RainOfSteel
SOC-14 1K
The commerce rules in CT and T20 seem to have some, how do I describe it, problems. Maybe everyone else already knows about this, but I’d still like to discuss. I did do a search for “Commerce” across all the forums, but none of their titles seemed to suggest a similar topic.
I’m specifically excluding MT, TNE, Book 7, T4, or GT here. I have no idea what was in MT or T4; have not finished reading GT: Far Trader; and the TNE rules are for a different type of trading environment, an apparent development of Book 7: Merchant Princes type mechanics.
Also, this discussion wanders from shipping economics over to starship design and construction and back again. I didn’t really know whether or not to post it to the Fleet, or the Research Station, and so I decided to put it here.
So, the basics of commerce are:
Freight: Goods shipped for someone else, where the shipper is paid a base of 1000Cr/ton shipped.
Cargo: Goods purchased, shipped by the shipper, and then sold, hopefully for a handsome profit.
Mail: I'll leave mail out of this discussion.
I have no problem with these basic concepts. The problem comes in with the base rate for freight, and to some degree, the profitability and sale values of low value goods shipped as Cargo.
If I'm a starship operator at an agricultural world, it's not unreasonable to assume that I might find lots of grain as freight or cargo. The T20 chart has grain at the top of a list of cargos (where lowest values are sorted from top to bottom).
I, as a starship operator, do whatever is necessary to assure that I am shipping that grain (to fill out the hold, whatever). Say it's a 10 ton lot. The owning broker, who is paying me to ship the grain, gives me 10,000Cr. In order for this broker to make any money, the destination sale value of that grain had better be more than 10kCr plus the broker's original purchase price.
Here's where the problem is. This sets the _minimum_ price, as far as the owning broker is concerned, at well over 1kCr/ton of grain. The question is, can anyone at the point of sale afford to buy grain for 1kCr/ton? Bear in mind that it will likely be a local broker buying it, and potentially selling it to a distributor for collection and disbursement to manufacturers (bakeries, fermentation plants, etc.). Each set of hands it passes through raises the price for the end-consumer.
Now, around where I live, the undiscounted prices for a high-end mass-market brand-name loaf of bread is about $1.98, give or take a little. No name store brands go down to $0.99, and the stuff I usually buy, whole grain and multi-grain exotic brands go for almost $3.60--4.00/loaf. Now, this is almost certainly the result of shipment of grain from US farmers to manufacturers here in the US (local bakeries, etc.). Does anyone believe it costs $1000 or $2000 or more US Dollars to ship that grain (it's hard to convert IC 1116 Era credits to 20th Century Terra US Dollars, but I have little doubt the credit is stronger than the modern dollar; and T20 mentions that an Imperial Credit is worth 3 modern US dollars)? I don't, but that's what interstellar shipment does, it tacks on a fortune in additional costs which _must_ be passed on to the consumer. Who else, in the end, is going to pay for them? Government subsidy? Maybe for part of it, but not for all. I think if we had to bear a $2000/grain-ton shipped from farmers to market, that each loaf would cost $10-40 US Dollars, minimum (it's hard for me to tell exactly where the real cost would be, but I think it wouldn't be pretty). Ordinary people out to buy a loaf of bread made with grain with this huge cost load would get to the store and go into sticker shock, fall over, flop around like a fish out of water, and then be carried away in an ambulance.
On the face of it, to me at least, low-value goods can’t ever be economically shipped as long as the base rate is 1kCr/ton, due to the fact that no one at the destination would _likely_ be willing to pay, or more importantly, be able to _afford_ to pay (if you don’t have the money, you can’t pay, except by going into debt, and going into debt to buy food is a desperate measure that should not be considered standard practice, because it can’t go on for very long). This is bad, because reducing the base rate to lower the end-cost of such goods would be a hammer blow to a starship operators ability to pay a starship’s mortgage.
It’s worse for speculative traders, who want a far better return than the mere base rate; they are, in fact, speculating for exactly that purpose, to beat the base rate. T20 lists the base value of grain at 300Cr/ton. A very high broker skill and some good rolls could do well with this and push the price above 1kCr/ton, but as I’ve outlined above, I don’t think brokers or even distributors would be lining up to buy grain at such inflated prices.
