Starships Comparative Potential Mercantile Revenue

[WizWom]

CPI in 1977 was 60. Currently is up over 240, so parity in 1977 is $4 now. Also matches well with ¼ hour base labor. But you just did the calc backwards. MCr37.08 LBB2 = kCr37.08/ton × $4/Cr = $148.3k/ton. That is much cheaper than $500k/ton, yet it still has a hard time breaking even without spec trade.

CPI has been useless for 30 years, because the government has incentive to low-ball the government statistic.
In the 70's I could buy a diner meal for $1 breakfast, $1 lunch and maybe $2 for a dinner.

Now you're hard pressed to find a place that charges less than $8 for a breakfast, $8 for lunch and $15 for dinner. McDonalds used to have a "Hamburger Fries and a coke - and change back from your buck!" ad.

 

[aramis]

CPI has been useless for 30 years, because the government has incentive to low-ball the government statistic.
In the 70's I could buy a diner meal for $1 breakfast, $1 lunch and maybe $2 for a dinner.

Now you're hard pressed to find a place that charges less than $8 for a breakfast, $8 for lunch and $15 for dinner. McDonalds used to have a "Hamburger Fries and a coke - and change back from your buck!" ad.

Only having been cognizant of prices since late 70's, I've never seen a McDonalds meal under $1; I remember $0.97 hamburgers (and throwback specials to $0.79).

But it's dubious if McDonald's counts as food...

As for the CPI, the incentive to lowball it has been present the entire time. It's just as lowball earlier as it is now.

 

[Condottiere]

Cheeseburger special sales, I think at seventy nine cents.

Can't recall if you needed newspaper coupons.

I kinda suspect that once the economics click, they won't need cows but can grow the burger patties directly.

 

[whartung]

CPI has been useless for 30 years, because the government has incentive to low-ball the government statistic.
In the 70's I could buy a diner meal for $1 breakfast, $1 lunch and maybe $2 for a dinner.

Now you're hard pressed to find a place that charges less than $8 for a breakfast, $8 for lunch and $15 for dinner. McDonalds used to have a "Hamburger Fries and a coke - and change back from your buck!" ad.

Well, coincadinkly, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ , a $1 in 1970 is worth $7.54 today. So, $8 breakfast is right on track.

I paid $10 for a egg-a-muffin meal the other day.

Only having been cognizant of prices since late 70's, I've never seen a McDonalds meal under $1; I remember $0.97 hamburgers (and throwback specials to $0.79).

Hamburger Stand. $0.29 hamburgers in the early 80s. Didn't seem much different from a McDs hamburger, we just bought more of them.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Straybow]

CPI has been useless for 30 years, because the government has incentive to low-ball the government statistic.
In the 70's I could buy a diner meal for $1 breakfast, $1 lunch and maybe $2 for a dinner.

Now you're hard pressed to find a place that charges less than $8 for a breakfast, $8 for lunch and $15 for dinner. McDonalds used to have a "Hamburger Fries and a coke - and change back from your buck!" ad.

Yes, the CPI is designed to minimize the Cost Of Living Adjustment for entitlements. But some economists track the "real" inflation rate, which peaks higher than CPI but usually doesn't sustain the peak long enough to change the result in the long run. The difference is the area under the curve for real world prices ends up being more for the inflationary period. When calculated with pre-CPI methods, the current inflation rate probably peaked around 20% and remains somewhere around 15%.

According to this, the big mac was introduced in 1967 at 45¢. So maybe you could buy the "where's the beef?" sized burger and a small fires and coke for a smidge under a dollar in the early '70s.

 

[Straybow]

That's because a Free Trader is operating on "low volumes" of passengers and cargo capacity.
It's not a container ship carrying TEUs by the thousands.

A train carrying a hundred TEUs can make a profit. A truck hauling one TEU across the country can make a profit. Why? Because the service is priced by the hauler to make a profit, not by some mysterious, invisible authority beyond the fourth wall that wrote numbers down on a napkin while developing the game and never bothered to make the numbers work.

