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Is gold worth anything in the 3I?

Basically, it is a case of what fits best. If neither looks correct, then I start doing some digging and calculating. The 300 Horsepower Renault engine used in aircraft in World War One cost about $4400 then. Neither the inflation calculator or the Gold value works well on that one, but given the current production of car engines I go with a 50% increase in cost, and assume that the cost to product an equivalent engine now would be about $6600.

I think you'd need some sort of scaling for TL in this type of calculation. A manufactured item produced at the leading edge of technology of one TL doesn't directly compare to a functional equivalent produced at a higher TL. The Ford Windsor 302 V8 is a 300hp engine and costs under $4k today as a crate engine. It's half the displacement of the Hispano-Suiza V8 used in a bunch of WWI fighters but has the same power output.

The height of 1915 engine design and metallurgy isn't the same as that of 1961 or 2019. If you were purpose building a drop-in replacement for the HS V8 you could probably make it more efficient (P/W ratio) and all around better for the same dollar value which means you're making a modern replacement for less than it's century old predecessor.
 
OK the right thing to do is to change the dollar values back to 1977 dollars. At which point you have converted to Imperial Credits.
The calculation from 2018 dollars to 1977 dollars is multiply by .24.

https://cpiinflationcalculator.com/

I am not sure what date the article in question is using, but the calculator at the link can do 2018 back to 1913 or from any year to any year in that range.
Math works both ways. Credits/0.24 is the same as 1 Cr = $4.17 (close enough to 1 Cr = $4 for most uses).
 
I DO care!


Here is the site I use-



https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/


The one I prefer is the Economy Power, that is to say the percentage of GDP the item/work/company/labor would cost relative to everything else at it's time.
No, that only works for things like roadbuilding and other large scale fixed capital goods. For individual production items you use a combination of per capita GDP and differential prices in goods and services. It probably is going to track fairly well with CPI because CPI is calculated based on a "basket" of goods, a variety chosen in proportion to typical household purchases.


For example, CPI does not directly include gasoline prices. However, motor fuel prices get folded into every consumer item as component supplies and parts are shipped to production location, and item is then moved from producer to distributor to retail customer.
 
Most pirate havens are going to be within a parsec - there's a LOT of real estate given Marc's (and my) default assumption that Oort clouds and Kuiper Belts are not unique to the Sol system. Find a rocky core KBO, drill in, and drop some modular bases; forge some papers, and send it in on a relatively legit freighter.

Note that the major expenses are fuel and mortgage; without the mortgage, a freighter is able to make a lot of money. Of the 211k on the Type A, 155k is the payments. It loses money because of unfilled staterooms... a pure cargo version makes 30K per full 122 Td hold.

I've put a calculation tool in the tools folder: http://travellerrpg.com/tools/shipecon0_2.shtml
I agree about the available real estate. I don't agree that finding a large, rocky KB/Oort body is that easy. I don't agree that setting up a base in which people would want to live is that easy. You can send the booty out on some ship with a legal title. But now you're spreading the profits over at least a couple of ship crews, plus base personnel. You'd generally want it manned 24/7 with some means of making an unmaskable warning for incoming pirates if authorities show up (perhaps blow up a fairly innocuous but unique object within detailed sensor reading range).


If you're staying within one parsec, then there are probably only two or three target systems to raid. The more you raid, the more they want to find you. If you spread out to many systems you make a smaller dent in the traffic, a smaller blip on enforcement radar, and less of an obvious pattern. With a J2 or J3 raider you can look for a much larger field of plunder.



Unless one posits that piracy is so easy that they set up camp every couple parsecs... that's a whole lotta pirates.



Any time a ship can operate without mortgage payments vastly increases profitability. But piracy introduces additional risks. The typical trader rarely encounters piracy, but the pirate always has piracy encounters and likely combat. Combat means ship damage, which can be more expensive than mortgage payments.


Combat damage also requires a shipyard. So, if your pirate base is going to include a shipyard that requires vastly more expense to set up, and many skilled hands to fold into your pirate culture. Which, again, means shares of profits are smaller. It requires a very identifiable supply chain. To disguise that means sourcing those supplies from varied and distant manufacturers, which means repairs to primary equipment (drives and weapons) will be delayed compared to a legit yard.



If your base doesn't include a shipyard, then you have to take your damaged pirate ship to a yard that will work with pirates. Can you trust them to keep your secret? How easily can that secret be broken?


How many civilian (i.e., non-pirate) eyes can notice there's something suspect about that one ship that's been here with battle damage six times in only two years? If the shipyard is willing to work with one pirate crew (perhaps due to personal connections) the danger is minimized. The cover story could be anti-pirate patrols of varying success. A pirate haven is different. More than one pirate ship is going to be a repeat customer, subject to suspicion by residents, repeat traders, or even passing travelers.



