Free Traders - Tramp Steamers or Semi-Trucks

[Spinward Flow]

Now, its fair to argue that they may well be deadheading the cargo. They arrive and find that there's nothing worth shipping back. At which point they need to decide whether its worth making an empty trip back, or waiting for a new load.

But this is mostly (mostly) a problem for new traders, not experienced traders. Experienced traders get that way by not sending their vessel down unprofitable routes.

"We'd like you to move this cargo to the starport at Yosemite V" "Yea, I can do that but it'll cost you double. There's never anything there to bring back to make it worth the trip. If we get a load back, we'll refund you 25% when we get back."

But of course the LBB 2 system doesn't accommodate for those discrepancies.

One workaround to this problem (which won't be a "natural" result of the ticket dice rolls) would be a round trip charter. A third party charters the entire ship's capacity (or as much of it as the operator is willing to sell them so as to keep some capacity in reserve for "operator's uses") on a round trip basis (also known as "there and back again"). The operator doesn't have to worry about returning empty, because they've already been paid (by the charter) to make the round trip. It's then incumbent upon the third party to make THEIR ends meet on the voyage.

Fun fact: This type of round trip charter is one way for a smuggling operation to run without needing to own (and operate) a starship themselves. So long as there are merchant operators who are willing to charter with "No Questions Asked" about who and what is being transported ... the smugglers can get up to all kinds of shenanigans without tying themselves down to a specific tail number of starship with a transponder.

 

[Enoki]

Free and far traders =

 

[TamsinP]

Free and far traders =

I just looked up that ship. It was* a tanker of 2600 GT (9306 m^3 = 665 dTons), so closer in size to the subsidised liner than to a free/far trader.

*Vessel Tracker has it last registered on AIS 4488 days ago and last seen 3113 days ago; Mrine Traffic has it last logged on AIS 4459 days ago en route to Gressik in Indonesia. That suggests it got taken out of service for scrapping.

 

[Badenov]

I just looked up that ship. It was* a tanker of 2600 GT (9306 m^3 = 665 dTons), so closer in size to the subsidised liner than to a free/far trader.

*Vessel Tracker has it last registered on AIS 4488 days ago and last seen 3113 days ago; Mrine Traffic has it last logged on AIS 4459 days ago en route to Gressik in Indonesia. That suggests it got taken out of service for scrapping.

It certainly looks about ready for scrapping. Looks like this was a last pic, riding empty to its final destination.

 

[TamsinP]

I did find a photo of it at anchor at Benoa, Indonesia in 2016. At that point it still had its lifeboat(s) and doesn't seem to have had any easily removed fitting taken off.

 

[Condottiere]

I don't see much tourism potential.

At best, you could write it off as a business expense, or some one else is paying, for the middle class.

You'd think a dedicated passenger starliner could be configured to minimize costs, to make it affordable.

 

[spank]

Sure, but they need that experience. With near-instant comms they don't. They can just check and see if there's something that'll be there when they get there, or likely to be (if they're risk-takers). Which is another thing that makes a free trader more like an old-time tramp, and not like a tramp or a trucker of today - the free trader is out of communication for a week, and when they get back into comms, it's at the destination. A modern tramp or trucker is never out of it, so even if things change mid-trip, they'll know about it and can start yelling at their agent to fix it.

Yes and no,
With instant comms you would likely have a dispatcher, or broker lining up loads of freight at the next stop. So that would be a boon. IMHO there should be some sort of agent or broker that a trader can sign up with to provide a +DM for cargo along a specified route. Not a formal as a subsidized route, but the Trader would be obligated to visit a number of worlds, and in exchange they pay an upfront fee for the route and get a +DM at each stop when rolling for cargo to represent the extra cargo that their agent has lined up for them. Absent that good planning is essential, Consider this example:



You're at Laisarlo, you check the available cargos and find alot of cargo going to Kaflowe. --- Because of the +7 modifier for TL14 --> TL 7.
Or you could take the trip to Emsindale, less cargo, but:

1. It's a POP 9 world vs a POP 5 for Kaflowe. More outbound freight
2. The modifier for the return is much better, -1 vs -7.

