I don't mind accepting Book 2 as evidence of how things work in the OTU, but I most certainly do not accept that it's the only valid evidence. What edition, btw.? TTB specifically states that it's each occupied stateroom that cost life support; it also makes it clear that the cost is actually per warm body, as double occupancy is permitted, but requires twice the LS cost.
Be that as it may, it's hard enough to justify life support costs when there are people around to eat caviare and pâté de fois gras, drink champagne, breathe specially imported jasmine-scented mountain air and bathe in asses' milk; to charge Cr2000 with no one actually consuming consumables is, IMO, patently... um... not plausible.
The 1977 edition (of course) if it was changed in the later editions. I know LS is only charged for occupied staterooms for
Merchant Prince. I would have to find a later edition of LBB2 to be sure if it changed in LBB2 but I thought it was one of the rules that slipped through to the later editions. It is a varied rule (as I said earlier) so the ref. can chose his rule to suit his needs. The difference changes the profit point but you still wind up against the passenger generation table and most merchants finding that having a steward and taking high passengers beats having empty staterooms because the number of middle passages is just too darn low.
The nature of Life Support has always been puzzle. If it is primarily food than the Imperial Navy should be full of lard tubs who eat delicacies all the time (the life support cost is the same for a lowly squid as it is for the Emperor so they should be eating the same food). We can probably add some odd things into life support for crews on small vessels like laundry but surely a 400,000 ton dreadnought with a crew of thousands has a shipboard laundry. Oxygen surely cannot be so expensive that it alone makes food a minimal part of the cost but as has been often pointed out 200CR/day is awfully expensive food. Maybe starships have extreme health and safety rules and most of the cost is the sewage fee for pumping out the toilets
(although with vacuum outside I wonder why captains wouldn't skimp on the fee. maybe cleaning off the hull once after flying through someone else's sewage cloud makes the CR2000 fee seem reasonable although there is always the fusion drive. ). A poorly explained rule which doesn't give us much info about what is covered by LS.
This might explain why there are two rules, if LS is consumables like caviar and asses milk then unoccupied staterooms should be free while if LS is consumables like heat and jasmine-scented mountain air then staterooms without occupants would have a LS cost. Unless your staterooms are equipped with air-tight doors and have bulkheads some LS cost will be incurred by unoccupied staterooms they share an environment with occupied staterooms (and a portion of stateroom space is allocated to common areas which will have a LS cost even if unoccupied staterooms are sealed off). LS can be divided into two categories, those which are incident to living space and those which are incident to living persons. Things like air filtration, heat, exterminators will cost money on a living space basis while things like food and laundry will cost money on a living person basis. The LS rule is no doubt a combination of the two and CR2000 (per occupant or per stateroom) is a mechanism which produces a result of cost/stateroom-trip which works if the rule is not stretched out of shape (the liner with 800 mid passengers, a 13 person crew of whom 7 are medics and not a single steward is an example of stretching the rules out of shape) or looked at too closely.
What I want are reasonable, self-consistent rules that don't impose senseless arbitrary restrictions. Or rather, I want a reasonable, self-consistent underlying worldview. I've nothing against simplified rules for ease of play as such. What I object to is assuming that they are exact, literal representations of "reality" rather than simplifications.
The following is purely my own feeling and there is nothing cannnonical to support them. take it for whatever you feel it is worth.
When trying to decode the "reality' which lies beneath the passage rules as written, the starting point, for a
Traveler universe, is that there are small spaceships which travel between stars and make money carrying passengers. Unless that reality is changed, whatever contradicts that reality, no matter how reasonable it is, cannot be true in a
Traveler universe. Small merchants carrying passengers profitably do unquestionably exist so any interpretation of the other rules must be consistent with this reality. If you have a problem with unreasonable, inconsistent rules which impose senseless arbitrary restrictions I suggest you change the nature of the universe (and not try to board a commercial airplane in the US, there is nothing reasonable about having to take off your shoes to fly).
Hans, since I made that mistake last time, let me specify that this is not addressed to your argument against stewards. If it is addressed to you specifically it is only to the extent of warning you that insisting too much on reasonableness and consistency from the rules can result in changing the nature of the game universe.
The passage rules are not so much based upon consistency as it is upon balance. The rules are not oriented towards the needs of general non-player people seeking passage but upon what a starship captain would need to make it worthwhile to carry passengers balanced with what players without ships can afford. This works fine in a universe with small starships and scarce intersetellar travel. How else does one explain why on average one can find 9 persons seeking passage offworld from a planet with a population of 100 while can only find an average of 35 from a world of 90,000,000,000? A passage costs as much as it does not because that the utility value to the passenger seeking passage but because that is the amount of money a captain would need to make a reasonable profit carrying passengers. The passenger table is designed not to model passengers seeking passage but to provide system allowing a starship captain to make a reasonable amount of money carrying passengers. The model the rules are based upon is starship economics, with a nod to passenger's requirements but more upon starship economics. Since starship economics is the dominent basis for the model other aspects of the worldview (universeview?) are underweighed. These rules can be revised to measure the other aspects of the reality of starship travel if a different balance between passenger reality and starship captain reality is desired. The rules should probably be modified if the universe (like the OTU) is not a small ship/scarce interstellar travel universe.
Modifying the rules will have an effect on the economics of running small starships and this should be carefully considered if the economics of operating a small merchant ship is a significant part of your campaign. We can change the rules for starship passage to a model of that of tramp steamers but it would have an effect on the universe. Tramp steamer fare was a fraction of liner fare, but the rest of starship economics means that if fare is less than CR6,000 it would be more profitable to convert the stateroom to cargo and not pay the life support so tramp starship fare would have to remain the same but liner fare would have to increase to a minimum of CR20,000 and probably closer to CR40,000 which would be tough on players without starships. This would make liners extremely profitable and greedy players would convert their cargo bays to staterooms and hire stewards to take luxury passengers, ugh.
(low-pax are also unlikely to attempt a hijacking 
).