I've seen load sourcing sights, and have done rideshare work that functions much the same way. I've never seen a trucker going around buying up good and moving them to another city, hoping to sell at a profit, nor freight train companies, nor air freight, nor wet shipping.

 

[Spinward Flow]

I've seen load sourcing sights, and have done rideshare work that functions much the same way. I've never seen a trucker going around buying up good and moving them to another city, hoping to sell at a profit, nor freight train companies, nor air freight, nor wet shipping.

For short durations (delivery within days) that is almost certainly the case (these days). Transport services are just that ... they transport someone else's goods almost all the time.

It's when you get into LONG durations (months between pickup and delivery) such as during the Age of Sail when deliveries of goods took months that you got speculation of the type envisioned by LBB2 (et al.), where the merchant purchases the speculative goods, transports them, and tries to find a buyer for them at their destination.

With fast delivery times, it makes "business sense" for delivery services to specialize on their core competency of transport so as to leave the speculative goods market segment to specialists who prefer to "gamble" on arbitrage (buy low here, sell high there).

With slow delivery times, which interstellar trade functionally is, a business case for the merchant captain (or owner aboard) to engage in speculative trading with their own funding becomes a reasonable proposition again ... although there is very much a "catch as catch can" feeling to such activities, rather than a "swing for the fences on every pitch" type of sensibility for such matters. A merchant who wants to stay in (interstellar) business needs to have a good sense of knowing when to buy ... and where to sell ... in order to profitably navigate the eddies and currents of opportunity, when and as they arise. That takes SKILL and it isn't something that everyone has by default (because if they did, no one would or even could go bankrupt).

Transportation services for third party freight is a relatively "reliable" source of revenue income ... so long as you can scare up a large enough volume of it.

Speculative goods buying and selling is "gambling with your own money" ... which can lead to large profits and/or large losses. The trick is knowing enough (and having enough funding reserves) to engage in it only when the odds are in your favor.
Know when to hold 'em.
Know when to fold 'em.
Know when to walk away.
And know when to run.

 

[kilemall]

For short durations (delivery within days) that is almost certainly the case (these days). Transport services are just that ... they transport someone else's goods almost all the time.

It's when you get into LONG durations (months between pickup and delivery) such as during the Age of Sail when deliveries of goods took months that you got speculation of the type envisioned by LBB2 (et al.), where the merchant purchases the speculative goods, transports them, and tries to find a buyer for them at their destination.

With fast delivery times, it makes "business sense" for delivery services to specialize on their core competency of transport so as to leave the speculative goods market segment to specialists who prefer to "gamble" on arbitrage (buy low here, sell high there).

With slow delivery times, which interstellar trade functionally is, a business case for the merchant captain (or owner aboard) to engage in speculative trading with their own funding becomes a reasonable proposition again ... although there is very much a "catch as catch can" feeling to such activities, rather than a "swing for the fences on every pitch" type of sensibility for such matters. A merchant who wants to stay in (interstellar) business needs to have a good sense of knowing when to buy ... and where to sell ... in order to profitably navigate the eddies and currents of opportunity, when and as they arise. That takes SKILL and it isn't something that everyone has by default (because if they did, no one would or even could go bankrupt).

Transportation services for third party freight is a relatively "reliable" source of revenue income ... so long as you can scare up a large enough volume of it.

Speculative goods buying and selling is "gambling with your own money" ... which can lead to large profits and/or large losses. The trick is knowing enough (and having enough funding reserves) to engage in it only when the odds are in your favor.
Know when to hold 'em.
Know when to fold 'em.
Know when to walk away.
And know when to run.

That’s why I think the gambling skill should operate as a Trader-0 skill.

 

[whartung]

With slow delivery times, which interstellar trade functionally is

Interstellar trade is not slow. "Weeks" is not slow. I remember the old days when pretty much anything you bought off of TV was "6-8 weeks for delivery". The Sears catalog, ordering was weeks.

Is it slower than local? Yes.