For high value goods, this is not so much of a problem, as the shipping fee can wind up being only a small part of the overall cost. Does this mean that only high-value goods would be shipped? Maybe. But this is where I drag in “atmosphere” and “feel” for the OTU. The OTU is, in many ways, designed to provide, in bits and pieces, the feel of classic Science Fictions from the 50s-70s (yes, there is classic SF written after this and even before this, but this is still the primary era); although this in no way reflects on the validity of other types of settings, from grand space opera to far-future utopia, post-apocalypse or even cyberpunk. However, for the OTU , I always got the impression, from canon writings, that there is a huge amount of trade going on in the Imperium. While some worlds are backwaters where only a few ships show up, and indeed there are isolationist worlds where ships hardly ever arrive, the majority of Imperial worlds actively participate in trade, and in most cases, huge amounts of trade (ok, so it’s only an impression, but a lot of cannon writing backs it). One highly classic vision of Science Fiction is the High Population world, exemplified in Asimov’s Trantor from the Foundation series, a world covered entirely by one immense city spanning the globe, with average surface height of the city in the hundreds of meters, and many structures reaching kilometers of height, plus deep sub-surface extensions for city services, the city even extends out onto continental shelves. Asimov states the population is forty billion (never mind that the world city described has enough volume to hold the whole population in a manner that all would have palatial size residences with plenty left over for business, entertainment, and anything else you’d care to name; although of course, Asimov’s descriptions are of an enormously crowded place, so one can imagine that vast tracts of the world-city are unmaintainable and abandoned by the time of Hari Seldon or after, which is when most of the descriptions are good for), and that little or no food at all is grown here, and that many nearby agricultural planets are dedicated to growing all the food necessary to feed Trantor’s population. Those worlds send their grain, livestock, and other foodstuffs to Trantor aboard titanic freighters.
Given that the OTU has many similar high population worlds, I’d imagine similar circumstances, where nearby agricultural worlds supplied many foodstuffs, including low-value foodstuffs, the staples that keep the main population alive. High end technology for food production seems rarely mentioned in most Classic SF, unless it is to say that food provided this way is substandard (yes, there are exceptions); in a real SF universe, one can only imagine what TL-15 Food Production is like, because the Imperium seems it’s at TL-8 or 9 Food Production most of the time.
I’m pretty sure none of this is dealt with in either CT or T20 because the rules are meant to provide a framework by which starship operators can run and pay for their vessels, and be a vehicle by which adventures can be induced. The source and destination don’t matter as far as these published Commerce Rules matter. I, however, cannot help but try to visualize an integrated system that would really work (even if it’s only an estimation or even a WAG, something that sounds good can, in a game, be just as good as something that does work).
What about multiple jumps? If a destination world is more than one jump away, the cost to ships low-value cargos begins to truly soar (even high-value cargos can come under attack when shipping them too many jumps, and that’s just in CT and T20; under the Book 7/TNE style rules, it takes only a few jumps to make anything unprofitable to ship).
I don’t have an immediate solution available. Changing either the base rate or the starship construction rules is problematical, and especially changing the construction rules would make anything I designed incompatible with any other TU.
I’ve got some issues with Shipyards in Traveller (they’re barely dealt with), and I think large-scale industrialized high TL shipyards, whose size and capability would make land-bound dry-docks for building ocean going vessels characterized by 20th Century Terra shipyards pale by comparison, would provide huge economies over what is mentioned in the rules. Further, current starship rules do not take into account what a shipyard (any shipyard, not just the types I envision) would charge to assemble the ship. Right now, starship assembly is free (either that, or the costs noted are a shipyard’s cost-to-purchaser for final assembly of a combination of those elements, though it is most certainly not presented that way). Furthermore, as GURPS Far Trader (and Gordon R. Dickson’s famous Dorsai series) notes, some worlds do better at some things than others, and even for a world with a TL sufficient to do everything better, Comparative Trade Advantage can mean a disparate collection of scattered worlds can wind up making bits and pieces of the components and sub-assemblies that go into a starship. What am I babbling about? I’m going right back to shipping costs. As the T20 chart notes, starship weaponry has a cost equal to that noted in the constructions rules, and from that I make the leap to assume that the base cost for speculative purchase of any starship component is that listed in the design rules (which is why I feel those costs are not the costs charged by the shipyard to the new vessel’s buyer, but rather the manufacturer costs). No starship construction system seems to take into account the costs of shipping various components between the stars to the final point of assembly. It’s easily conceivable that some components must be shipped more than one jump, or multiple parsec jumps at priority rates (depending on which commerce rules are being used).