In this case the choice should be oblivious.

 

[casquilho]

How about this one? She looks smaller.

 

[Condottiere]

It goes something like this.

Hundred tonnes is minimum, two hundred tonnes optimizes bridge and jump drive minimums.

Since performance scales linearly, next cost cutting measure would be personnel; so if you reduce crews at certain tonnages, that's likely to happen from two hundred tonnes onwards.

 

[spank]

I don't see much tourism potential.

At best, you could write it off as a business expense, or some one else is paying, for the middle class.

You'd think a dedicated passenger starliner could be configured to minimize costs, to make it affordable.

That's one thing that I am finding a bit odd,
Cargo scales much more than passengers.
For freight there is a 50% chance of 15 tons on a POP 1 world, which scales to 50% chance of 515 Tons on a POP 10 world. About a 50x increase
For passengers, there is a 50% chance of 2 passengers on a POP 1 world, but it only scales to a 50% chance of 12-13 passengers, only a 7X increase.
That makes dedicated passengers operations much harder. A free trader would need to run 25 passengers a month to pull in 150,000 Cr and make rent. That's ~12 per trip, The only place you're going reliably pull those numbers is between a pair of POP 9 or POP 10 worlds. Which is, to put is charitably, a bit of a niche market. There's just not passenger demand to support that for free trader. Let alone bigger ships.

 

[Spinward Flow]

With instant comms you would likely have a dispatcher, or broker lining up loads of freight at the next stop. So that would be a boon. IMHO there should be some sort of agent or broker that a trader can sign up with to provide a +DM for cargo along a specified route. Not a formal as a subsidized route, but the Trader would be obligated to visit a number of worlds, and in exchange they pay an upfront fee for the route and get a +DM at each stop when rolling for cargo to represent the extra cargo that their agent has lined up for them. Absent that good planning is essential

This is where partnerships and local offices can make all the difference in the world(s).

The way the LBB2.81 ticket and speculative goods rules are set up is to handle tramp free traders showing up and working the spot market (what's available RIGHT NAO). It's very much a "catch as catch can" type of business model that's more of a "catch the wave" type of surfing the market(s), rather than a "prepare for the future" type of banking on resources and capabilities.

When you "invert" the relationship between starship operators and their markets, turning the starships into effectively "charter enterprises" for what amounts to trusted Third Parties & Partners, you unlock a cheat code that the megacorporations use to sustain their profits.



The REAL money isn't in the ticket sales, that just pays the bills/makes overhead. To REALLY get ahead, you need to be working in speculative goods arbitrage. The best way to do that is to "stay put" and just scour the market every week for the next speculative goods opportunity. So, as a business, you "set up shop and hang out your shingle" as a local operation that deals in speculative goods with some advance booking of passenger and freight tickets on the side ... and then just waiting for "a ship to come in" that's going where you need it to go.

So instead of working the spot market in brief windows of time, you're a local operation who is continuously "scooping up" demand for ticket services and speculative goods buyers and then consolidating all of those acquisitions and packaging them for starship operators on a charter basis.

Get enough "local offices" working the local market Full Time EVERY WEEK and all the starship has to do is "show up" and the local office will already have a shipping manifest lined up, ready to go. The third party and/or trusted partner local business "does all the legwork" to fill staterooms and cargo holds, while the starship operates on a charter basis (giving the third party the right to dictate where the starship goes). This reduces the starship to simply being a means of conveyance, in which charters for transits need to be enough to "pay all the bills" and keep the starship out of bankruptcy. The third party turns a profit on the arbitrage of tickets (100% purchase price vs 90% charter expense) and whatever speculative goods they're able to export to favorable destinations for sale (at presumably higher prices).

