It occurs to me, as I watch the inevitable flamewar rising out of the Passenger Pods discussion in the Locker Room, that slaver ships and piracy in space is a very different experience than slavery/piracy in the Golden Age of Sail.
Flamewar?? What flamewar?
Back in the GAoS, hauling a cargo of slaves was merely an ethical choice. If you had the moral flexibility to do it without flinching then it was a no brainer, you trade dewdaws to African kings for slaves, through them in the hold and occassionally slop food and water down onto them, get em to America, make 'em wash out the hold, and then load it up with barrels of sugar and pallets of cotton, which you bring back to Europe and sell for dewdaws to give to the Africans, earning heaps of profits at each leg of the way.
Depends on your Golden Age period. Britain outlawed slavery in 1807, and the importation of slaves to the U.S. was outlawed in 1808, and an 1819 amendment to the law declared the act of importation of slaves on a slave ship to be piracy, with the captain and crew liable for punishment as pirates. Several European nations followed suit over the next decade or so. You could land and sell slaves elsewhere, of course (some of the South American countries were infamous) - just not in the U.S. or in British, or later several European, possessions. After 1808, slave ships were reduced to the status of smugglers. By that time, of course, there was already a large self-supporting slave population in the U.S.
A factor here is that a big reason the slave trade was abolished in Britain and Europe was that it was no longer needed. The Industrial Revolution in Europe produced a demand for skilled workers, a role the slaves could not easily fill. Britain in fact struggled with a growing problem of unemployment over the next couple of decades as changes in agriculture drove rural workers into the city. All that left an opening for abolitionist sentiments to move forward unchecked - at least in Europe - and from there to the European colonies. In the U.S., it ran head-first into the fact that the agrarian southern economy depended heavily on slaves.
What that means for the Traveller universe is that slavery is more likely where tech is low and there's a need for a lot of grunt labor. Where tech is higher, technical solutions are more attractive: machines don't try to rebel, at least not until about TL 16 or 17, I think.
Unfortunately, that's also going to mean a problem connecting the dots. Your best source for slaves is low tech worlds if you're planning on using "dewdaws" to buy them, your best market for slaves is low-tech worlds, but a lot of them are too low-pop to be useful markets. It's going to be tricky finding source and market close enough to be profitable, and honestly you're going to get heavy competition from closer, higher tech despotic worlds selling their indentured debtors and political prisoners.
...By the same token, while I've always just sort of assumed that space pirates exist, it occurs to me that repairing a ship on the high seas back in the Golden Age of Sail was usually just a matter of making some more rope, or slapping a patch of tar onto holes. I can't think of much damage that could be done to a ship that didn't either scuttle it completely, or could be patched up with some tar.
Barnacles and shipworms (a species of clam, oddly enough) are the great enemies of wooden ships.
Shipworms are about as good as termites for destroying wood. From about the mid 18th century forward, ships had copper sheathing on the immersed portions of the ship in order to shield the wood from attack by worms. Prior to that, you pretty well figured your ship had a limited life, and you didn't want to be on an old ship. The copper sheathing needed occasional maintenance to make sure it stayed in place.
Barnacles are a distant relative of crabs that like to attach themselves to things - unfortunately including the bottom of your ship - and then filter-feed from the water. They aren't a threat that I know of, but in large numbers they can slow a ship down something fierce, at least as the sailors measured things in their weeks-and-months-long journeys. Ships would periodically be drydocked or beached so the crews could pry off the little pests. If you didn't take care of them periodically, the loss of speed meant for longer trips and possibly problems if you needed speed and didn't have it.
A heavy wind could damage your spars; ship captains judged the wind very carefully and had their crews adjusting sails all the time to get best use without damaging sails, rigging, or spars, but sudden gusts or a moment's inattention could lead to damage. Ships always carried spares. Then there's rope - you mentioned that. And, of course, your ship is only as good as its sails, which means someone has to mend and occasionally replace them.
Whereas spaceships are EXPENSIVE. Expensive to make, expensive to repair, expensive to maintain.
I haven't nearly the skills or knowledge base to do it, but it would be interesting to see someone do an economic comparison between the cost of building and maintaining space ships in Trav versus the costs in Hornblower's day.
Sorry, I have bits and pieces, but not enough for that big task. You need the cost of the ship; the cost of the supplies it consumed - including rope, spars, sail, tar, provisions, and so forth; the rate at which it consumed supplies; and the wages of the crew - keeping in mind that a sailing ship needs a rather large crew compared to the typical Traveller ship, so that becomes a consideration.
