Small Ship Unvierse Economics

[pendragonman]

Given that we have had many, many threads over the years that shows big ship universe economics; how would one create the economic model for a small ship universe. One where the absolute maximum tonnage is, say 10,000 dtons?

What assumptions are necessary? What tax rate is necessary, or are taxes even necessary?

Can the Imperial system be supported by trade tariffs alone?

 

[Tobias]

An economic paradigm for a small ship universe is quite easy to create. You don't need to change anything from the OTU, and you can use the budget considerations from STRIKER or TCS as you like.

On the other hand a paradigm for a small ship universe where starships are not also common as dirt is, under rational assumptions, only possible to create by drastically reducing population numbers, or average technological levels, or both.

 

[robject]

Or, possibly, to set world economies lower.

 

[McPerth]

On the other hand a paradigm for a small ship universe where starships are not also common as dirt is, under rational assumptions, only possible to create by drastically reducing population numbers, or average technological levels, or both.

Or by requiring a very scarce element for the drives (2300AD approach)...

 

[rancke]

Or by requiring a very scarce element for the drives (2300AD approach)...

Thereby pretty much making non-corporate civilian-owned ships impossible.


Hans

 

[McPerth]

Thereby pretty much making non-corporate civilian-owned ships impossible.


Hans

Or at least very rare, true, but I guess that would happen in any situation in wich starships are scarce, as Tobias suggested, whatever the reason behind scarcity is...

 

[aramis]

Part of the problem is that assumptions of ship cost in CT also assume middle class incomes of KCr12 or so per year, but later economic systems assume incomes on the order of KCr30+ for middle class incomes.

Keeping in mind: at the time CT was written, most of the goods priced in the rulebook were priced at about the then-current market prices for the US midwest. (I've checked old magazines, newspapers, etc, online. Seriously, it's 1976 Illinois prices.) Median income then was about $11,500., and the mean income $9,700 or so. A man could house his family for $400 a month in a nice apartment, $600 a month in a house. And feeding oneself was about $50 a month, $100 if one dined regularly, and about $300 if one never ate at home.

In that scheme, a 10% tax rate (pretty close to the world average at the time) means KCr=Pop. If we assume a 50% military budget (like the major cold war nations), KCr=0.5Pop. And the navy gets 70%, or KCr=0.35Pop.

A world with 1 billion people then has about MCr35,000.
A 5000Td carrier-battleship under Bk 2 runs...

5000Td MCr0500.0 5000Td Hull, USL
0100Td MCr0025.0 Bridge
0125Td MCr0240.0 JDrive Z=2
0047Td MCr0096.0 MD Z=2
0073Td MCr0192.0 PP Z=2
1000Td MCr0000.0 JFuel
0020Td MCr0000.0 PP Fuel
0050Td MCr0155.0 50 Trip turr, 1xBL 1x SC 1xML each.
1500Td MCr2850.0 150 Fighters w/Beam Lasers
0600Td MCr0075.0 150 Staterooms for fighter crew.
0260Td MCr0032.5 65 staterooms for ship crew (7E 1M 1N 1P 50G 1C 1X 3A)
0800Td MCr0100.0 200 staterooms for 200 Marines
0380Td MCr0137 4 shuttles (for marines) with 50 seats (and 21Td cargo) each
0045Td MCr0000 45Td cargo.

MCr4402.5 base cost. MCr3962.25 in bulk order
At KC1 per month per pilot (officers all), and marines at Cr300 each minimum, she racks up a good bit of salary - about MCr0.3 per month.

4.5 billion credits to build, 4.5 million a year to maintain, another 3.6 million to crew once (And she probably has dual crews), plus base housing probably (costing about KCr0.5 per annum to maintain) for both crews for another MCr0.415 per year, plus 25 fuel loads (another MCr2.6 per year or so, unrefined). She runs about 15 million a year, not including the base staff nor paying for the hull. With GCr35 per annum, and a 20 year replacement cycle, and 50% of the naval budget for non-ships, expect about 73 of these guys. Or replace some of them with smaller ships, to provide promotion potential.

 

[tjoneslo]

There are a number of reasons why you can end up with a small ship universe.