In a megacorporation, the starship and the "local offices" all belong to the same corporate holding company, although usually in different divisions or subsidiaries. However, the name of the game is vertical integration of import/export, so as to keep the profits rolling in to the megacorporation (at the expense of rivals).



Think about it this way.
If a starship operator is doing all the work of picking up tickets and scrounging for speculative goods, they can only do so at a rate of 1 week of business out of every 2 weeks ... and they're never working the same market consecutively (because they're always jumping to new destinations and new markets). In other words, starship operators have a "50% uptime" on being able to do business, because they spend a week in jump, incommunicado, when traveling.

Starship operators that have to negotiate everything themselves can only do business for 2 weeks out of every 4 (assuming single jumps to each destination).

Compare that to a local third party business.
The local third party doesn't have to jump ... so they can conduct business 4 weeks out of every 4.
Add in the fact that a company could have branch offices on multiple worlds all doing business concurrently and continuously, rather than sequentially and intermittently.

So if you have 2 local offices on 2 different worlds ... those 2 offices combined are able to conduct business for "8 weeks" worth out of every 4 ... compared to a starship that can only conduct business for 2 weeks out of every 4. Expand the number of local offices doing business to more worlds and the sheer quantity of transport demand that the local offices can aggregate while waiting for "partner" starship operators to arrive can wind up being pretty substantial.

This means that the way to "hack" the trading game is by making agreements with local businesses on each world that can funnel passenger and freight tickets to the starship operator on a "regular enough" basis to keep the charter carousel spinning, while everyone makes bank (although, most of the profits from such arrangements will accrue to the third party local offices, rather than the starship operators).

When you've got enough capital to own the starship AND the local offices doing business continuously, that's when you can start to corner the market and REALLY hop onto the gravy train! Note that doing this is EXACTLY what the megacorporations do ... except they do it on the MEGA scale, rather than as a "mom & pop" operation run by a penny ante collection of low end merchants.

 

[Badenov]

This is where partnerships and local offices can make all the difference in the world(s).

The way the LBB2.81 ticket and speculative goods rules are set up is to handle tramp free traders showing up and working the spot market (what's available RIGHT NAO). It's very much a "catch as catch can" type of business model that's more of a "catch the wave" type of surfing the market(s), rather than a "prepare for the future" type of banking on resources and capabilities.

When you "invert" the relationship between starship operators and their markets, turning the starships into effectively "charter enterprises" for what amounts to trusted Third Parties & Partners, you unlock a cheat code that the megacorporations use to sustain their profits.



The REAL money isn't in the ticket sales, that just pays the bills/makes overhead. To REALLY get ahead, you need to be working in speculative goods arbitrage. The best way to do that is to "stay put" and just scour the market every week for the next speculative goods opportunity. So, as a business, you "set up shop and hang out your shingle" as a local operation that deals in speculative goods with some advance booking of passenger and freight tickets on the side ... and then just waiting for "a ship to come in" that's going where you need it to go.

So instead of working the spot market in brief windows of time, you're a local operation who is continuously "scooping up" demand for ticket services and speculative goods buyers and then consolidating all of those acquisitions and packaging them for starship operators on a charter basis.

Get enough "local offices" working the local market Full Time EVERY WEEK and all the starship has to do is "show up" and the local office will already have a shipping manifest lined up, ready to go. The third party and/or trusted partner local business "does all the legwork" to fill staterooms and cargo holds, while the starship operates on a charter basis (giving the third party the right to dictate where the starship goes). This reduces the starship to simply being a means of conveyance, in which charters for transits need to be enough to "pay all the bills" and keep the starship out of bankruptcy. The third party turns a profit on the arbitrage of tickets (100% purchase price vs 90% charter expense) and whatever speculative goods they're able to export to favorable destinations for sale (at presumably higher prices).

In a megacorporation, the starship and the "local offices" all belong to the same corporate holding company, although usually in different divisions or subsidiaries. However, the name of the game is vertical integration of import/export, so as to keep the profits rolling in to the megacorporation (at the expense of rivals).