What about insurance? Are banks going to let buyer’s go around in something that costs tens to even hundreds of millions of credits without insurance? Not a chance. Worse, the bank is not only going to make the buyer pay for accident, liability, loss, piracy, and war insurances, but will also pass along the cost of owner-theft insurance as a guard against skipping (although there may be some facility for the bank to cash out the policy after a set number of years when the owner has sufficient equity in the vessel, and to have a large fraction of the owner’s costs in having paid for that insurance up front returned later).
Basically, between high TL shipyards operating at high TL economies, using advanced construction systems, advanced tools, etc., would allow for substantial discounts in assembly costs (which, admitted, aren’t being charged in any of the design rules to date). But I’ve been looking at altering some component costs, etc., plus adding the additional realism of insurance, assembly/labor charges (despite their additional complications/complexity), and in the end, will probably lower the costs of vessels, as opposed to altering the construction system itself (though, as noted, I haven’t come to any decision). Lower starship costs will go hand in hand with a more smoothed out Actual Value Table in the commerce rules, mostly to handle what GURPS Far Traders calls “The Rule of One”; thus lower costs go with lower overall profitability, which I don’t view as a bad thing. Having a starship should not, in my campaign world (YMMV in your TU), be a free ticket to instant wealth. Example: Using CT rules, shipping but a single 10mCr lot of computers for 30% purchase value and 400% sale value--a not at all impossible feat in the CT rules with Broker-5 or 6 from a Book-7 merchant character--is a profit of 37,000,000Cr, or enough to immediately purchase another starship, completely, without having to fiddle around with payments, or for the daring, slapping 37mCr down at a bank would probably be sufficient collateral, with good references, proven skills, and no criminal background, to take out _multiple_ loans and launch a fleet of new vessels (at the 10% discount rate for standard designs, of course). Such an event, IMTU, would be reserved for a major climax point of a campaign, with many obstacles overcome and opponents defeated, not the ho-hum routine of ordinary speculation.
What is my purpose? The end-purpose would be to reduce the base freight rate for interstellar shipping substantially in order to make low-value bulk cargos worth shipping between the stars, especially when there is more than one jump to the destination world.
Thoughts, comments?
Sincerely,
Chris
I’m specifically excluding MT, TNE, Book 7, T4, or GT here. I have no idea what was in MT or T4; have not finished reading GT: Far Trader; and the TNE rules are for a different type of trading environment, an apparent development of Book 7: Merchant Princes type mechanics.
Also, this discussion wanders from shipping economics over to starship design and construction and back again. I didn’t really know whether or not to post it to the Fleet, or the Research Station, and so I decided to put it here.
So, the basics of commerce are:
Freight: Goods shipped for someone else, where the shipper is paid a base of 1000Cr/ton shipped.
Cargo: Goods purchased, shipped by the shipper, and then sold, hopefully for a handsome profit.
Mail: I'll leave mail out of this discussion.
I have no problem with these basic concepts. The problem comes in with the base rate for freight, and to some degree, the profitability and sale values of low value goods shipped as Cargo.
If I'm a starship operator at an agricultural world, it's not unreasonable to assume that I might find lots of grain as freight or cargo. The T20 chart has grain at the top of a list of cargos (where lowest values are sorted from top to bottom).
I, as a starship operator, do whatever is necessary to assure that I am shipping that grain (to fill out the hold, whatever). Say it's a 10 ton lot. The owning broker, who is paying me to ship the grain, gives me 10,000Cr. In order for this broker to make any money, the destination sale value of that grain had better be more than 10kCr plus the broker's original purchase price.
Here's where the problem is. This sets the _minimum_ price, as far as the owning broker is concerned, at well over 1kCr/ton of grain. The question is, can anyone at the point of sale afford to buy grain for 1kCr/ton? Bear in mind that it will likely be a local broker buying it, and potentially selling it to a distributor for collection and disbursement to manufacturers (bakeries, fermentation plants, etc.). Each set of hands it passes through raises the price for the end-consumer.