On one axis is limitations on ship size: Lack of availability of rare elements is one reason. Having the jump drive be unstable over a specific radius is another. A third would be simple engineering limits on size.

On another axis would be the economics of building large or small ships. For example, remove the grav drive making it very difficult to get to/from orbit. Sure you can use HePLaR or Nuclear Fusion drive, if you don't mind polluting the planetary ecosphere with the rocket exhaust.

There is now so much harder to get goods to and from a planet that trade with other worlds is too expensive to bother. A few small ships trading in rare, exotic items are all that would be left.

The general paranoia about building large ships with powerful engines is one reason to keep ship sizes down. That assumes you have a general agreement between all the powers not to build oversize ships with the huge weapons/engines.

Taken in isolation each has reasons why they don't make real sense. But taken in combination, I think you could justify it pretty easily. So :

1) There is a maximum size on ships capable of using a jump drive which is inherent in the design of the drive. Any larger and the ship ends up a smear of subatomic particles along the flight path. I'd make this a probability so you can build a large(ish) ship and jump it once or twice safely, probably.
2) There isn't any way to engineer a long term (weeks+) stable environmental system on the scale of a jump capable ship. You can build a large habitat, you can't compress it into a starship sized object. This makes people very nervous about travel between worlds.
3) Have the grav modules fail to work effectively at beyond 30km above the surface of a planet, or at all on anything smaller than size 1 (whatever the G rating for that is). Meaning if you are going to get to orbit on most habitable planets, you need rockets with dangerous exhausts or beanstalks. The economics of this drives worlds to be very independent.
4) Because there no inherent limitation on non-jump ship sizes, there is little or no incentive to build jump-capable war fleets, because it's too easy to outclass them with the in-system defense fleet. Military planning concentrates on local defense rather than force projection, except on a very small scale.

So 2, 3, 4 serve to isolate worlds economically and militarily, and 1 serves to reinforce those changes.

So starships could be relatively cheap, if anyone cared to build one. They tend to be small, fragile, and not useful in the grand scheme of things. Perfect for PCs.

 

[Condottiere]

The reason you want to keep ships as small as possible, is because the size of big ticket items like drives and power plants are percentage based, and if you can accomplish your goal with a smaller ship, it saves money.

The reason you might want one as large as possible, is if economies of scale come into play, or for a naval vessel, space for any upgrades.

What's worth approximately one thousand credits per fourteen cubic metres in transport costs per jump to take the trouble to shift to where demand is? If million ton super freighters can bring those transportation costs down, probably quite a lot.

 

[salochin999]

How could an Imperium maintain control in a Traveller style universe?

Control the star ports and ship yards.

If you say the fiefdoms of the Imperial nobility aren't the planets themselves but the planetary star ports and their attached ship yards - which ties in well with each planet having their own local government - then ship construction can be controlled by the Imperium for political not economic considerations.

 

[Vladika]

How could an Imperium maintain control in a Traveller style universe?

Control the star ports and ship yards.

If you say the fiefdoms of the Imperial nobility aren't the planets themselves but the planetary star ports and their attached ship yards - which ties in well with each planet having their own local government - then ship construction can be controlled by the Imperium for political not economic considerations.

I like this thought. If you look "real world" many shipyards can build supertankers. Exactly ONE can build super carriers (the modern "capital ship"). The reasons don't matter, the reality is the model.

The USN builds one carrier every four years. Nobody else can either afford them, or their infrastructure. It would be too expensive to have every supertanker capable shipyard also having the capacity to build super carriers.

 

[aramis]

How could an Imperium maintain control in a Traveller style universe?

Control the star ports and ship yards.

If you say the fiefdoms of the Imperial nobility aren't the planets themselves but the planetary star ports and their attached ship yards - which ties in well with each planet having their own local government - then ship construction can be controlled by the Imperium for political not economic considerations.

Only kind-of - unless there's something else preventing it, major worlds normal heavy industry capacity is easily capable of building the ships in a physical sense. We might not be able to build the jump grids, tho. And a Panamax fits inside a bounding box of about 50,550Td, but being typically about 25KTd, and laden DWT of 60K to 80 K tons (metric) (panamax cruise ships as low as 8K DWT). The Nimitz Class is a bounding box of about 130KTd, but only fills about 1/4 of the bounding box; calling it 30KTd for good measure.

