mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
They are a bit big to fit in the missile rack...
CT Only: What One Thing Would You Change About Classic Traveller?
- Thread starter robject
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Just use launch tubes.
Hmm, the point is that the megacorps are committed to the line through capital commitment, the line can crush all competitors through literally no capital expense on the high jump routes and come to think of it likely makes their money on exclusive contracts on the local J-1/J-2 megacorps deliveries, the megacorps effectively gets Cr250-Cr500 per parsec rates for their investment and much less inventory in transit (interstellar JIT).The point of underpricing competitors to drive them out of the market is to then be able to charge monopolist rates. Keeping the prices at loss-leader levels sort of defeats the purpose. . .
But in the end it's a handwave for a broken pricing scheme anyhow. And that's fine, as long as the players are on the beneficial side of the transaction. Determining the value of a High Passage received in mustering out (or a TAS membership) would get weird otherwise, and cheap space-fares make the game go more easily. Players won't notice that it doesn't work out until they get their own high-Jn ship, and with luck they'll just put it down to inefficient design (if they're not gear-head munchkins wielding spreadsheets) instead of overly simplified and narrowly-scoped trade rules.
It's an attractive proposition to me for creating an enviornment of giant megacorps rigging the trade game to favor coreward IND production, suppressed local production and something like Oberlindes going up against The Man.
Makes a good setting feature, even if the economics don't make sense to me. But then, they don't really have to make sense, do they?
Dropping the argument for now, with a note to myself to finally get around to working up a set of freight rules for the "excluded middle" range between J-1 small ships and the megacorp lines that play a different game.
So what would be your goal for the new freight rules? At the end of the day, what boxes do you want to check?
Rates that allow the most-efficient available (by TL and the astrography of a region) ships to turn a pretty good profit on freight. Less efficient (in LBB2 terms, smaller) ships should just barely be able to break even, and be forced to rely on speculation for any significant profits.
I'd like to include promptness incentives that make higher Jn ships viable on freight and passenger fees. They'll get to (and have to) charge more -- sometimes a lot more, but the cost will reduce the available volume of cargo and passengers accordingly. Most of these customers will be, in effect, NPCs using the speculative cargo rules in the way PC ship-owners would.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
That's the beauty of the situation, isn't it?
As soon as one "player" in the megacorp game makes their move and attempts to entrench themselves, they commit to a specific business model which then invites their competitors to figure out ways to undercut them and steal their market share. Creative destruction is the name of the game at that scale, and the path to victory lies in finding solutions that are more efficient.
Industrial/Non-industrial worlds
Rich/Poor worlds
Agricultural/Non-agricultural worlds
Asteroid Belts
Desert worlds
... all of them offer differing economic terrain and competitive demands that need to be satisfied. World populations grow and fall, the tides of economies shift and turn over time as supply meets demand.
It's all a DANCE ... where the ledgers and bookkeeping are the dance floor, where fortunes can be made ... or lost.
According HG, launch tubes need (except if config is 7) 25 times the craft 's volume...
To fit 2500 dtond launch tubes, I guess we're not talking about usual players' ship...
What if -- hear me out -- you used a Spinal Mount Mass Driver with XBoats for ammo?
Space Kamikazes.
All true except that interstellar polities have agendas that can trump market efficiency or even rule of law.
If it’s the OTU it’s rule of men and trade is an element of managing the realm, both carrot and stick and limited but decisive intervention.
In my proposed version the megacorps have an advantage getting a feed of tonnage from the megacorps stream. But they wouldn’t care that much about local subsector traffic and the players living on the scraps. Unless the players start threatening the megacorps with delivering product that cuts profit or grow into a threat to the megalines. And therein lies conflict and story…..
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Far Trader does this.
The biggest issue with these types of systems in simply gambler ruin. In the end, it's a random system. As I mentioned when I was doing the J2 runs, at one point the ship ran an entire year without making any money. Always at the mercy of what was available to be sold, and how much it was worth selling for. If the ship didn't have enough capital, it would gone bankrupt.