Perhaps pirates tend to use a ship up and discard it as soon as a captured ship in better shape can take its place. Ok, that also makes tracing them trickier. But then almost any ship the pirates are using will exhibit battle damage which can attract unwanted attention at legitimate ports. Only the rare capture with easily covered damage will be useful for taking booty to port.


But that means this one ship will be identified with cargoes that could eventually be traced to pirated shipments. Sure, things may go unnoticed for a while. But the more stuff the pirates bring to port, the more stuff that can be traced. It might be traced by pattern long after the trades were actually executed.


Bounty hunters would pay brokers and port officials to obtain lists of ships and cargoes across many ports. Successfully uncovering a pirate would be worth an insurance reward of perhaps ten percent of every ship and shipment that can be traced to that pirate. Bounty hunting a moderately successful pirate could be far more profitable than the piracy itself, just by turning them in and letting the authorities take the risk of apprehension.


Actually chasing down and apprehending that pirate can be accomplished by the bounty hunter after the pirate lands or docks at port in some cases, eliminating the risk of combat and expensive repairs to their own ship. Then they get the insurance reward and a percentage of the pirate vessel value. If they have a powerful fighting ship themselves, it may be worth laying in wait at an expected port of call and taking on the pirate ship when it appears. If successful, the claim percentage of the pirate ship is that much higher.



The examples of pirate havens from the nineteenth century don't really compare. The spread of information in that age was both extremely limited in extent and slow to travel. Not so in an information age. It becomes trivial to maintain a record of every ship, every crewman, and every item of trade. If port X seems to keep sketchy record of ship traffic, somebody can drop passive sensors nearby to record flight control and ship transponder transmissions that would, by necessity, be unencrypted. Encrypted comms would also be picked up, sorted by source, and preserved for later analysis.


If the pirate can't be chased down because they've ditched the ship in the months since the last visit, the authorities can investigate the port personnel. They won't be gentle, and somebody is going to give up the pirates to save their own bacon.


No, I'm not convinced that anybody can make a career of piracy. One is more likely to run into protection rackets and other lower risk criminal behavior and official corruption. "Captain, these engine parts are way overpriced, and I'm not convinced the proton converter needs to be replaced." "Yes, but the Syndicate controls this port. If we don't buy their overpriced parts and labor, the repairs take much longer and something will break down before we've gone three jumps. And don't even think to come back and get repairs on warranty."
 
I guess we have the answer now:

If only this asteroid alone is so gold rich, I guess there will be others, making gold too common as to have much value in 3I...

(this was the first I thought when I read flykiller's post)


Hmm, but even with the robust reuse/recycle regimen that likely obtains in the Core Worlds where presumably most activity follows the population, you have to tally that against 1000s of years of wear and tear and loss.


Big question is how much can any raw mineral cost when Nuclear Damper technology suggests atomic manipulation and synthetic material generation limited only by fusion power, demand funding the techs, and gravwell issues.
 
TL9-11 exploitation of system resources is the way to go.

TL12 you have both the damper/gravitic/fusion synthesis of elements vs system exploitation.

TL13+ damper technology, extreme grav field tech such as is used to focus laser weapons, cheap fusion energy - you can make your own elements to order
 
Are you talking about transmuting elements? is any reference to it in Traveller?

ITTR the minerals explotation in several planets is one of the main goals of the MegaCorps, according many adventures or merc tickets where they are patrosn, BTW.
 
There are no references, but it is a natural consequence of the technologies they have - unintended consequence.

Gravitic tech allows you to hold stuff and compress it, damper tech allows you to enhance the strong force and thus fuse heavy elements from lighter ones a lot more efficiently than nature does it, Finally you have fusion power plants, or if you want to do it even cheaper build your factory near a star and use solar power.

There are some further consequences of the holy trinity of gravitics/damper/cheap energy generation. Antimatter should be manufactured in vast quantities for industrial use. The Imperium should be able to construct Dyson swarms anywhere it wants, then there are manufactured black holes as starship power plants...
 
Canonically, Gold is worth Cr10/gram (about Cr283.5 per ounce, somewhere around). It has industrial and decorative uses, and it's clear that transmuting isn't small scale practical until about TL18, given the size of damper units it's industrial scale.

TL22, a flashlight-sized device can lower the nuclear binding force to dissociate it.

Damper Boxes (TL12) don't prevent decay, just slow it. Throwing extra protons at the contents may or may not stick them, and probably won't prevent rapid decomposition of the nucleus if the energy isn't JUST right.

