CT Only: What One Thing Would You Change About Classic Traveller?

[Grav_Moped]

Aren't we all.



Just as a point of reference.

Given a pile 3m high, the 82 tons of a Free Trader a roughly 20x20x3m pile of stuff. Basically 7 tractor trailers full of goods.

In terms of containers, a Free Trader is 35 containers. A small container ship is 3000 containers.

I would say that the Amazon warehouse near me easily has 30 bays for trucks, and probably twice as many trailers parked there.

Basically 13 Free Traders just hanging about on the dock.

Its good to look at these things in terms that we can almost (almost) comprehend. I'm still not really able to grasp that vast volume of stuff that comes in to our ports every day.

Port of Los Angeles has a volume of 9.2M TEU (container units). 1 full size semi truck hold roughly 5 TEU in terms of raw volume. Thats over 5000 trucks a day (which seems high). 720 Free Traders per day (!!). With a 5,000 ton cargo ship (roughly 3500 tons cargo space), thats 17 per day.

Worldwide (top 50 ports), it's about 1000 5K cargo ships a day.

A busy small ship universe to be sure, but not an untoward one.

That's the baseline intercontinental cargo flow so it kind of double-counts port tonnage, combining outgoing and incoming cargo volume.
Interstellar cargo would be on top of that.

But as a way to understand the cargo volumes under discussion, it's an excellent observation.

For reference, we're TL-7.5 (or so) and Pop 9 (7.9 billion). None of the LBB3 trade codes apply.

Edit: Port of LA + Long Beach FY 2020-21 (June-to June) total throughput was 10.878 million TEUs. That's a 23% increase over FY 2019-2020!
Doesn't change the math much, but I gotta brag on the local "highport." (LAX is the "downport" where the smaller "ships" land...)

 

[Grav_Moped]

In a LBB2-only universe, 5000Td ships require TL-15 to build (J1 or J2). Or just a TL-15 source for the drives, depending on how you interpret the rules.
For J1 ships, 4000Td is TL-14, 3000Td is TL-13, 2000Td is TL-11, 1000Td is TL-10.

 

[Spinward Flow]

1000Td is TL-10

At least LBB5.80 lets you get away with a model/2 computer (minimum) which requires TL=7 and you can still have Maneuver-1 or 2 drives at TL=7 (presumably fission thermal hydrogen flow since fusion isn't available yet at that tech level). No jump drive, obviously, below TL=9, but you can still get up to hull code: C (3000-3999 tons) with a model/2 computer.

Under LBB5.80 at TL=9 you can build Jump-1 (max), Maneuver-6 (max), model/3 computer (max) which can control up to hull code: J (9000-9999 tons) ... so definitely an improvement over LBB2 restrictions.

 

[Grav_Moped]

At least LBB5.80 lets you get away with a model/2 computer (minimum) which requires TL=7 and you can still have Maneuver-1 or 2 drives at TL=7 (presumably fission thermal hydrogen flow since fusion isn't available yet at that tech level). No jump drive, obviously, below TL=9, but you can still get up to hull code: C (3000-3999 tons) with a model/2 computer.

Under LBB5.80 at TL=9 you can build Jump-1 (max), Maneuver-6 (max), model/3 computer (max) which can control up to hull code: J (9000-9999 tons) ... so definitely an improvement over LBB2 restrictions.

But then it would be a Big Ship Universe, and my comment was a tangent on this one:

A busy small ship universe to be sure, but not an untoward one.

... which I pretty much agree with. LBB2 isn't necessarily inconsistent with an OTU constructed using updated assumptions about shipping logistics and trade volumes, though the ship encounter table is going to need some tweaking.

You just end up with a lot more ships at the high end of the Small Ship category than LBB2 as written would lead you to expect, and these ships need a source of high-TL (13+) drives. Maintenance can happen at any Class A starport so the drives's origin is less critical than HG or TCS would suggest.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Container shipping, well its 57th century equivalent, is what the megacorporations and merchant lines do between worlds that are on the major trade routes/xboat network.

