Who needs stewards anyway?

[mike wightman]

What came first - the trade rules or the free trader design?

I get the sneaking suspision that the two were designed together to get exactly that effect.

 

[far-trader]

..
It's interesting how well the design of the Free Trader fills it's intended role, and a tribute to it's versatility that it is suitable for other roles (like the tramp starship).

You noticed that eh

I've long said the Book 2 trade rules really only apply to one special case, the Type A Free Trader. Why? Because at the time it was the only merchant ship players could (remotely, very remotely if not fudging rolls) muster out with. And one of only 2 ships they could muster out with at all. There was no real way for a reasonable group to scrape up the 20% down on any ship. So, the trade rules were built around the specifics of the Type A and the typical random worlds it would encounter. Designed so that it could usually break even or better and allow some free time for interesting side trips (aka an adventure) but if the ref needed it wouldn't be hard to cause a shortfall in funds requiring a big money job (aka "We're doing crime, er, I mean adventure!") or a patron with something the players want (aka "the carrot").

Then along came Merchant Prince, and Citizens, and so on, and we had Belters with Seekers, Pirates with Corsairs, Merchant Princes making huge windfall profits and buying big ships outright, and (Mad) Scientists with Lab Ships. Who'd I forget?* And all the while nobody changed the now pretty badly bent if not horribly broken root trade system and expected it to still apply rationally Not officially anyway. Everybody had houserules by then or soon after I'm sure.

* now I remember, Nobles with Yachts

So it's not so much that the ship fit the role so well, as the role was built to fit the ship I suspect. The two probably shared their birth and one or both were tweaked to mesh.

(heh, Mike and I are having a shared brain moment I don't know if that's scary or funny... )

 

[mike wightman]

Be afraid - very afraid lol.

The trade rules also work pretty well for the subsidised merchant - many runs through The Traveller Adventure confirm this.

Making a far trader profitable is the tricky bit - speculative trade and luck.

And remember the ref can always take money away - pirate encounter, drive coils explode, crew member or passenger sues for damages etc...

 

[far-trader]

The trade rules also work pretty well for the subsidised merchant - many runs through The Traveller Adventure confirm this.

True. Because it's J1 (it loses money on those J1 double jumps with carried tanks). In general the rules will work for a reasonable (Book 2) J1 design of any size I think.

The rules don't work so well (for the subsidizing government anyway) for the Subsidized Liner (usually running with empty staterooms, always operating at a loss... still, a neat ship to play with for the longer legs)

 

[aramis]

Be afraid - very afraid lol.

The trade rules also work pretty well for the subsidised merchant - many runs through The Traveller Adventure confirm this.

Making a far trader profitable is the tricky bit - speculative trade and luck.

And remember the ref can always take money away - pirate encounter, drive coils explode, crew member or passenger sues for damages etc...

The far trader can be made to work by NOT being tied to a route; follow the sale DM's on the cargo you get, THEN go. It pulls up the average sale that a crew with decent capitalization (KCr15/Td cargo space) can make mortgage payments. The Type R subbie can make a lot more on following the sale DMs than it can on the fixed route, too.

 

[far-trader]

You call that a business plan?

Making a far trader profitable is the tricky bit - speculative trade and luck.

Trader "I'm lucky! I'll make your payments easy on speculative trade!"

Banker "Sorry we're not believers in luck. We want a sound business plan."

(Of course, if the numbers in Merchant Prince are to be believed, the banks are willing to back losers like that all the time and ignore the sound business plan idea entirely, seize the ship as soon as one payment is late, and then refinance with another "lucky" trader, keeping the previous down payment and collecting another. Rinse and repeat. They don't lose anything and probably profit more the sooner a trader forfeits :devil: )

The far trader can be made to work by NOT being tied to a route; follow the sale DM's on the cargo you get, THEN go.

Trader "And I'm going to jump wherever the best deals can be made so I can make the payments."