So, the argument is often made the max should be 50-100KTd... but those are not stressed for the kinds of accelerations a Traveller ship is. (typically, carriers hit about 50KM/h in 10 minutes... about 13.8m/s over 600 sec even if we allow for it in 5 min... that's still under 0.1m/s^2... 0.01G or so. And a lot of her mass is in fact structural.)

A small ship universe generally is below 5KTd - the size limit of Bk2 designs - the 10KTd-50KTd max being mid-sized - big enough you need HG rules to build, small enough that crews are still reasonable.

Simply put, if the tech can build it, and there's no reason it's limited, the shipyards will NOT be controllable - because if you forbid another, any wet naval yard will be able to hide gravitic spacecraft in wet-naval hulls, especially submarines.

We know that a sub can be buttoned up for up to a year. (It's really tight on the food.) So we know a spaceship with gravitics should be good just as long.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

The USN builds one carrier every four years. Nobody else can either afford them, or their infrastructure. It would be too expensive to have every supertanker capable shipyard also having the capacity to build super carriers.

Erm, america is not the only people operating, or even building carriers.

The UK has the two Queen Elizibeth hulls on the slips (even though they're only going to bring one into full commisson), the Indians are in the process of building two, the Russians say they are building them....and thats not counting VSTOL, helicopter carriers and such.

in short, their are several nations that can build these ships, and i'm sure more nations could, given sufficent reason to.

 

[Condottiere]

Building and operating a carrier needs a specific institutional memory niche, which is one reason the Chinese weren't allowed to get hold of an Invincible, directly or through a backdoor, to take apart, examine and reverse engineer. It takes two or three decades to acquire it.

Though I hear the Brazilians are helping them out.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

I'm not arguing that Building and operating a carrier is easy, as the fact that our world of 7 billions people is currently supporting about 40 or so carriers of all types shows, the yanks run about half of those.

I'm just saying that the chinese have the ability to aquire both the ships and the operational experenice to use them, if they really want to. Even if, as you say, it takes them 30+ years to do it, it's in thier power.

 

[aramis]

[m;]The continuing discussion of the chinese carrier capability is dangerously close to politics, is essentially off topic, and if it continues, will be drawing infractions for politics outside the pit.[/m;]

 

[Condottiere]

Besides finding the money to build ships, the actual bottleneck appears to be the recruiting, training, maintaining and retaining of qualified personnel.

Not that you wouldn't have a surge of patriotism at the start of a war, though you might be short of hulls.

 

[Carlobrand]

Besides finding the money to build ships, the actual bottleneck appears to be the recruiting, training, maintaining and retaining of qualified personnel.

Not that you wouldn't have a surge of patriotism at the start of a war, though you might be short of hulls.

Ehh? 379 billion people and you can't find enough recruits? Aramis is drawing 5000 Navy personnel, about 11,000 pilots and another 14,000-ish Marines out of a world with a billion pop. That doesn't exactly sound difficult, and that puts something like 25,000 5000 dT battleships in the Marches.

[m;]The continuing discussion of the chinese carrier capability is dangerously close to politics, is essentially off topic, and if it continues, will be drawing infractions for politics outside the pit.[/m;]

Oops, sorry.

 

[pendragonman]

Back on topic, please.

While the Terran ability to build wet navy carriers is interesting, it is not what I am trying to get at.

One of you premised a budget of KCr = 0.35Pop. What I was wanting to know is if fleets can be built and maintained on just trade tariffs, so at maybe 0.035Pop or even 0.0035Pop to encourage more trade.

Opinions?

 

[Quint]

FWIW, IMTU I went with a small ship model - but decided that the size of FTL ships were limited by Tech Level. TL9&10 are up to 1KDt, +1KDt per TL. This seemed like an interesting way to limit ships in a couple of different ways and has worked out.

The biggest thing in a small ship universe is how it changes naval warfare - boats get very important (or at least seem more important, seriously I'm not sure why the OTU isn't dominated by monitiors and starbases except that that seems to be less "fun") and it's much more exciting trying to transport large numbers of troops for surface actions.

D.