They are background fluff.

All we know about in detail are the scraps available to a free trader calling at a world - the trade rules as written.

That's pretty much it. To me Traveller was about going off the beaten path and visiting worlds that were far away enough to have issues; Night of Conquest, Mission on Mithril, and so forth. That really doesn't gybe to well with stuff that was supposed to happen around the "urban hubs" like Regina, Efate and so forth, but I guess you could call it artistic license.

Afterall, how exciting is it to be hired to inspect a supertanker or container ship that's hauling ... I don't know ... beanie babies or something. Like you mentioned old-fashioned commodities trade occurs as per the Far Trader rules, and that's where things get interesting.

For all the groups I ran or was part of, the 3I equivalent of MAERSK or DHL never entered play. The game had a ... er, not "Star Wars" vibe, but a kind of frontier justice in space kind of atmosphere. You plied the lesser known space lanes at your own risk, and therein game sessions took place. If you wanted safety, then you didn't stick around the SM, and headed to Core or someplace.

Places that need constant supplies of necessities are either government installations or have a lot of wealth generated where they can afford to have big league shipping companies come drop of loads of air, water, food, and whatever else.

 

[Blue Ghost]

But then it would be a Big Ship Universe, and my comment was a tangent on this one:

... which I pretty much agree with. LBB2 isn't necessarily inconsistent with an OTU constructed using updated assumptions about shipping logistics and trade volumes, though the ship encounter table is going to need some tweaking.

You just end up with a lot more ships at the high end of the Small Ship category than LBB2 as written would lead you to expect, and these ships need a source of high-TL (13+) drives. Maintenance can happen at any Class A starport so the drives's origin is less critical than HG or TCS would suggest.

The ship encounter table, and the entirety of the rules themselves, were written during a time when people wanted scifi (D&D) in space kind of stuff. So, there's almost a kind of ... eh, how do I say this ... not a "quick and dirty" feel, but a functional and operational feel to details like the ship encounter chart. Logically it's more likely that the further out you go the more likely you are to come across a pirate or rogue Type-T or some other vessel, but for some sessions it seemed like everytime the players ventured to an X or Type-D port that pirates were around.

 

[Grav_Moped]

The ship encounter table, and the entirety of the rules themselves, were written during a time when people wanted scifi (D&D) in space kind of stuff. So, there's almost a kind of ... eh, how do I say this ... not a "quick and dirty" feel, but a functional and operational feel to details like the ship encounter chart. Logically it's more likely that the further out you go the more likely you are to come across a pirate or rogue Type-T or some other vessel, but for some sessions it seemed like everytime the players ventured to an X or Type-D port that pirates were around.

It's definitely on the "game" end of the "game-vs-simulation" spectrum (as with most of CT, and particularly Proto-Traveller). This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- especially for a game -- but it makes it difficult (if not impossible) to extrapolate a simulation from it.

That extrapolation is sort of where this line of discussion seems to be going at the moment.

And part of the "game" nature of the starship encounter table is that the nominal proto-traveller and typical OTU setting was intended to be far out on the edge of civilization, so it's not meant to represent what happens in a built-out core section of an interstellar civilization. They just didn't go there, because it wasn't needed for the game as they expected it to be played.

Then they went and wrote up the OTU, where even a frontier area like the Spinward Marches has been part of the Empire for hundreds of years when play starts in the early 1100s. (This makes Adv. 4, Leviathan, a little problematic; it's an exploration of an "unknown" region that's improbably been ignored for half a millenium -- because, in actuality, the only reason it's "unknown" is that nobody had gotten around to writing it up yet.)

 

[Blue Ghost]

Yeah, I was thinking of Leviathan last night and earlier today when I thought about posting a reply. It's like "jump torpedoes" and the Kinunir being a "frontier cruiser". The stuff was written for the context in which the state the game was in at the time.