The benefit of the local retailer is proximity. You walk in, find your good, walk out. The online retailers have scaled that up to where the store front is acres in size, but manageable through staffing and the online catalog. Having something shipped from a local Amazon warehouse vs delivered from a local grocery store is the same thing. The local grocery is stifled by lack of floor space, and also having to carry perhaps more of a commodity than a market can bare. The local market may have a capacity for 10 units per week. But the grocery store needs to stock all 10 stores with excess, otherwise they're out of stock and the consumer goes elsewhere. Meanwhile a centralized online vendor can stock more efficiently, and thus more items, offering more variety.

The value add of an interstellar trader is to provide goods from far, far away. Not routine stuff that anyone can get with a phone call and an X-Boat hop. But the speculative trading model doesn't take into account rarity/distance. I mean, a lathe from Core is no different than a lathe from Regina. So, no reason to haul one all the way across the galaxy. But Tobian Star Flower spice, that's completely different.

The Age of Sail model is a much more remote model, places are farther, in terms of time, apart. But also visits were more rare as travel was very expensive, and dangerous. So, even commodities were rare, and thus valuable to ship.

 

[Spinward Flow]

That’s why I think the gambling skill should operate as a Trader-0 skill.

There is some overlap between the two ... but they really aren't the same, in my estimation.
Just because you're good at gambling on "games of chance" in a casino does not mean you necessarily have transferable skill to "games of commerce" in the realms of buy and sell (over, in the context of this discussion, interstellar distances).

Interstellar trade is not slow. "Weeks" is not slow. I remember the old days when pretty much anything you bought off of TV was "6-8 weeks for delivery". The Sears catalog, ordering was weeks.

Depends on how you're counting the passage of time I guess.
Think about from the buyer's perspective, starting from nothing.

If I place an order "today" for something in the next star system over (let's call it one jump away) ... a starship needs to be dispatched from where I am go pick up that item. That ship could take 1+ day maneuvering away to a jump point, spend a 7 days in jump (+1 day for maintenance checks after breakout), plus another 1+ day maneuvering to the destination world from the jump point.

So even if a ship leaves "immediately today" after I order something (unexpected and/or out of stock), we're already talking a 10 days in transit just to get to a neighboring star system. Add in needing to do the whole transit AGAIN to get back and we're talking 20 days minimum expectation in the generic case ... and that's not even including any delays that could be involved in getting a delivery to/from the starport ... so if we bake in another 5 days for that on each end, we're looking at a 30 day round trip time from initial order to final delivery on my doorstep as a customer for an interstellar sourced item (that wasn't already in stock).

Make that 2 jumps away and you're looking at perhaps up to 60 days (if relying on tramp traders).
6 weeks = 42 days
8 weeks = 56 days

My point being that a dedicated service (skip the intermediate stops) will of course be faster and be able to fill an order more quickly ... and for items that are in steady demand there will be a relatively "dedicated flow" moving those goods from producers to markets (including warehousing) so you don't necessarily have to wait as long when an item is "out of stock" and needs to be reordered from an interstellar supplier. However, in terms of "time delay friction" in the movement of goods, jump speeds are by no means "instantaneous" of the ansible communications variety and are going to factor into the bottom lines of third parties, but not necessarily for interstellar transport services operators.

Heck, even moving goods between Regina/Regina and Efate/Regina is either a 1J6, 2J3, 3J2 or 6J1 transit ONE WAY ... and you need to double that duration for a round trip! That kind of time delay in the "go fetch" process of moving goods around can make a difference in how markets are shaped by supply and demand ... but all of those considerations are "downstream" of starports and customs.

It's not something that the LBB2 trading system needs to model "holistically" ... so it doesn't even try.
Instead, all LBB2 tries to model (very simply) are the only parts of interstellar trade that are "relevant" to a small ship operator at any given time and location (You Are HERE). Everything else falls by the wayside. It's a "here's the rules of the road, now go find your own path" type of system, rather than an attempt at a full blown economic simulation of everything.

Doesn't stop us as Players and Referees from TRYING to extend and extrapolate that simplistic model beyond what it is intended to answer and cover (because, we do that...), but that's the nature of trying to dream of fictional worlds with universal standards in them that aren't pure gobbledygook variables for everything that's more trouble than it's worth.

