But nevermind the explainifications: This static approach is just plain no fun. It's also my major problem with Bk7 trade: It was all about finding a route that works, and then running that route ad infinitum. Bk2 trade was random and nonsensical, but in that it was more adventurous: Weird trading goods were discovered in weird places, and maybe you could find a way to profit.

Also, I see no reason why "freight" should be the boring "let's fill the hold for Cr1000 a ton" option. A transport job on a small free trader could be highly paid and/or risky for many reasons. Same with passengers. Varying these things is interesting, and it only stands to reason that with increasing risk or desparation, the pay should vary as well.

 

[mike wightman]

Then you are in the real of adventuring, speculative trade leads, extra renumeration for carrying cargo of a more 'dubious' nature, that sort of thing.

Such as the merchant selling passage to veterans consisting of piling as many as they can fit in the cargo hold on a bed of straw... (Alien Realms)

One ship fitted with refrigeration cargo capacity had just completed a turn for a meat packing consortium on Emerald, and was heading back for yet another.
The captain was taking on passengers for the return trip, and soon filled up with soldiers willing to meet his price- Cr5000 per head, so to speak.
The accommodations were charming, to say the least, twenty men per bay, straw for the lucky few who got a bed at all, and soldiers would have to bring their own food. The rules were simple, to match-all weapons to be checked with the crew, no fighting, and all complaints would be ignored.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Almost as if there was some cartel fixing the price to their own advantage...

Running a Subsidized Merchant, an R2 (J2 version of it, implied by the 400Td standard hull), or Subsidized Liner on a route places a cap on freight rates. Others can charge rates that try to recover their costs, but shippers need only wait until the next subsidized ship comes through to get the subsidized Cr1000/Td/Jump rates.

Or, as I pointed out, if nobody makes money on J2 or higher, nothing moves more than 1 parsec at a time and longer trips end up charged per-parsec anyhow because those trips get purchased one jump at a time.

 

[kilemall]

Running a Subsidized Merchant, an R2 (J2 version of it, implied by the 400Td standard hull), or Subsidized Liner on a route places a cap on freight rates. Others can charge rates that try to recover their costs, but shippers need only wait until the next subsidized ship comes through to get the subsidized Cr1000/Td/Jump rates.

Or, as I pointed out, if nobody makes money on J2 or higher, nothing moves more than 1 parsec at a time and longer trips end up charged per-parsec anyhow because those trips get purchased one jump at a time.

Theoretically there should be a modifier for per jump of several parsecs, for higher demand of faster cheaper per parsec shipping, more lots should be available.

Given our age of sail timing, shipping cheapest and warehousing for months in advance of demand would be a definite business model.