Now, around where I live, the undiscounted prices for a high-end mass-market brand-name loaf of bread is about $1.98, give or take a little. No name store brands go down to $0.99, and the stuff I usually buy, whole grain and multi-grain exotic brands go for almost $3.60--4.00/loaf. Now, this is almost certainly the result of shipment of grain from US farmers to manufacturers here in the US (local bakeries, etc.). Does anyone believe it costs $1000 or $2000 or more US Dollars to ship that grain (it's hard to convert IC 1116 Era credits to 20th Century Terra US Dollars, but I have little doubt the credit is stronger than the modern dollar; and T20 mentions that an Imperial Credit is worth 3 modern US dollars)? I don't, but that's what interstellar shipment does, it tacks on a fortune in additional costs which _must_ be passed on to the consumer. Who else, in the end, is going to pay for them? Government subsidy? Maybe for part of it, but not for all. I think if we had to bear a $2000/grain-ton shipped from farmers to market, that each loaf would cost $10-40 US Dollars, minimum (it's hard for me to tell exactly where the real cost would be, but I think it wouldn't be pretty). Ordinary people out to buy a loaf of bread made with grain with this huge cost load would get to the store and go into sticker shock, fall over, flop around like a fish out of water, and then be carried away in an ambulance.
On the face of it, to me at least, low-value goods can’t ever be economically shipped as long as the base rate is 1kCr/ton, due to the fact that no one at the destination would _likely_ be willing to pay, or more importantly, be able to _afford_ to pay (if you don’t have the money, you can’t pay, except by going into debt, and going into debt to buy food is a desperate measure that should not be considered standard practice, because it can’t go on for very long). This is bad, because reducing the base rate to lower the end-cost of such goods would be a hammer blow to a starship operators ability to pay a starship’s mortgage.
It’s worse for speculative traders, who want a far better return than the mere base rate; they are, in fact, speculating for exactly that purpose, to beat the base rate. T20 lists the base value of grain at 300Cr/ton. A very high broker skill and some good rolls could do well with this and push the price above 1kCr/ton, but as I’ve outlined above, I don’t think brokers or even distributors would be lining up to buy grain at such inflated prices.
For high value goods, this is not so much of a problem, as the shipping fee can wind up being only a small part of the overall cost. Does this mean that only high-value goods would be shipped? Maybe. But this is where I drag in “atmosphere” and “feel” for the OTU. The OTU is, in many ways, designed to provide, in bits and pieces, the feel of classic Science Fictions from the 50s-70s (yes, there is classic SF written after this and even before this, but this is still the primary era); although this in no way reflects on the validity of other types of settings, from grand space opera to far-future utopia, post-apocalypse or even cyberpunk. However, for the OTU , I always got the impression, from canon writings, that there is a huge amount of trade going on in the Imperium. While some worlds are backwaters where only a few ships show up, and indeed there are isolationist worlds where ships hardly ever arrive, the majority of Imperial worlds actively participate in trade, and in most cases, huge amounts of trade (ok, so it’s only an impression, but a lot of cannon writing backs it). One highly classic vision of Science Fiction is the High Population world, exemplified in Asimov’s Trantor from the Foundation series, a world covered entirely by one immense city spanning the globe, with average surface height of the city in the hundreds of meters, and many structures reaching kilometers of height, plus deep sub-surface extensions for city services, the city even extends out onto continental shelves. Asimov states the population is forty billion (never mind that the world city described has enough volume to hold the whole population in a manner that all would have palatial size residences with plenty left over for business, entertainment, and anything else you’d care to name; although of course, Asimov’s descriptions are of an enormously crowded place, so one can imagine that vast tracts of the world-city are unmaintainable and abandoned by the time of Hari Seldon or after, which is when most of the descriptions are good for), and that little or no food at all is grown here, and that many nearby agricultural planets are dedicated to growing all the food necessary to feed Trantor’s population. Those worlds send their grain, livestock, and other foodstuffs to Trantor aboard titanic freighters.
Given that the OTU has many similar high population worlds, I’d imagine similar circumstances, where nearby agricultural worlds supplied many foodstuffs, including low-value foodstuffs, the staples that keep the main population alive. High end technology for food production seems rarely mentioned in most Classic SF, unless it is to say that food provided this way is substandard (yes, there are exceptions); in a real SF universe, one can only imagine what TL-15 Food Production is like, because the Imperium seems it’s at TL-8 or 9 Food Production most of the time.
