How common is space travel in Traveller

[atpollard]

Whipsnade makes an important point - in a rather crude and decidedly undiplomatic way. Means are at least as important as motivation. The fact that folk can get to the U.S. by walking, boating from Cuba, or paying 500 or 600 bucks for a comfortable flight on a safe airline (or a month's salary for a steerage ticket on Titanic), does not mean all of those folk are up to paying $10,000 for a jump flight - or would pay $1000 if there was a fair chance of death associated with it.

In 1790, travel from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean took many days aboard a sailing ship.
It was VERY expensive, dangerous and required the traveler or ship to provide food and water for the duration of the journey.
Those conditions are a lot closer to the Traveller 1 week in jump space than they are to a modern trans-Atlantic flight - it is a journey not taken lightly.
About 1 percent of the US population in 1790 was comprised of individuals who had arrived from Europe by sailing ship within the last 12 months.

The EUROPE TO USA percentage rises to about 4% during the immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but even I admit that this represents an unusual set of conditions. The 1% figure, however, appears to be the absolute best real-world analogy to Starship Travel that we are likely to encounter.

The equivalent of Low Passage:
"In 1860 alone 1.63 million Irish left Ireland. The coffin ships of the 1840s (rickety, barely navigable ships in which one out of five passengers died of disease or starvation before setting foot in their destinations) gave way to the clipper ships and ultimately to steamships."

 

[Carlobrand]

... About 1 percent of the US population in 1790 was comprised of individuals who had arrived from Europe by sailing ship within the last 12 months. ...

The U.S. population in 1790 was a bit under 4 million. The population of Britain was about twice that. I don't know the populations of the other European states from which immigration might have occurred.

If we assume the vast majority of immigrants were from Britain alone, that means about 1/2 percent of the British population took boat and ended up in America over the course of a year. 40 thousand souls out of a population of 8 million or so. That's actually quite a few ships when we consider the ships that were sailing that route - it's a fairly active trade route.

If we factor in the other states - if that 40 thousand drew from a larger pool than 8 million - then it drops from there. We don't know how many Brits might have shipped for other destinations, but this was early in the Empire. At any rate, your rate ends up being somewhat difficult to assess - possibly a half percent, possibly less, possibly more, all depending on where those 40 thousand souls hailed from and whether there were others from those same places heading elsewhere in the world. So, a vague half-percent with a wide margin of error?

And of course, that does not include those who came and then went home - agents of government, businessmen, and so forth.

However, I don't think the voyage cost was quite on the level of the Cr10,000 6-months to a years wage that we're talking about for the Traveller Universe. I'd have to do some research on what folks were actually charging then. The only thing I have relates to the late 19th - early 20th century, not useful for this discussion.

 

[Enoki]

Actually, a LOT of business was done with month-long mail times... but most of it was speculation rather than order fulfillment.

I see it more like travelling salesmen for example. World A with a tech level of say, 10, sends a sales rep to World B tech level 7 to see if he can get the locals to buy say, retrofit controllers for their machine tools in heavy manufacturing. The sales rep retrofits one machine and tells the client how great this is and lets them see the increased productivity. He then sells them 50 more at some inflated price. Or, he might just sell marching bands too.....

Another would be one world sending technicians and engineers for a project beyond the capacity of another. Think foreign aid to the 'Third World' here. Or, sending specialists to train the locals on something like mining equipment that was imported by a off world corporation to their new mine where the locals will do the work.

Any number of businesses might be moving people about for various reasons.

 

[aramis]

I see it more like travelling salesmen for example. World A with a tech level of say, 10, sends a sales rep to World B tech level 7 to see if he can get the locals to buy say, retrofit controllers for their machine tools in heavy manufacturing. The sales rep retrofits one machine and tells the client how great this is and lets them see the increased productivity. He then sells them 50 more at some inflated price. Or, he might just sell marching bands too.....

Another would be one world sending technicians and engineers for a project beyond the capacity of another. Think foreign aid to the 'Third World' here. Or, sending specialists to train the locals on something like mining equipment that was imported by a off world corporation to their new mine where the locals will do the work.

Any number of businesses might be moving people about for various reasons.

Those are the kinds of things that generally didn't get done during the era of multiple month travel times. Keep in mind - Atlantic crossings typically ran 6-10 weeks, depending upon currents and winds. Costs of passage were often a years wages for base level labor; many travelled on indenture contracts of 1-2 years.

Most of the stuff moving was either raw materials - wood, molasses, flour - or basic finished goods - rifles, hand tools, pottery & tablewares. Most of the people moving were on essentially one way trips or were military. And most of the military were sent for multi-year tours. By "Essentially one way" I mean that the individual was intending several years or more, and had no assurance of a return trip.)