I mean, I shrug my shoulders at it now. Things worked, they seemed a little odd or, as you say, didn't "simulate" so much as present game play possibilities. I guess part of the issues with this thread is that maybe we're trying to add ABS brakes, air-bags and a video entertainment system to a car that was built in the 1950s. You can do it, and it works, but there might be some limitations.

Part of the issue that as the game aged so did the player base, and as such so did our expectations. But I guess that's what this thread is all about, finding ways to improve the old fav

I guess for me there isn't one thing I would change.

1) Add or make AHL's armor combat mechanic standard.
2) keep task resolution fluid and home brewed as per the original rules.
3) tweak the starship encounter table
4) go back to the LBB format
5) contract writers to write more adventures for the old CT, and never look back.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The game had a ... er, not "Star Wars" vibe, but a kind of frontier justice in space kind of atmosphere. You plied the lesser known space lanes at your own risk, and therein game sessions took place. If you wanted safety, then you didn't stick around the SM, and headed to Core or someplace.

The fringes.
The frontier.
You know ... where the ADVENTURES are to be had.

 

[Condottiere]

With a mixed bag of goods, even in a forty foot container, you'd want them organized so that at each stop, what's supposed to be dropped off is in front of the pile.

And if it's meant to be stuff for vessel or crew use, easy to get to.

 

[Straybow]

Book 2 '77 page 8:
Book 2 '81 page 8:
Guess I'm missing which R was W'd about parsec pricing.

There was a whole thread about this. The specific examples immediately following your quoted sentence indicate per parsec. When interpreting rules, a specific rule always governs when in conflict with a general rule. The gist of the argument:

"Differences in starship jump drive capacity have no specific effect on passage prices. That is to say, a starship with a jump drive of 3 charges the same passage price as a starship with a jump drive of 1. The difference is that a jump-3 ship can reach a destination in one jump that would take the jump-1 ship three separate jumps (through two intermediate destinations) to reach."

That can only be fulfilled if the prices are based on distance to the destination in parsecs. The example implies that the J1 somehow can't book a destination three parsecs away, but this is not stated and is contradicted: Traveller explicitly allows a ship to carry fuel for two or more jumps if space allows, as necessary to cross a rift, and therefore a destination more than one jump away can be booked. A J1 always travels one parsec per jump, and always charges per parsec. The specific rule that "drive capacity has no specific effect" therefore mandates that per parsec is required.

One need only make a small change in the given example to illustrate further: two J3 ships are going from A to B (three parsecs distance). One ship jumps directly. The other has deliveries at both intermediate destinations and so takes three jumps. The general rule allows the J3 to have B as a destination if jump capacity is invoked as a limit, but does not mandate that it go there in one jump if passage or cargo is booked to go there.

TLDR: The specific example does not say it costs three times as much to go in three jumps.

1981 revised the example text (which I don't have handy to supply the quote), but the revision actually supported per parsec because it used a term ("ticket" iirc) that is not defined as equivalent to passage cost. Additionally, the revision did not clarify that passage can only be booked for one jump.

You may now go about gaming as normal, invoking per jump or per parsec pricing as you see fit.

 

[Straybow]

This. It's not only the absence of a fully-developed OTU, but also that the rules were for a Small Ship Universe. Rules as written, 5000Td was the upper limit. House-rule the possibility of larger hulls, extrapolate from the table, and you might reach 12,000Td but that's pretty much it. There's no consistent pattern for Drives W-Z so extrapolating larger drives than that would be pure guesswork (and, RAW, require TL-16+).

If my math is right (and it probably is), 5000Td is about the size of a modern large container ship (~221,000 gross register tons). The largest crude carriers are almost twice that size (in gross register tons, which don't scale linearly but it's a ballpark figure).

Edit: checked my math -- it's at least in the ballpark.

1 Td = 4.94 British Register Tons of 100 ft³, so a 5k Td ship is only ~25k tons volume. Add about 25% for structural mass gets you to 31k tons. Old Panamax ship were limited to 52k tons of fuel & cargo and about 80k tons gross with ballast, or roughly 2x the 5000 Td limit. New Chinese locks on the Panama Canal can fit a ship carrying about 120k tons, not sure what gross tonnage.