I’m pretty sure none of this is dealt with in either CT or T20 because the rules are meant to provide a framework by which starship operators can run and pay for their vessels, and be a vehicle by which adventures can be induced. The source and destination don’t matter as far as these published Commerce Rules matter. I, however, cannot help but try to visualize an integrated system that would really work (even if it’s only an estimation or even a WAG, something that sounds good can, in a game, be just as good as something that does work).
What about multiple jumps? If a destination world is more than one jump away, the cost to ships low-value cargos begins to truly soar (even high-value cargos can come under attack when shipping them too many jumps, and that’s just in CT and T20; under the Book 7/TNE style rules, it takes only a few jumps to make anything unprofitable to ship).
I don’t have an immediate solution available. Changing either the base rate or the starship construction rules is problematical, and especially changing the construction rules would make anything I designed incompatible with any other TU.
I’ve got some issues with Shipyards in Traveller (they’re barely dealt with), and I think large-scale industrialized high TL shipyards, whose size and capability would make land-bound dry-docks for building ocean going vessels characterized by 20th Century Terra shipyards pale by comparison, would provide huge economies over what is mentioned in the rules. Further, current starship rules do not take into account what a shipyard (any shipyard, not just the types I envision) would charge to assemble the ship. Right now, starship assembly is free (either that, or the costs noted are a shipyard’s cost-to-purchaser for final assembly of a combination of those elements, though it is most certainly not presented that way). Furthermore, as GURPS Far Trader (and Gordon R. Dickson’s famous Dorsai series) notes, some worlds do better at some things than others, and even for a world with a TL sufficient to do everything better, Comparative Trade Advantage can mean a disparate collection of scattered worlds can wind up making bits and pieces of the components and sub-assemblies that go into a starship. What am I babbling about? I’m going right back to shipping costs. As the T20 chart notes, starship weaponry has a cost equal to that noted in the constructions rules, and from that I make the leap to assume that the base cost for speculative purchase of any starship component is that listed in the design rules (which is why I feel those costs are not the costs charged by the shipyard to the new vessel’s buyer, but rather the manufacturer costs). No starship construction system seems to take into account the costs of shipping various components between the stars to the final point of assembly. It’s easily conceivable that some components must be shipped more than one jump, or multiple parsec jumps at priority rates (depending on which commerce rules are being used).
What about insurance? Are banks going to let buyer’s go around in something that costs tens to even hundreds of millions of credits without insurance? Not a chance. Worse, the bank is not only going to make the buyer pay for accident, liability, loss, piracy, and war insurances, but will also pass along the cost of owner-theft insurance as a guard against skipping (although there may be some facility for the bank to cash out the policy after a set number of years when the owner has sufficient equity in the vessel, and to have a large fraction of the owner’s costs in having paid for that insurance up front returned later).
Basically, between high TL shipyards operating at high TL economies, using advanced construction systems, advanced tools, etc., would allow for substantial discounts in assembly costs (which, admitted, aren’t being charged in any of the design rules to date). But I’ve been looking at altering some component costs, etc., plus adding the additional realism of insurance, assembly/labor charges (despite their additional complications/complexity), and in the end, will probably lower the costs of vessels, as opposed to altering the construction system itself (though, as noted, I haven’t come to any decision). Lower starship costs will go hand in hand with a more smoothed out Actual Value Table in the commerce rules, mostly to handle what GURPS Far Traders calls “The Rule of One”; thus lower costs go with lower overall profitability, which I don’t view as a bad thing. Having a starship should not, in my campaign world (YMMV in your TU), be a free ticket to instant wealth. Example: Using CT rules, shipping but a single 10mCr lot of computers for 30% purchase value and 400% sale value--a not at all impossible feat in the CT rules with Broker-5 or 6 from a Book-7 merchant character--is a profit of 37,000,000Cr, or enough to immediately purchase another starship, completely, without having to fiddle around with payments, or for the daring, slapping 37mCr down at a bank would probably be sufficient collateral, with good references, proven skills, and no criminal background, to take out _multiple_ loans and launch a fleet of new vessels (at the 10% discount rate for standard designs, of course). Such an event, IMTU, would be reserved for a major climax point of a campaign, with many obstacles overcome and opponents defeated, not the ho-hum routine of ordinary speculation.
What is my purpose? The end-purpose would be to reduce the base freight rate for interstellar shipping substantially in order to make low-value bulk cargos worth shipping between the stars, especially when there is more than one jump to the destination world.
Thoughts, comments?
Sincerely,
Chris
Aramark, eat yer heart out!
