Starship Missions: Scheduled vs Unscheduled + Cargo vs Freight

[Spinward Flow]

PCs break the mould.
But knowing how NPCs make their living can help a campaign setting "feel real" by virtue of the coherent consistency of the economics that control their lives. That way, when an NPC says "No, I can't do that for you." there's a reason behind it, rather than it just being something arbitrary (like a roll of the dice).

That kind of coherent consistency helps build up the Lore and feel of different locations in space that the PCs travel to, so it isn't all the same everywhere. Giving the campaign setting texture like that has immersive value, even if the PCs aren't engaging with it directly in exactly the same way that the NPCs are.

Just because the PCs don't care, does not mean that NOBODY cares.

 

[whartung]

Scheduled deliveries seem to run contrary to this idea but that doesn't mean the crew of scheduled carrier couldn't have some fun.

Um, unless you're chartering passage, or driving yourself, the vast majority of travel today is via "scheduled" deliveries.

Even the stuff you order to your home is a scheduled delivery. They have a truck that goes out on a known route (which is why they give them the package to deliver in the first place).

 

[Silverhawk]

Think we have to use the game terms and not real world per se.

Railroads pretty much never own their cargo unless it is something like ore/timber/steel/coal railroads owned by producers or users in some aspect of vertical integration.

Since the early part of the 20th Century the railroads have been restricted from owning commodities/industries that are sold to others. This was part of the anti-trust movement of the Theodore Roosevelt administration. And materials being carried for a railroad's use generally were shipped in cars marked as for company service rather than just any car of the appropriate type.

 

[McPerth]

Um, unless you're chartering passage, or driving yourself, the vast majority of travel today is via "scheduled" deliveries.

Even the stuff you order to your home is a scheduled delivery. They have a truck that goes out on a known route (which is why they give them the package to deliver in the first place).

Today's world has immediate communications that allow you to sell your cargo at your destiny even before you buy it at your trip origin. In Traveller you don't have this possibility...

 

[whartung]

Today's world has immediate communications that allow you to sell your cargo at your destiny even before you buy it at your trip origin. In Traveller you don't have this possibility...

Even so, I posit most trade will be done via scheduled means. Simply because starships are stupid expensive, which means that operators will want them fully utilized as much as possible. Sitting around waiting for cargo is wasting pretty much everything (labor, mortgage, maintenance, etc.). The only way to fully utilize the ship is to have it on some schedule that the freight brokers are keyed in on so that they can sell your slots to customers.

The B2 trade rules are an anachronism as a niche gameplay mechanic, not a manifest of behavior of society at large.

The players don't want to fit to a schedule, they want to run about rogue driven by whimsy. That's fine, for players. For anyone actually interested in making their mortgage payments, they're going to want all of this stuff lined up before they arrive. Brokers have weeks to set up loads, shippers don't want to be at the whim of whoever happens to fly in next. They want assurances that their products are going to arrive to a destination on schedule. They can no more afford to have their goods sitting rotting in a warehouse than a ship can afford to sit idle and empty while Mal and Jayne go rustling among the ne'er-do-wells to rummage up business.

That doesn't mean those shippers aren't sending goods on speculation, just that the ship operator isn't necessarily involved in it. In fact, speculators even moreso can't afford to just sit around. They're not moving their goods blindly. They're not some snake oil salesmen roving from town to town in their cart. They have a finger on the market, annual trend data, maybe some inside info to time their goods.

There's always enough thing happening on the edge to keep a player group and their Free Trader amused, but that's the exception, not the rule. Filling in the truly last minute stuff (but for some reason not charging a premium for it). Society and businessmen like structure and planning.

 

[Grav_Moped]

The B2 trade rules are an anachronism as a niche gameplay mechanic, not a manifest of behavior of society at large.

The players don't want to fit to a schedule, they want to run about rogue driven by whimsy. That's fine, for players. For anyone actually interested in making their mortgage payments, they're going to want all of this stuff lined up before they arrive.

Absolutely. You've got at the very least MCr37 tied up in capital costs for the ship, and you're going to let it sit idle for half the time? I mean, this might be plausible if you're thinking it's break-bulk cargo in crates and barrels, but once containerization is possible there's no need to stay dirtside for more than a couple of days if the downport doesn't have a backlog.

That doesn't allow a lot of time to get roped into some planetside adventure, though, so the canonical flight cadence is acceptable. It's one of the places where the game sacrifices economic plausibility in favor of dramatic potential. And that's fine, because it's a RPG first and only a commerce simulation to the degree necessary for narrative purposes.

I mean, you can play it as "Starships and Spreadsheets" if you want, and if you keep things within the scope of the LBB2/7 trade mini-game, it works well enough. But in the context of Traveller as an RPG, the mini-game is only there to support scenarios and campaigns based on science fiction "space trader" tropes.

All that said, you have to give them credit for making the effort, and coming up with something that worked (even if only within a limited scope and requiring some ship-construction rules kludges). In 1977, that was a pretty big deal.

 

[kilemall]

Since the early part of the 20th Century the railroads have been restricted from owning commodities/industries that are sold to others. This was part of the anti-trust movement of the Theodore Roosevelt administration. And materials being carried for a railroad's use generally were shipped in cars marked as for company service rather than just any car of the appropriate type.

Before that the Philadelphia and Reading owned everything from the mines to the railroads to the docks, it was the highest valued stock in the world at one point.

 

[aramis]

CORRECT. But you do owe 50% of the profits when the lots are sold.

This goes to the heart of the question raised in the initial post by the thread-starter: Does a Subsidized Merchant (per the T5 Definitions) actually make sense or have a viable mission?

Would a government or organization subsidize such a venture? What conditions would be written into such a subsidy contract, and under what conditions would a government consider a subsidy a default on the subsidy-agreement and perhaps cancel it?

TTB says "gross receipts".... which would include sale of carried spec. The dodge there is to pay the ship it's KCr1000/ton...

 

[whulorigan]

"Mission Profile Year 50: Scrap source"

That would be code "WU" -
Barge (W) - Inoperative/Hulk/De-activated (U).

(Hey, wait a minute, those are my initials . . . )