Banker "So you want us to just trust that you'll come back from these wide ranging ventures? You won't just keep going, say if you find you're short on a payment? I think we're going to insist that your business plan be a little more traceable."

(imtu a ship with a mortgage might not get a Generate program and be required to use pre-gen jumps purchased through the bank to insure they know where their property is and that it can't run off too easily, which brings up another mtu rule...)

Trader "I can make more money and keep up the payments if I run unrefined fuel."

Banker "No, that'll break your contract, if not the drives. You have to run only refined fuel or forfeit the ship."

(imtu that limits the ships to Class A and B systems, safe from pirates and other hazards, insures the ship runs fine, but costs more to operate, the banks in league with the fuel suppliers, no, they are the fuel suppliers :file_23: )

...anywho, time for some sleep for me

 

[rancke]

To make this balance though you would have to lower the LS cost and/or allow double occupancy.

True. I'd forgotten that this figure is for reasonable LS costs. As I implied in an earlier post, I think Cr2000 for a 10-day stay aboard a ship is wildly overpriced. I do allow for double occupancy, but the price I quoted is for single occupancy. The ship I used was a 600T design made according to QSDS1.5.

But how could you justify the extortionate rate for tramp passage...

By assuming that people aren't so much paying for the experience of ten days of sybaritic pleasure as for being taken to another world. And by assuming that there isn't a more pleasant alternative to traveling by Free Trader. And by assuming that Free Traders do charge less than regular liners on those occasions where they do compete with them -- except, of course, when people pay by Passage Voucher.

...and if tramps lowered their rates it would be more profitable to rip out the staterooms and haul freight, and hauling freight (non-speculative) would lower the income of the Free Trader. Nothing game breaking, and there is no lack of justification for lowering LS costs and allowing passenger double occupancy. I think you'd be better off creating a separate passenger category for tramp passengers and tramp starships could take middle single occupancy and double occupancy tramp passengers.

Yes, treating Free Traders differently from regularly sheduled liners and freighters is exactly what I have in mind.


Hans

 

[Max]

T4 isn't CT. While T4 is good at creating a similar feel to CT (aside from needing to look up an erratum every 2 minutes) it's economics are differently balanced than CT. Ships are much cheaper, a Type A Free Trader in T4 is 2/3rds the cost of a CT Free Trader for instance. A T4 large stateroom is 20% the cost of a CT stateroom which changes the economics of passenger service.

In general the rules will work for a reasonable (Book 2) J1 design of any size I think.

1000 tons is about it, and even then you have to have a really good route. There just isn't enough trade to support anything bigger. And commerical ships pretty much have to be hybrid passenger/freight ships - the way trade is generated makes specialization in one or the other economically unfeasible. A Type R can be run profitably with an occasional trip to worlds pop 7 while a Type M "Liner" (140 tons passengers (what gives with all the low berths) and 124 tons cargo makes it a "liner"?) is going to have problems if it has a pop 8 world on it's route. The rules work great at creating a universe where spaceships are rare and travel is expensive.

 

[mike wightman]

IMHO bulk transport of freight and passengers is done by the megacorp shipping lines.

The trade tables are the province of the tramp traders.

We have never really been shown how the megacorps do it.

 

[far-trader]

IMHO bulk transport of freight and passengers is done by the megacorp shipping lines.

The trade tables are the province of the tramp traders.

We have never really been shown how the megacorps do it.

Nor even how the small ship subsidized lines (should) do it. Being on a route with a regular schedule and the backing of other ships and factors should seriously change the way business is done over the free-trader model of "Which world should we go to next?"

 

[rancke]

T4 isn't CT. While T4 is good at creating a similar feel to CT (aside from needing to look up an erratum every 2 minutes) it's economics are differently balanced than CT. Ships are much cheaper, a Type A Free Trader in T4 is 2/3rds the cost of a CT Free Trader for instance.