Think about it this way.
If a starship operator is doing all the work of picking up tickets and scrounging for speculative goods, they can only do so at a rate of 1 week of business out of every 2 weeks ... and they're never working the same market consecutively (because they're always jumping to new destinations and new markets). In other words, starship operators have a "50% uptime" on being able to do business, because they spend a week in jump, incommunicado, when traveling.

Starship operators that have to negotiate everything themselves can only do business for 2 weeks out of every 4 (assuming single jumps to each destination).

Compare that to a local third party business.
The local third party doesn't have to jump ... so they can conduct business 4 weeks out of every 4.
Add in the fact that a company could have branch offices on multiple worlds all doing business concurrently and continuously, rather than sequentially and intermittently.

So if you have 2 local offices on 2 different worlds ... those 2 offices combined are able to conduct business for "8 weeks" worth out of every 4 ... compared to a starship that can only conduct business for 2 weeks out of every 4. Expand the number of local offices doing business to more worlds and the sheer quantity of transport demand that the local offices can aggregate while waiting for "partner" starship operators to arrive can wind up being pretty substantial.

This means that the way to "hack" the trading game is by making agreements with local businesses on each world that can funnel passenger and freight tickets to the starship operator on a "regular enough" basis to keep the charter carousel spinning, while everyone makes bank (although, most of the profits from such arrangements will accrue to the third party local offices, rather than the starship operators).

When you've got enough capital to own the starship AND the local offices doing business continuously, that's when you can start to corner the market and REALLY hop onto the gravy train! Note that doing this is EXACTLY what the megacorporations do ... except they do it on the MEGA scale, rather than as a "mom & pop" operation run by a penny ante collection of low end merchants.

We had the opportunity to do this in a campagin some years back. A permament office at each point along a circular trade route, two ships making the circle in opposite directions, brokers on each world working full time to make sure the ships would depart with full holds. We made some good money, considering it was a sideline to the main thrust of the campaign.

 

[spank]

It goes something like this.

Hundred tonnes is minimum, two hundred tonnes optimizes bridge and jump drive minimums.

Since performance scales linearly, next cost cutting measure would be personnel; so if you reduce crews at certain tonnages, that's likely to happen from two hundred tonnes onwards.

IDK that I'd say 200 tons optimizes the bridge or jump drives.
It's definitely better than a 100 ton hull, but there's still room for improvement.
I think you need to get to 400 or 600 before you are starting to become optimized

 

[Enoki]

How about this one? She looks smaller. View attachment 5667

When you get down to the 100 - 200 ton ships they're more like late 19th or early 20th century trawlers.

 

[kilemall]

One workaround to this problem (which won't be a "natural" result of the ticket dice rolls) would be a round trip charter. A third party charters the entire ship's capacity (or as much of it as the operator is willing to sell them so as to keep some capacity in reserve for "operator's uses") on a round trip basis (also known as "there and back again"). The operator doesn't have to worry about returning empty, because they've already been paid (by the charter) to make the round trip. It's then incumbent upon the third party to make THEIR ends meet on the voyage.

Fun fact: This type of round trip charter is one way for a smuggling operation to run without needing to own (and operate) a starship themselves. So long as there are merchant operators who are willing to charter with "No Questions Asked" about who and what is being transported ... the smugglers can get up to all kinds of shenanigans without tying themselves down to a specific tail number of starship with a transponder.

Solo shot first version, the way it should be.

 

[Spinward Flow]

IDK that I'd say 200 tons optimizes the bridge or jump drives.
It's definitely better than a 100 ton hull, but there's still room for improvement.
I think you need to get to 400 or 600 before you are starting to become optimized

I'm currently of the opinion that if you can "get away with" TL=10 F/F/F drives (65 tons) you only need a single Engineer (skill-2) who can work both crew positions, so you need an Engineer/Engineer crewman (just like a Pilot/Navigator or a Steward/Medic can be a single crewman). That gets you the most drive performance for the least amount of crew (and therefore, stateroom tonnage), which then gives you the biggest hull form factor with the best revenue tonnage fraction for its size.