I agree that it's probably doable at TL13, but I suspect it's not commercially viable until TL15 or 16...
 
Are you talking about transmuting elements? is any reference to it in Traveller?

ITTR the minerals explotation in several planets is one of the main goals of the MegaCorps, according many adventures or merc tickets where they are patrosn, BTW.


That's the game in the Marches, but could be that's because they are feeding a LOT of TL6-11 planets and it's cheaper then the whole TL edifice to support transmutation.
 
Do you have a source for that figure?
Is it from the T20 Commodities Table for Speculative Cargo or another source?

The only reference I have comes from MT:HT (page 50), where, when refering to spice currency, it talks about Cr 300 gold coins weighting 30 g (so consistent with Aramis' numbers).

But this not alredy 3I...
 
Canonically, Gold is worth Cr10/gram (about Cr283.5 per ounce, somewhere around). It has industrial and decorative uses, and it's clear that transmuting isn't small scale practical until about TL18, given the size of damper units it's industrial scale.
Yup, it is something that only specialist factories are going to do, there will be no maker based transmutation until way above TL16.
By TL13 damper projectors are battlefield technology and are smaller than the earlier TL12 ship and city mounted stuff. 84 ton mass and 6 displacement ton volume is not exactly huge for an industrial damper, the power requirement is 500MW.

Alternatively all it could require is modified damper box technology at the pinch point of your elemental fusion.

The process is cheap fusion energy heats the stuff you want to fuse to a plasma, you use electromagnetic and gravitic fields to accelerate it direct it and squeeze it, and then use the damper component to catalyse the nuclear fusion reaction. Note this is an endothermic process for elements above iron (and some isotopes of lower mas number elements but its a good rule of thumb).

So - power plant, plasma generator, plasma conduits and flow apparatus, accelerators and pinch point, damper field, lots of electromagnets and grav plates, not to mention computer and controls, That little lot is going to have quite a price tag - it may be a lot cheaper to just get in a seeker and go find El Dorado...

Damper Boxes (TL12) don't prevent decay, just slow it. Throwing extra protons at the contents may or may not stick them, and probably won't prevent rapid decomposition of the nucleus if the energy isn't JUST right.
Nuclear stability is something we understand very well at our TL. We know the ratio of protons to neutrons to give stable or unstable isotopes of elements. We even transmute elements in particle accelerators and in nuclear reactor experiments.
This tech may actually allow us to create more stable isotopes of elements that nature can not.

I agree that it's probably doable at TL13, but I suspect it's not commercially viable until TL15 or 16...
Commercial viability will depend on juggling two factors:
cost of obtaining element by transmutation vs cost of obtaining element by resource exploitation.
IMTU I would limit it to the higher TLs as you suggest to maintain a more stable economy, but with factories producing expensive stable transmuted elements for specialist applications.
 
I would have it's value vary widely over known space, while trading over relatively narrow margins locally, say within a subsector. A subsector with an abundance of rich gold bearing bodies would have a pretty low price that would extend a "short" distance around. A GM could be pretty arbitrary within such general bounds. As with any commodity, costs of extraction and transport will largely indicate (though not directly determine) its price. When the market price falls below those costs, producers will no longer create a supply, whereupon the price will eventually rise as the existing supply dissipates. Have your intrepid adventurers try to dissipate some of it.

Remote systems would have a "basis" over the price of the gold at its source.

Does your ship captain transport a hold full of gold along the main, making a marginal profit, or does he take a risk and take a shortcut through a pirate infested backwater to cut expenses and make a fortune/ton?

Viva, space truckin'!!
 
Canonically, Gold is worth Cr10/gram (about Cr283.5 per ounce, somewhere around). It has industrial and decorative uses, and it's clear that transmuting isn't small scale practical until about TL18, given the size of damper units it's industrial scale.

TL22, a flashlight-sized device can lower the nuclear binding force to dissociate it.

Damper Boxes (TL12) don't prevent decay, just slow it. Throwing extra protons at the contents may or may not stick them, and probably won't prevent rapid decomposition of the nucleus if the energy isn't JUST right.

I agree that it's probably doable at TL13, but I suspect it's not commercially viable until TL15 or 16...



Book 3 T5.10 page 161
"The traditional gold price of Cr1000 per Troy ounce [31
grams] = Cr32 per gram. The ingot has a value of about (32
x 320 = ) Cr10,000."

weirdly enough this also is the same page that equates density with armor and uses gold as an example...

"That is, Density= 8.0 does not require that the
object is constructed of Steel; Density= 19.3 does not require
that the object is made of Gold (although it is constructed so
something very dense).
Armor. If the density selected is identified as Armor, that
assigned Ar= is used in Protection."

Ar= 19.3 Gold
 
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