That was one reason I was working on that Piracy scenario for PBEM. I had hoped to set up a double blind system where the Pirates had their resources, the Navy its resources, and the merchants were of their own known value per GURPS FAR TRADER. But that is just the issue. There are no hard and fast rules regarding the existence of Fleets, nor the command structures, etc to even do more than say "In my traveller Universe, we have...".Originally posted by kaladorn:
The spreadsheet BTN method suggested is interesting, but only accounts for merchant traffic, and that says nothing about relative proportions of military or non-military, non-trade traffic. Both of these may be influenced by the amount of trade traffic (military tends to protect trade) but aren't directly correlated.
As an aside, Stave Corn may be remarkable for being unique rather than plentiful.
At one time, I embarked upon an ambitious project along the lines of pricing the equipment used by the Imperial ground forces, along with trying to figure out the budgets for each subsector, each planetary government, and ultimately, the Imperial Government. If we had hard and fast values for that - and included a "fudge" factor for training costs, cost of living for our soldiers and their support units, we could arrive at some framework for building a reasonably realistically constrained military force for all of the Spinward Marches. From there, we could then figure out what precisely those pesky Subsector protection forces are really doing, and where they are stationed and what their typical mission profiles are like.
The real question I had intended to pose with the Piracy PBEM campaign was "How many assets are needed to keep piracy at bay?" along with "Is piracy under the GURPS TRAVELLER rules even possible?". One interesting thing I noted about Ianic is that it is a Desert World with a hydrographic value of Zero. I also noted that plant life depends upon water, and that water tends to turn to water vapor if there are any water surfaces exposed to the sun. If I were the government of Ianic, I most certainly would be telling any of the ships that set down on Ianic, that it is illegal as hell to fill up one's fuel tanks with Ianic freestanding water! This permitted me as the GM to set it up such that merchant ships HAD to go to the Gas Giant in order to refuel. As this trip took days at 1G thrust, this gave any potential pirate a rather broad expanse of operational space rather than the 100 diameter planetary limit. All ship sensors whether military grade or civilian grade, have the ability to reach only so far - which gives a wiley pirate some breathing space to operate in (and no comments about whether one can "Breathe" space which is a vacuum
All in all, being able to simulate how many ships are present in a system upon arrival or upon exit from said star system adds to the feeling that life is routine for the people of the Imperium and that space travel is just another aspect of routine life...