Solo shot first version, the way it should be.

We make every pretense of competency around here.

 

[TamsinP]

How about this one? She looks smaller.

SS Robin was 366 GRT, which converts easily to 73.2 dTons.

 

[Condottiere]

Really speculative, would be guessing that exchange rates between the Imperium credit and whatever local currencies are.

Possibly, it optimizes the results with physical presence of the Imperium credit.

Then, you either have to wait for the local currency to increase, or speculate that you can buy more local goods with it, than with something else.

 

[kilemall]

Really speculative, would be guessing that exchange rates between the Imperium credit and whatever local currencies are.

Possibly, it optimizes the results with physical presence of the Imperium credit.

Then, you either have to wait for the local currency to increase, or speculate that you can buy more local goods with it, than with something else.

The repurposing of the CT Striker currency effects, equipment acquisition and maintenance especially at higher techs to affect trade and even items players may buy paints an interesting and ugly picture.

It was clearly written so merc forces had to use a high/low mix, locally supportable equipment coupled with a few judicious higher tech force multipliers, and big consequences if they are destroyed or fail maintenance.

But used in both the merchant game and general character operations, it creates a whole lot of nuances.

You’re on some hick TL6 world with your Gauss rifle and advanced armor and scanners, locals aren’t touching you. Until your stuff breaks- unless you have an armory and spare parts squirreled away on your expeditionary pinnace, going to have to pay steep prices to get the parts and tools, if you can at all.

All that speculation game changes if you can use currency differences to your advantage. Use your hard TL15 CrIMP to buy the riches of a low tech planet, ship and sell them on higher starport/tech combos, or even buy a genuine TL6 firearm/tool for far less for personal use.

Shore leave for your crew on an otherwise low starport/low tech may be a shopping spree.

Now the balancing factor to consider putting in with a currency subgame is incorporating the cargo tech push/pull baked into these available cargo rolls into speculation.

A straight up DM of tech difference could make a run from a high tech world to the backwater worlds insanely profitable and worth the one way traffic. But temper it with that currency exchange and maybe not so profitable.

Conversely, you might buy that glorious radioactives lot on planet Hillbilly at an insane currency differential, but because it’s not high tech that means it’s not processed refined and thus the speculative DM cuts the other way. Tech of raw materials or food counts, indicating advanced alloys or bioengineered enhanced ag.

Since lots could be goods stranded at a starport warehouse and not of that world, origin tech is a thing to determine. I’d use hard CrIMP for anything not being bought as world origin, no currency manipulation. Or at least origin world tech not current world.

On a macro level the combo of currency and high tech desirability paints a picture of third world planetary exploitation and high tech domination.

It provides a clear reason for why planets don’t just tech themselves up if they can’t ever afford to buy the tooling or produce exports that are desirable and earn enough to get that interstellar TL.

And in the case of the 3I, the powerful nobles representing the megacorps and high tech planets wanting to keep it that way, further reason for no bootstrapping worlds. Fodder for noble drama and patron motives on either side of that line.

Finally, some personal interaction flavor- getting currencies exchanged, making sure your salary/trade deal is in hard CrIMPs, dealing with local desire for said currency and perhaps related resentment, etc. Too bad the fine print wasn’t read, the payout is 1 million in local Starbucks at 5%, that sort of thing.

A lot of effort and somewhere in there clever players abusing math challenged refs, but really could make the environment pop and give one background information to create all manner of world building merchant/adventurer drama.

 

[Rupert]

It certainly looks about ready for scrapping. Looks like this was a last pic, riding empty to its final destination.

A bit of a clean-up and a paint job, and enough of a load to put her back in trim and she'd look fine. Still fairly obviously quite small, though.