In fact, that's what I saw on most of the runs. Some just flat declined and never got their head above water. They started with the money in the bank and it just started bounce downward, never being higher than what was started with. When you looked at the ones that lasted 10 years, there was a series of steep, sustained declines. How much of that was the buy sell strategy, which was admittedly naive? Hard to say. But even with a "perfect" strategy, a bad streak of random numbers means the downfall of the operation.
Naturally this was exacerbated by the high overhead of the ship. It was flat expensive to run. Were it a larger ship, a 300 ton vs 200 ton, with more free cargo to leverage the available freight, maybe it would have been better.
But even then, the dice are heartless, and can be unforgiving.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
1. This is all a cover for smuggling spice.
2. Railgun spinal mounts fire twenty tonne slugs, as do semikilotonne mass driver bays.
3. You'll need a mass driver cargo slinger.
2. Railgun spinal mounts fire twenty tonne slugs, as do semikilotonne mass driver bays.
3. You'll need a mass driver cargo slinger.
Good point. I'm aiming to keep the floor higher than the present rules do.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
You're accelerating more than "mere particles" at that point.
And if what you're "throwing" is mere deadweight for sheer kinetic impact energy ... might was well simply "throw rocks at them" (of large enough size to penetrate the atmosphere, if any) as a bombardment strategy. For one thing, unmodified planetoids are way cheaper(!) than XBoats if it comes down to the pricing of your ammunition.
{whistles not so innocently)
To be fair, this is somewhat true of most roleplaying experiences.
This is where starship design for day to day operations (and quality of life aboard) comes into play.
When the objective is to avoid gambler's ruin, one of the first things you want to do is to "stack the deck" in your own favor with the capabilities of your ship so that in the run of Feast Or Famine™ you can survive the stretches of famine long enough to get to feast.
I would like to think that I've conclusively demonstrated that this is possible to achieve rather consistently in the hull code: 1 (100-199 ton) form factor, but even then there is still some "luck of the draw" (or roll of the dice, if you will) involved in determining How Successful™ a wannabe merchant prince can be using one of my starship designs (either high G to evade pirates or multi-jump for long range). However, in the hull code: 2+ (200+ tons) displacements, other factors such as life support and crew salaries can become a serious drag on potential profit margins, requiring a pretty significant dedication of tonnage towards revenue generation (passengers/cargo) since mail alone isn't going to be able to suffice as an economic lifeline all by itself.
The challenge is figuring out a "better mousetrap" of a starship design in the hull code: 2+ range, while balancing a wide variety of factors that can ultimately impact the bottom line and the profit margins.
Hint: it's a fun challenge to try and "solve" as best you can.
Adversity breeds innovation.
Make the challenge "too easy" to solve and there isn't a sense of accomplishment associated with finding a workable solution.
There's a reason why I'm so proud of my 194-198 ton Courier ship designs ... partly because I couldn't find anything even remotely close to them posted in the history of The Fleet for all of the time that CotI has had people posting. Being able to "find something new" in rulesets that people have already written off as having been "played out" such that there is "nothing new to see/find here" is one of my specialties. The potential was always there ... it just hadn't been realized/recognized before. For me, that's FUN!
No-win situations breed player resentment.
HanleyTucks
SOC-11
Honestly, what you describe is most small businesses.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
If the situation truly has NO solutions that "win" ... sure.
But if a situation does have solutions that "win" ... but require you to pay attention and make smart decisions ... GAME ON!
Keep in mind that it needs to be winnable (remaining in the game constitutes a marginal victory condition) without requiring grognard spreadsheet-wielding munchkin skills.If the situation truly has NO solutions that "win" ... sure.
But if a situation does have solutions that "win" ... but require you to pay attention and make smart decisions ... GAME ON!
We're talking about LBB2 with its lookup tables and limited need for higher math. (Geometry, sure. Math? You can skip a lot of it.) That's the one thing that the LBB2 trade rules have going for them: they work for the canonical ships that PCs are likely to own in the early stages of play.
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