So, in Traveller, we face a case of fares being comparable, but times not, to the 18th C. The loss of cargo space isn't much different, either, tho' it was a matter of carriage of food and water rather than habitation space.

Still, our best comparison is the 19th C steamers pre-transatlantic cable. With trip times down to a month, it's still a poor comparison. Still, we can look at some data. in 1870, fares from Norway to the US ran 15 Spd, or 1870$18, plus food (bring your own for a month - typically sailing 30-45 days) or 40 Spd (1870$46) from Norway via England to Quebec including all meals. Labor costs in the US were $1-$3 per day, with a roughly 250 day work year. ($2 per day was poverty line for a family of 4 in a city)

So people were paying 10% of a year's potential income for a month's travel in basic accommodations (Cabin steerage) in hopes of work... plus loss of about 1/7th of a year in income for travel time and finding work. And it was risky - most trips had a death or two. Sounds pretty comparable to low passage rates.

At the same time, high class passengers were taking 3-6 month jaunts "for the season." Keeping in mind, travel times of a month each way.

http://www.norwayheritage.com/articles/templates/voyages.asp?articleid=37&zoneid=6
http://www.norwayheritage.com/articles/templates/voyages.asp?articleid=45&zoneid=6
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tnwayne/1870agcen/page1.htm

 

[atpollard]

However, I don't think the voyage cost was quite on the level of the Cr10,000 6-months to a years wage that we're talking about for the Traveller Universe. I'd have to do some research on what folks were actually charging then. The only thing I have relates to the late 19th - early 20th century, not useful for this discussion.

Yeah, older data is harder to get. One data point that I found is the Virginia Colony grew at just over 1% per year from 1622 to around 1644 and the travel and supply cost to become a Virginia Colonist was about 600 days of wages for a carpenter of the period (20 pounds sterling IIRC).

By the early 1900's, the cost was much less - closer to 2 months wages.

 

[Enoki]

You are a mulit-gazillion credit corporation. You send a salesman out with samples that don't take up alot of room and he / she sells to other worlds on a travel expense account plus commission or, simply is expected to make sufficent sales to cover the cost of travel and commission. I could see this particularly where there is a big technology off set and the locals need some training or experiance with the product to want to buy. A few hundred thousand or million credits in sales more than pays for passage.
Orders go back via x-boat or other message service and the product ships once received.

 

[aramis]

You are a mulit-gazillion credit corporation. You send a salesman out with samples that don't take up alot of room and he / she sells to other worlds on a travel expense account plus commission or, simply is expected to make sufficent sales to cover the cost of travel and commission. I could see this particularly where there is a big technology off set and the locals need some training or experiance with the product to want to buy. A few hundred thousand or million credits in sales more than pays for passage.
Orders go back via x-boat or other message service and the product ships once received.

Don't see it.

If the samples are particularly valuable, the salesman and samples "disappear"... and get crash reengineered locally.

If not, then odds are good you can simply ship x units per quarter, (probably 1/(y+1) of expected demand where Y is number of equidistant suppliers).

There's literally no benefit to sending samples - either send salable lots, or send a catalogue - it's much safer and cheaper. Especially since the canon imperium does NOT have a patent protection program.

 

[Carlobrand]

If you are a "multi-gazillion credit corporation" in an era of week-long one-way trips and two-week round trips costing half a clerk's annual salary per body sent, you don't send a salesman out with random samples that might or might not find a market. You send a small team to set up an office in your potential market and they spend the time needed to learn all they can learn about it. Then they ship that data back - data ships a lot cheaper than people. You use the data to make an informed judgment about what that market needs and send that. Your team receives the goods you send and can use their knowledge of the local market to plan a marketing campaign to sell it. If you're successful, your team can grow their office by hiring and training locals, and you now have a thriving subsidiary on that world.

 

[mike wightman]

Sounds an awful lot like a broker to me...

 

[Carlobrand]

More or less, I guess.

At the height of the British Empire, agents and entrepreneurs did not tend to shuttle back and forth between London and Delhi or Hong Kong. They went out expecting to live there for a few months or years, acting as part of a local subsidiary that enjoyed considerable autonomy. If they were there for a short stay, it was often a matter of weeks rather than days. Even with the introduction of the telegraph and later wireless, the local subsidiary enjoyed wide latitude in decision-making simply because it was not possible for the distant central office to gather the degree of information needed quickly enough to make anything more than broad strategic decisions; if a subsidiary was struggling, the remedy was more often to send someone to investigate or to replace the leadership than to issue detailed marching orders from afar. And, often a large fraction of the local subsidiary's employees were locals themselves, especially at the lower levels - the upper strata of the subsidiary was exclusively reserved to the folk from Mother England.