Port of Los Angeles has a volume of 9.2M TEU (container units). 1 full size semi truck hold roughly 5 TEU in terms of raw volume. Thats over 5000 trucks a day (which seems high). 720 Free Traders per day (!!). With a 5,000 ton cargo ship (roughly 3500 tons cargo space), thats 17 per day.

Worldwide (top 50 ports), it's about 1000 5K cargo ships a day.

A busy small ship universe to be sure, but not an untoward one.

Standard US road trailer is 53 feet, and if we allow for more height than the standard twenty foot container, only about 3 TEU by volume. The load limit for a TEU is about 21 tons, while the load limit for the 53' trailer is 32 tons, which is only 1½ TEU.

 

[Straybow]

Agree except for the strikethroughs (keep the 168-hour Jump durations, don't need to divvy up cargo smaller than 1Td).

Agree, no need to divvy up smaller than 1 Td. However, CT regularly treated the Td as a ton of mass, rather than several tons mass that would fit into a Td in a loadworthy manner. Another debate that can be found elsewhere.

 

[mike wightman]

Per parsec pricing is rules as written, or rather price per jump capability. A jump 1 ship can only seek cargos for worlds at a distance of 1 parsec...

The referee should determine all worlds accessible to the starship (depending on jump number)

(note not jump range but jump number...}

Misunderstanding the passenger ticket price is where the confusion comes from.
The passage is paid to go to the announced destination, and the destination must be within the jump number of the ship remember.

Passage is always sold on the basis of transport to the announced destination, rather than on the basis of jump distance.

 

[Straybow]

"The referee should determine" != "The referee may only determine"

There is nothing forbidding a J1 ship to seek cargoes at more distant destinations. Nothing requires delivery in 1 week. Heck, those shipments may have been sitting at the starport for months awaiting a ship with room to spare. Granted that passengers might not like delays, but if the price is the same per parsec...

 

[mike wightman]

Except there is something explicit in the rules as written that forbid it.

The first quote - the ship captain or whoever can only seek cargo for worlds within the jump number of their ship...

If you want per parsec pricing go for it, many do. But don't try and argue the rules as written allow it, because they don't.

 

[Condottiere]

Delivery time is not necessarily guaranteed, but if you sign a contract, there is some form of expectation, failure might incur a financial penalty.

If I have a container full of perishables that need to be in the next system within three weeks, especially if that trade is on a regular basis, that window of making it to market would be around ten days, transport to the starport, loaded onto the freighter, accelerate to the jump point, could be four days, a week in transition, give or take, and then ten days to deliver to the next starport, unload, and transport to the surface, presumably.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The gist of the argument:

"Differences in starship jump drive capacity have no specific effect on passage prices. That is to say, a starship with a jump drive of 3 charges the same passage price as a starship with a jump drive of 1. The difference is that a jump-3 ship can reach a destination in one jump that would take the jump-1 ship three separate jumps (through two intermediate destinations) to reach."

That can only be fulfilled if the prices are based on distance to the destination in parsecs.

Another example of coming to the WRONG conclusion with confidence.

In your hypothetical example, the party wanting to ship cargo to a destination 3 parsecs away by Jump-3 ship can do so in a single manifest ticket, paying Cr1000/ton, on the Jump-3 ship and have the cargo arrive there in 1 week after jumping out of the current system. By contrast, the same party wanting to ship cargo to a destination 3 parsecs away by Jump-1 ship can do so by purchasing THREE manifest tickets, costing Cr3000/ton, on the Jump-1 ship and have the cargo arrive there in 1+2+1=4 weeks after jumping out of the current system.

Now ... if you were a buyer of transport services ... which would you choose?
The Cr1000/ton option that arrives in 1 week?
Or the Cr3000/ton option that arrives in 4 weeks?