So to bring this back to your point ... weeks may not be slow to your mind ... but depending on what you're talking about, it sure can be a problem for any kind of Just In Time style of supply chain (as we've had real world examples of for the past 2+ years now). With enough Time, Tools, Tech Manuals and Advanced Planning thrown at the problem it doesn't have to be an obstacle ... but delays in interstellar shipping rates of delivery times can still be a factor in all kinds of ways ... including use as adventuring hooks!

 

[Condottiere]

1. Shanghai to Long Beach, full container, twenty nine to thirty eight days, currently; thirty five to forty six hundred greenbux.

2. I think you can divide transport into roughly three categories, interstellar, insystem, planetary.

3. Planetary could be drone delivery.

4. Gambling would be an assessment of the likelihood of a certain result.

 

[Spinward Flow]

2. I think you can divide transport into roughly three categories, interstellar, insystem, planetary.

I agree.

Stipulating that dividing line between intrastellar (maneuver) and interstellar (jump) is how far a craft (small or big) can maneuver in less than 192 hours/8 days (which is microjump transit time).

Note that this means that a J1/1G Free Trader can operate as a ship that never jumps outside of the local star system (although they may want to have 2 jumps of range so they don't need refuel at both ends of their microjumps, only at their home base on the mainworld).

 

[mike wightman]

Which is why the type A has been described as the Amazon delivery van of the Third Imperium.

In high pop systems with TL9+ there is likely to be a lot of insystem trade where a 6g small craft just isn't as fast as a jump 1 type A.

 

[Spinward Flow]

a 6g small craft just isn't as fast as a jump 1 type A.

6G for 8 days can transit 47.9 AU ... which depending on planetary orbits may or may not be sufficient.

But then when you look at places such as the Regina star system and realize that the Far Companion (Darida) star system orbits about ~5000 AU distant from the primary and companion stars ... yeah, you're not making that trip with 6G anything ... you're microjumping to get out to the worlds orbiting around Darida.

Which is why the type A has been described as the Amazon delivery van of the Third Imperium.

Indeed.
I can easily see Type A Free Traders drumming up a reasonably healthy transportation services business in the Regina star system without ever needing to jump a full parsec away. The same can be true in plenty of other star systems as well.

Paya/Aramis, Bowman/District 268, Caliburn/District 268 and even Grote/Glisten seem like almost ideal "frontier spirit" locations for a Free Trader to spend maneuvering and microjumping around inside the Spinward Marches if you really want that "edge of civilization" feel in your Traveller campaign setting.

 

[Condottiere]

Monojump starship with manoeuvre drive factor one is technological level nine.

So maintenance and operation must be, relatively, dead simple.

 

[aramis]

I've seen load sourcing sights, and have done rideshare work that functions much the same way. I've never seen a trucker going around buying up good and moving them to another city, hoping to sell at a profit, nor freight train companies, nor air freight, nor wet shipping.

Speculation is a well documented mode into the mid19th C. It dies for coastal trade with the arrival of telegraphy, and for international West Europe to eastern Americas with the Transatlantic cable. Well, mostly. It's very well documented in the 18th C for the Dutch East India and British East India companies.

The shift from speculation to demand was pretty rapid. Not quite light-switch rapid, but close. There's still some speculative flow in Alaska - mostly oilers working the yukon-kuskokwim...

 

[Spinward Flow]

Speculation is a well documented mode into the mid19th C. It dies for coastal trade with the arrival of telegraphy, and for international West Europe to eastern Americas with the Transatlantic cable. Well, mostly. It's very well documented in the 18th C for the Dutch East India and British East India companies.

Once you can "call ahead" of shipments (via telegraphy cables) that takes a lot of the "surprise" of shipments of goods just turning up at the docks, eliminating a lot of the impetus (and advantage) of speculation in those goods.

However, well into the 19th century is still during the Age of Sail ... so that surmise on my part still stands.
But that's also where the parallels between speculation during the Age of Sail and the speculative opportunities during the Age of Jumping (for lack of a better term) become quite congruent, due to the lack of instantaneous communications over long (read: interstellar) distances.