 

[christopher.boote]

Nonsense. If SST travel were actually profitable, then more than 20 Concorde jets would have been built, they wouldn't have bee flown for nearly 30 years until they fell apart, and they would have seen competitors and succeeding generations of SST transports following them. There simply weren't enough potential passengers for the service provided and so the service stopped despite substantial government subsidies.

Your analogy of the Atlantic immigration trade is also wholly false. That "market" lasted for less than two generations and, like the SST project, was subsidized in numerous ways by the various governments involved through both direct and indirect subsidies and policies.

Using outlier examples of historical passenger traffic provides your ideas no support.

In the politest possible terms, as an ex-BA revenue manager, and multi-trip flyer in Concorde, ... Round Objects!

Concorde WAS profitable - on the routes it was allowed to fly
It was denied the chance to fly the real money making routes (London-Dubai-Sydney/London-Singapore/London-Bermuda) due to non-money issues

BA took no government subsidies to run it (except for the original R&D costs) even paying what an 'independent' assessor valued as fair market price for the 'planes at privatisation time
As for Air France, well, yes, the whole of AF was (and indeed still is) illegally underwritten by the French State, so any subsidy for Concorde was but a drop in the ocean

Think, if Concorde was so uneconomic, why would BA sink £17.9m into research 'armour-plated' fuel tanks (actually, a rubberised Kevlar layer) to solve an issue which had never been a problem on any well maintained runway, ever before?
They expected to get that money back and more.

The reason she is no longer flying is nothing to do with economics or safety (as you'll see this summer... ) but politics

AF was NOT prepared to pay the money to harden their fuel tanks, and was managing (somehow) to make a loss despite subsidies, so they invoked the termination clause of the bilateral agreement, that, effectively, said "if one airline drops it, both have to"

But a better example of the fare structures for Jumps is not Economy/First/Supersonic, rather Economy/Club (Business)/First
From London to to New York, the most competitive yet regulated sector in the world, for scheduled flights, it's about 7x the price of Economy to travel Club, and about 12x for First
This is pretty close to the Traveller x8/x10 Mid/High multipliers

And for comparison, MOST people (over 60% by IATA's reckoning) travel outside the UK at least one per year, and over 20% more than five times per year

The cost of air travel does not equate to the cost of space travel (yet) in terms of proportion of disposable income (well, not in the UK, anyway)

 

[DangerousThing]

What would have to be done to the economics of space travel to make it affordable for the middle class to make yearly trips.

I've already, IMTU, made Stasis (Low Passage) *extremely* safe, though it still retains the bad reputation.

I'd like to make Middle Passage affordable, with High Passage costing at least twice that of Middle Passage.

I suppose this might mean:

Luxury Passage CR 10,000
High Passage CR 3,000
Middle Passage CR 1,000
Low Passage CR 100

Of course this would hit the passenger revenue stream of the free traders. I would also have to adjust life support costs (which I think are too high anyway).

The trouble is that if you touch one part of a complex system, you have to see how the entire system changes.

 

[far-trader]

What would have to be done to the economics of space travel to make it affordable for the middle class to make yearly trips?

Your numbers are pretty close to my simple fix years ago for the solution to this. I divided (this and just about everything in Book 2) by 10, for simplicity. So...

High Pass Cr1,000
Mid Pass Cr800
Low Pass Cr100

Those numbers work better (for me and MTU at least) based on the long term cost of living numbers in CT.

Of course this would hit the passenger revenue stream of the free traders. I would also have to adjust life support costs (which I think are too high anyway).

The trouble is that if you touch one part of a complex system, you have to see how the entire system changes.

Again for me and MTU anyway the simple solution above works...

Life support, also divided by 10 (which makes it much easier to justify as food and minor expenses).

Starship crew salaries, also divided by 10 (brings them much more in line with other price and pay structures)

Ship building, also divided by 10 (making rewards for "adventures" smaller and more realistic. The reason for "adventures" (to make up mortgage shortfalls) still remains, it's just the values that have changed.

etc. etc.

 

[Whipsnade]

BA took no government subsidies...

BA took no government subsidies directly tied to the Concorde. However, if you want to claim BA receives no government subsidies at all then The Economist has been lying to me for the more than 15 years I've been a subscriber.

And BA is a piker compared to the subsidies AF receives.

National regulations don't mean squat globally. The US and EU regulatory hurdles put in place on the Concorde don't apply to Tokyo, Beijing, Qatar, New Delhi, and other places. If enough demand for SSTs existed they'd still be flying and there would have been more built then 20.

 

[aramis]

BA took no government subsidies directly tied to the Concorde. However, if you want to claim BA receives no government subsidies at all then The Economist has been lying to me for the more than 15 years I've been a subscriber.

And BA is a piker compared to the subsidies AF receives.