Think carefully ... the profitability of your business might depend on the answer.



What people keep missing the point on is that the only way you're going to get a "per parsec" interpretation out of the Rules As Written (RAW) is if third parties agree to have their cargo shipped "at cost" to each of the intermediate destinations.

And ... it's at this point that actual MAPS become an important consideration.


Let's say that there is a (hypothetical) third party who wants to ship 50 tons of cargo from Vilis to Frenzie in the Vilis subsector of the Spinward Marches.
Here's the map relevant to that journey.

Frenzie is 3 parsecs distant from Vilis (see map above).

To send the 50 ton cargo from Vilis to Frenzie by Jump-3 starship requires a single jump from Vilis to Frenzie.
Cost to ship = Cr1000 per ton = Cr50,000

To send the 50 ton cargo from Vilis to Frenzie by Jump-2 starship requires two jumps ... Vilis to Garda-Vilis, then Garda-Vilis to Fenzie.
Cost to ship = Cr1000 per ton + Cr1000 per ton = Cr100,000

To send the 50 ton cargo from Vilis to Frenzie by Jump-1 starship requires FOUR jumps Vilis to Garda-Vilis, Garda-Vilis to Arkadia, Arkadia to Sellatio, Stellatio to Frenzie.
Cost to ship = Cr1000 per ton + Cr1000 per ton + Cr1000 per ton + Cr1000 per ton = Cr200,000

Now, that's assuming that the cargo stays on a single starship for the entire trip ... it might not.
You could have a situation where a Jump-1 starship carries the 50 tons of cargo from Vilis to Garda-Vilis (Cr50,000 cost), unloads it at Garda-Vilis ... then a different starship with Jump-2 capability going from Garda-Vilis to Frenzie picks it up and transports it to Frenzie (Cr50,000 cost).



NOTE:
In every single one of the above scenarios, a Cr150,000 billing at Cr1000 per ton per parsec for a 3 parsec trip is explicitly NOT A RESULT.



The cost of shipping cargo under the Rules As Written in CT is explicitly PER PORT OF CALL ... NOT PER PARSEC.
Try not to get the two confused.
I know it's a hard concept to grasp (after all, it has persisted for 40+ years at this point), but it's really not that difficult ... so long as you're paying attention and don't fall prey to the assumption that 3 left turns equals 1 right turn.

Also, I really shouldn't have to be explaining the distinctions involved here needed to reach a correct interpretation of the Rules As Written (RAW) ... but apparently I (and others) still do, to this day.

That can only be fulfilled if the prices are based on distance to the destination in parsecs. The example implies that the J1 somehow can't book a destination three parsecs away, but this is not stated and is contradicted: Traveller explicitly allows a ship to carry fuel for two or more jumps if space allows, as necessary to cross a rift, and therefore a destination more than one jump away can be booked. A J1 always travels one parsec per jump, and always charges per parsec. The specific rule that "drive capacity has no specific effect" therefore mandates that per parsec is required.

WRONG.
Categorically, undeniably, flat out and completely ... WRONG.

Again ... use the MAP ... that's what it's for (I know, it's so shocking!).

Let's say a Jump-1 starship has an extended range of enough fuel for 2 parsecs.
Such a starship could jump from Garda-Vilis to deep space to Frenzie, bypassing Arkadia and Stellatio.

Such a journey would be booked as Garda-Vilis to Frenzie ... from port of call to port of call.

It would not be booked as Garda-Vilis to Deep Space (population zero, everybody out who didn't buy a ticket to Frenzie, hope you enjoy your "stay" in Deep Space!) ... and then booked as yet another ticket from Deep Space to Frenzie (as if there was anyone or any cargo to pick up in Deep Space). Can you say "DERP"...?

No, such a journey would not be billed as "two tickets for two jumps" ... it would be billed as a single ticket from one port of call to the next port of call, however far away that destination port of call is. How the starship "moves" in order to get from here to there is up to the captain and crew of that starship, but the ticket (and therefore the ticket price) is dependent on going from one port of call to the next port of call.