A T4 Free Trader is 83% of the cost of a CT Free Trader, not 67%. But I said QSDS1.5, not T4. QSDS was an attempt to correct some of the mistakes in the T4 ship generation system. There are difference, even so. The power plant fuel tankage is a lot smaller. I can't remember the size of bridges, and unfortunately I can't find my copy of QSDS1.5, nor can I google a copy.

however, I did find a file where I'd figured out the costs of moving a dT of freight according to strict CT rules (Even used the life support costs). I designed a 1000T freighterfor each jump rating and assumed 35 trips per year and a cargo hold filled 90% on the average. The results were:

True cost of moving freight by starship (HG rules):

Ship       Per jump      Per parsec

Jump-1     Cr657.36        Cr657.36
Jump-2   Cr1,064.84        Cr532.42
Jump-3   Cr1,642,93        Cr547.64
Jump-4   Cr2,657,64        Cr664.41
Jump-5   Cr4,737,36        Cr947.47
Jump-6  Cr10,837.88      Cr1,806.31

Edit: It should be noted that crew salaries and a decent return on the investment is included in the 'expenses', so a jump-2 freighter that charges Cr1000 per dT for freight is almost making a decent profit. A jump-1 freighter would be coining money, and a jump-3 freighter would be heading straight for bankruptcy.

A T4 large stateroom is 20% the cost of a CT stateroom which changes the economics of passenger service.

It should, but it didn't. The rules for expenses and revenues for operating a starship are the same in T4 as in CT.


Hans

 

[far-trader]

...unfortunately I can't find my copy of QSDS1.5, nor can I google a copy.

I came across it in the BITS archive again just last week

http://www.bitsuk.net/

Under "archive" and then "game rules", v1.5.1 and the Big Hulls addition.

 

[Max]

Quote:
A T4 large stateroom is 20% the cost of a CT stateroom which changes the economics of passenger service.

It should, but it didn't. The rules for expenses and revenues for operating a starship are the same in T4 as in CT.

The economics, not the economic rules. The rules (aside from tech differential) for passengers in T4 produce similar results to the rules in LBB2. The rules for starship design produce T4 small staterooms which are an order of magnitude cheaper than CT staterooms.

A quick way of seeing how much the change in stateroom price affects the ship:
#large staterooms x CR400,000 add to price
#small staterooms x CR420,000 add to price
divide #small staterooms /2
A CT liner is much more expensive than a T4 liner.


This makes liners in T4 less of a capital investment than they are in CT, which should make travel more easily available in T4 than in CT if everything else is the same.

 

[aramis]

True cost of moving freight by starship (HG rules):

Ship       Per jump      Per parsec

Jump-1     Cr657.36        Cr657.36
Jump-2   Cr1,064.84        Cr532.42
Jump-3   Cr1,642,93        Cr547.64
Jump-4   Cr2,657,64        Cr664.41
Jump-5   Cr4,737,36        Cr947.47
Jump-6  Cr10,837.88      Cr1,806.31

You didn't list hull size; due to a certain non-linear component size (bridges), that skews prices on the low end. Lack of available cargo limits the utility of the high end.

 

[rancke]

You didn't list hull size;

Yes, I did. 1000T. To eliminate the question of the fixed-size bridge.

...due to a certain non-linear component size (bridges), that skews prices on the low end. Lack of available cargo limits the utility of the high end.

Lack of available cargo applies to tramps. Regularly sheduled freighters will be used on routes where there wouldn't be a lack of available cargo for them. And just to account for a certain amount of uncertainty, I did calculate with an average cargo of 90% rather than full capacity.


Hans

 

[kafka47]

Very impressive agruments all. Thank you for a lively discussion.

It is interesting when I confronted this question, I always assumed that Stewards were stand-in for Air Marshals or a Security detail on smaller starships that could not afford regular security. It always explained why the Marine character in the game had to wear a short skirt a la Star Trek.