National regulations don't mean squat globally. The US and EU regulatory hurdles put in place on the Concorde don't apply to Tokyo, Beijing, Qatar, New Delhi, and other places. If enough demand for SSTs existed they'd still be flying and there would have been more built then 20.

The demand has been present for a long time. The ability of AF and BA to REACH that demand hasn't. The demand isn't sufficiently high to justify the operation of the Concorde given the operational constraints...

 

[Whipsnade]

The demand has been present for a long time.

But it is not yet large enough or there would be SSTs in the air today.

The ability of AF and BA to REACH that demand hasn't.

There were and are other players than AF and BA, there were are other governments handing out subsidies than the UK or Frace, and yet no SSTs fly today and none were built apart from the initial 20.

The demand isn't sufficiently high to justify the operation of the Concorde given the operational constraints...

Exactly. The demand does not yet exceed the constraints even though those constraints vary greatly worldwide.

 

[Carlobrand]

Starship crew salaries, also divided by 10 (brings them much more in line with other price and pay structures)

etc. etc.

Wait, what?? I didn't work 20 years in the Merchants so you could pay me minimum wage!

Seriously though, if you scale down the overall economy by a factor of ten, then logically everyone else's salaries are similarly scaled down, and they're still having problems meeting the price of a starship ticket. I mean, mid passage is still two months' salary to someone of a similar professional level to your ship's engineer, whether the passage is Cr8000 and you're paying him 4000, or whether the passage is 800 and you're paying him 400. The real issue punching up that ticket price is the cost of the ship relative to everyone's income - factor that down without also factoring down Joe Mechanic's income and you'll bring the cost of the passage down to something he can afford.

On the other hand, when it takes a shipyard a year or more to build a ship, you don't expect it to be cheap. A year's salary for a bunch of laborers, on top of whatever the cost of the base materials is, plus overhead and profit for the builder, can't be cheap.

I discussed elsewhere an option to address both the problem of high prices and of empty beds. With all due respect to the rules, history makes it quite clear that passengers are more than willing to travel in what the game calls double-occupancy. I figure a captain looking to make money is not going to ship out with empty rooms so, if he can't fill his rooms with high and mid passage, he can sell semi-private rooms (put a top bunk in there and sell it as a double-occupancy) at a discount. Anything over Cr 2000 a head is money he wouldn't have otherwise, and if he can get two passengers in the room at Cr 5000 a head, then he makes as much from the room as he would with a middle passage. So, as launch time approaches, it's time to play Price Line Negotiator and get those rooms filled with folk who don't mind a roommate if it'll save a buck.

 

[far-trader]

Wait, what?? I didn't work 20 years in the Merchants so you could pay me minimum wage!

Sure you did. It's in the contract. Read the fine print for the fine print, here use my scanning electron microscope :devil:

Seriously though, if you scale down the overall economy by a factor of ten, then logically everyone else's salaries are similarly scaled down...

Nope, not the overall economy, just the whacked (in my opinion of course) Book 2 (mostly) prices. Check out the cost of living per the long term subsistence (Book 3 equipment section), military/merc salaries (Book 4) and (somewhere...TCS?) the presumed average income of the population at large.

On the other hand, when it takes a shipyard a year or more to build a ship, you don't expect it to be cheap.

Certainly... but ships, even the smallest still cost MILLIONS of credits, instead of 10's of millions of credits. It makes it a little easier to swallow that muster out benefit of a Starship in my opinion. Still a hard swallow at 20% of MCrs but easier than 10s of MCrs.

I discussed elsewhere an option to address both the problem of high prices and of empty beds. With all due respect to the rules, history makes it quite clear that passengers are more than willing to travel in what the game calls double-occupancy.

I've long figured that "Middle Passage" IS double occupancy, at the basic LS cost (so half per occupant).

Key to the lower LS cost by the way is that at just Cr200 for 2 weeks it really can be mostly food, and we aren't forced to presume some exceedingly rare expendables like iridium lined and silk faced toilet paper

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Middle Passage.

/snippage/

I've long figured that "Middle Passage" IS double occupancy, at the basic LS cost (so half per occupant).

/snippity-snip/

Thank you! And here I thought I was the only one who always thought Middle Passage meant sharing the stateroom. You want privacy, you purchase a High Passage. If you are brave and/or broke you hop in a Low Berth and hope you make out.

 

[77topaz]

Thank you! And here I thought I was the only one who always thought Middle Passage meant sharing the stateroom. You want privacy, you purchase a High Passage. If you are brave and/or broke you hop in a Low Berth and hope you make out.

Isn't the canon difference between Mid Passage and High Passage just that a Mid passenger will have to shift if a High passenger arrives? (I think it's that way on Traveller Wikia)