Garda-Vilis --> Deep Space --> Frenzie = 1 new port of call = 1 ticket manifest = 1 passenger ticket or Cr1000/ton for cargo
Garda-Vilis --> Arkadia --> Stellatio --> Frenzie = 3 new ports of call = 3 ticket manifests = 3 passenger tickets or Cr3000/ton for cargo



The thing is, the whole system of "who is going where my starship is going next?" is somewhat externalized to the game mechanics that determine how many passengers and how much cargo is waiting to book passage to a starship's (highlighted for emphasis and clarity of purpose for understanding the nuances) NEXT PORT OF CALL after which all of the passengers and cargo get unloaded and the cycle starts over again for the next port of call. Sure, you can have passengers and cargo that book space on your manifest for multiple ports of call so as to "hopscotch" their way from where they started to where they are going ... but they're doing so on a port of call to port of call basis ... not on a per parsec billing basis.



In a lot of cases, and especially for the default LBB2 starships with Jump-1 capacity, the next port of call is only 1 parsec away (because they only have a 1 parsec range) ... so defaulting to a "per parsec" understanding for billing is kind of an ipso-facto that makes some sense, but it's not the correct answer for how (and why) the billing works the way it does. As soon as you get into jump capacity and/or range of 2+ parsecs and integrate moving around the map into your understanding of what it happening (and why), the "per parsec" billing understanding collapses as being inadequate to the task of proper cross-correlation.

It's kind of like how in algebra the Quadratic Formula can yield two different answers, but you then need to "proof" both of those answers to determine which of the answers provided by the formula is "valid" and which one is not.

Sometimes both answers yielded by the Quadratic Formula will work.
Sometimes only one answer will work and the other is a "false positive" kind of answer yielded by the formula ... but you actually have to "do the math" to determine which is which for any given problem that you're using the Quadratic Formula to solve.

Same deal here with the Per Parsec versus Per Port Of Call interpretation of the prices for booking passage/cargo on a starship.

The Per Parsec interpretation works sometimes ... but not always ... and has implications that can lead to wrong assumptions.
The Per Port Of Call interpretation is the correct answer ... and it ALWAYS works in every circumstance.

 

[atpollard]

Setting aside the RULES on "per jump" or "per parsec" pricing for just a moment ...

The Operating Cost of starships tend closer to "Cr 500 + Cr 500/parsec" pricing as a very rough 'curve'. Per Jump pricing makes longer-legged ships increasingly less profitable (and many operate at a loss even with a full hold). Per Parsec pricing makes some size-jump combinations ridiculously profitable.

Use or ignore that factoid as you see fit.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Per Jump pricing makes longer-legged ships increasingly less profitable

Depends on what you consider to be costs then.

If you have to buy fuel from a starport (and refined fuel is going to be especially expensive in this regard), then longer range is going to equal higher costs. But if your starship has a fuel purification plant and can refine its own fuel from wilderness sources (which are functionally "free") then longer range will not (necessarily) equal higher costs.

A larger fuel fraction onboard will usually equate to a smaller tonnage devoted to revenue generation, but not always if a ship is fitted with collapsible fuel tanks and can "flex" its cargo capacity based on the demand/need for range. More tonnage devoted to revenue generation will typically result in higher income revenues ... but not always, especially if there aren't enough passengers or cargo to fill your manifest to capacity.

The tradeoff happens in the profit margins, where it's all about maximizing revenue at minimal costs.
It is true though that some combinations of jump capacity and revenue capacity will wind up being more consistently profitable than others, since the higher jump capacity allows for an easier "pick and choose" of ports of call, which and preferentially result in a more consistent filling of shipping manifests and better speculative cargo trading opportunities than would otherwise have been available ... and that's a factor that is a function of the Map and not something that easily yields itself to spreadsheet analysis when keeping all other factors equal (because choice of destinations with larger jump capacity is NOT an equal factor for different jump capacities!).