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[rancke]

Hate to break it to ya, but we're already down to the point where the physics prevent going smaller and make we electrical circuitry smaller than living cells.

Physics as we know it maybe. But Traveller isn't hard science; it's a hard science shell with a delicious soft gooey center.


Hans

 

[Selandia]

Is there something in the trade and commerce system (I am still reading through my T5 CD ROM) that could be used to come up with this? How often does a ship come through a given star system? Is it based on Ix, Ex, RU, starport, TL, Pop, Trade Classifications, trade routes, or, more likely, some combination of all of these)? I would love to have an automated way to determine this ... plug all of the information into a spreadsheet along with jump distances to all neighboring worlds, and determine how long it takes to get from world x to all worlds within six parsecs of it. Repeat for the time it takes for the message to get to the next world, and so on.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

I did not find a trade pattern generator for volume/frequency
the t5, p.490 "available pasengers and freight" page is provided with a caveat:

These tables reflect available levels
of goods and passengers appropriate
for Player-Characters. They do not reflect
overall economic demand.

In fact, when it comes to info, they have that proposition that mail contract do exist only between worlds with an importance level difference of 2. In RW that would not work (no mail between London, Berlin or Paris?). In T5 it is part of keeping the players sweating.

No merchant prince scenario yet in T5.

I think that Gurp "Starports" do have something. T4 "Pocket Empire" had some macro economic if my memory serve me well. They have their scolars on their forums I presume. You may find it adaptible.

The next issue of Imperialines, I believe, is addressing trade. May be they will have that?

have fun

Selandia

 

[ovka]

I came up with something very rudimentary using GT:Far Trader. It involved converting Starport and TL to Gurps values, calculating all of the WTN's and BTN's for a subsector sized area, determining trade routes (I think there was some fudging there) and manually checking world by world how long it would take information to get from place to place. There *has* to be a better way.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka