Quote from: estarIt won't be luxury goods price given a traveller/firefly type premise. Different technology will produce different results of course. Seriously what technology you are basing your assertion on.

Also look what happens in Alaska, Siberia and other exterme earth environments where everything has to be shipped in. Food is more expensive but it not luxury good expensive. Plus people are making crazy money so while they pay more for the food they have more to spend.

I agree Tramp freighters are not going to be competing with bulk carriers. Again Far Traders addresses that issue in almost excoriating detail. And Far trader agrees with my own experience with the shipping industry.

Interstellar shipping /= oceanic shipping! It is not in the least equivalent for costs. Far Trader may address this in excruciating detail, but that doesn't make Far Trader correct. If Far Trader is drawing equivalencies in cost to oceanic shipping, then it is most certainly wrong. The equation I posted up thread is, if anything, erring on the side of under costing. Plug your costs into the equation, and check them against FT. If prices given by Far Trader are under the results of using the above calculation, they are most certainly wrong. If they are at or somewhat above what I have listed, They are close to correct. I know nothing about FT, never having played or run Traveller for 25+ years. All I know is the equation gives approximately correct results for any tech level.

HOWEVER! You are the GM. If you prefer using Far Trader, that's all cool. If the results given by Far Trader are adequate for your purposes, that is also cool. There is no reason you should feel obliged to change anything if FT is effectively wrong. We are not talking reality here, nor are we talking a scientifically accurate simulation. It really doesn't matter at all. It's just a game. Just because I prefer modelling economics more closely means nothing in Your Traveller.

-clash

Quote from: Kyle AaronOr like that redneck hyperdrive setting, where you didn't even need a spaceship, just something more or less airtight, a computer and $200 worth of gear from Radio Shack.

Exactly, Kyle!

-clash

Quote from: BalbinusPCs run tramp freighters, not massive cargo shipping vessels.

Food in the real world is not transported by tramp freighters so much.

And in most tramp freighter sf rpgs space travel is too rare and expensive to make food worthwhile or other easily produced local materials (and that's easily in the context of a spacefaring culture bear in mind).

So, medicines, unique items (Torvald's World crystalwine, carvings from the Mnori people of Deneb IV, artefacts from the lost civilisation of the XT4367 moons), people, stuff that isn't commonplace.

And illegal stuff of course, guns, drugs, stimvids, celebrity dna samples...

Bingo, Balbinus!

-clash

Quote from: estarAlso look what happens in Alaska, Siberia and other exterme earth environments where everything has to be shipped in. Food is more expensive but it not luxury good expensive.

Yeah, but nowadays ships and fuel are cheap, compared to most scfi settings. Take a look at general cargo ships for sale here. Basically, new they run $1,000-$5,000 per tonne of cargo capacity. Second-hand they're $500. Some really old and crusty ones are $250.

The low capacity (under 500t) ones aren't much cheaper because there's a base cost to the thing, engines and so on. So we can have a sketch figure of,
   General Cargo ships
New, base cost $250,000 + $2,500/t cargo
Second-hand, good condition, base cost $125,000 + $1,000/t cargo
Truly shoddy but still gloats, base cost $75,000 + $500/t cargo
adjust for bargaining, recent maintenance certificates, sale by desperate person or thief, etc

The Space Shuttle has a cargo capacity of 25 tonnes. Under these sketch rules of cost, it'd be $312,500. In fact, the Space Shuttle programme has cost $145 billion. If we generously assume that 90% of that was research, then the six Shuttles built cost $2.4 billion each.

Granted, it's a real boondoggle of a programme. Let's consider something more efficient but less ambitious, SpaceShip One. This thing can fit one pilot and 2 passengers, and cost $25 million to develop. Again the generous assumption of 90% development costs give us a $2.5 million craft. And it can't make orbit.

Getting stuff into space is expensive, and technically very difficult. If for your rpg setting the only law of physics you break is the one about no faster-than-light travel, then you're left with gravity wells to climb out of, atmospheres to enter and not burn up in, and so on. And all that leads to the great expense and hassle that real space travel is.

Now, I certainly agree with the person who said, if you're going to break the laws of physics every week, why not the laws of economics? What matters here is what's central to the game. And if your game revolves around trade, then the economics matter. If your game revolves around schemes and plots and wisecracks and quickdraws, and the trade's just part of the scenery, then you don't have to worry about economics

Quote from: flyingmiceInterstellar shipping /= oceanic shipping!

Actually it is. The details may differ but the same pressure of cost, procedure, time, and profit bears on all shipping. When people want to move goods from point A to point B they tend do the same thing.

Quote from: flyingmiceIt is not in the least equivalent for costs. Far Trader may address this in excruciating detail, but that doesn't make Far Trader correct.

One of the authors of Far Trader has a PhD in economics and has been playing Traveller since 1990. All three authors researched how the economics of shipping works. Far Trader is on pretty solid ground.

Quote from: flyingmiceIf Far Trader is drawing equivalencies in cost to oceanic shipping, then it is most certainly wrong. The equation I posted up thread is, if anything, erring on the side of under costing. Plug your costs into the equation, and check them against FT.

Again what are your technology assumptions.

Hydrogen fuel? Fusion Reactors? Rocket fuels?
Time how long does it get take to get from point A to B?
etc.

Your formula is simplistic. It may work for tramp freighters but it doesn't work for shipping in general. Because it accounts only for cost, doesn't include scale or volume.

Quote from: flyingmiceIf prices given by Far Trader are under the results of using the above calculation, they are most certainly wrong. If they are at or somewhat above what I have listed, They are close to correct. I know nothing about FT, never having played or run Traveller for 25+ years. All I know is the equation gives approximately correct results for any tech level.

HOWEVER! You are the GM. If you prefer using Far Trader, that's all cool. If the results given by Far Trader are adequate for your purposes, that is also cool. There is no reason you should feel obliged to change anything if FT is effectively wrong. We are not talking reality here, nor are we talking a scientifically accurate simulation. It really doesn't matter at all. It's just a game. Just because I prefer modelling economics more closely means nothing in Your Traveller.
-clash

One of the hallmarks of hard sci-fi is that your world is reasoned from the premise. Another hallmark that in the absence of some factor arising from your premises things work like in our world.

Our world has fuel cost
it takes a certain amount of time to ship things
we have to pay people to transport cargo.
Shipping is insured.

The economics of shipping is well understood and it is the same whether you go by ship, truck, train, or plane. In everyone the price you pay to ship is based on how fast you want it shipped, how much are you going to ship ( you get a price break the more you ship), and finally if there special handling involved. As for me I had been dealing with shipping issues for over 20 years with my regular job supporting metal cutting machines and shipping stuff all over the world.

Quote from: Kyle AaronThe Space Shuttle has a cargo capacity of 25 tonnes. Under these sketch rules of cost, it'd be $312,500. In fact, the Space Shuttle programme has cost $145 billion. If we generously assume that 90% of that was research, then the six Shuttles built cost $2.4 billion each.

Getting stuff into space is expensive, and technically very difficult. If for your rpg setting the only law of physics you break is the one about no faster-than-light travel, then you're left with gravity wells to climb out of, atmospheres to enter and not burn up in, and so on. And all that leads to the great expense and hassle that real space travel is.

It expensive because you are paying for the maintenance and salary of a multi-billion dollar launch facility over 4 flights a year. It is well known in the space community that if you increase the launch volume the cost will go down. Doesn't mean it will be as cheap as container shipping but it will drop prices by one or two orders of magnitude. ($10,000 per pound, to $1,000 or $100 a pound)

Part of the work in the alt-space community is to

a) reduce the amount of support a launch vehicle needs
b) reduce the amount of time to turn around or prep a launch vehicle.

but a and b are not what going to be what drives the cost of a launch way down. Only volume will do that and doing a and b will allow a faster launch rate. Unlike say a Shuttle, Atlas, Ariane, or a Delta.

Note: Rocket Fuel is CHEAP! Particularly Liquid O2. Fuel cost is not the issue.

As for sci-fi games. Any type of reactionless drive changes the equation. With reactionless drives your launch vehicles can be configured more like other types of cargo vessel with most of the space devoted to cargo rather than fuel as it is with today.

I give up.

--clash

Quote from: flyingmiceInterstellar shipping /= oceanic shipping!

Correct.  I think the better model to use is air freight.  It's a better model because air freight is expensive and limited by size and weight in a way that oceanic shipping often is not.  If it's the sort of thing that people would ship by air today, then it's the sort of thing that people might ship by small spacecraft in the future.

Quote from: flyingmiceOne thing I see again and again in SF RPGs is people shipping bulk cargo from system to system. Iron ore. Wheat. Cattle. This is WRONG! This would never happen! Why? Because it would always be cheaper to use first world-based resources and then system-based resources.

I'm late to the game as usual, but the problem that I see with your argument is that it's predicated on ground rules that you're setting yourself.  Interstellar travel is entirely hypothetical at the moment, thus so is the economics of interstellar trade.

Furthermore, common sense "rules" of economics get broken all the time.  You're old enough to remember when you just plain didn't buy fruit out of season, or when you did that it was awful.  That's, like, 30 years ago.  What happened?  The economic feasibility of shipping fruit around the world changed, based partly on technology, but largely on how badly people wanted the stuff and how much they were willing to pay for it.  Similarly, grains are grown here in the US, but shipped overseas to China to be processed into foods that are in turn shipped back to the US for sale.  Back in the 80s there was a furor that local sawmills were closing down because the Japanese had set up a system whereby they could buy the raw timber, ship it to Japan, mill it, then ship it back to the US for sale at a cheaper price than could be managed if it had been milled domestically.

Things like this happen all the time, based not only on available resources, but upon the work force available to do the job of producing bulk goods, their willingness to do the job affordably, and the consumer demands of the end market.  Throw in whatever hypothetical terms you want to tweak the feasibility of interstellar bulk shipping, and I just don't see a problem with this.

Now, what you were really driving at with this thread was a discussion of what sort of trade goods would be feasible given more limiting constraints on interstellar shipping.  Don't give up -- just state the terms more clearly.

!i!

Quote from: flyingmiceThe primary expense in transport is the means of transport itself and the crew needed to tend it. Whether or not fuel is cheap, interstellar ships are expensive.

Depends on how patient you are. If, for example, you want to ship refined iron and you're sending it four light years, can you wait 16 years for it to get where it is going? If so, all you have to do is get it to a quarter of the speed of light in the direction its going in and forget about it. Depending on the kind of technology used to gain acceleration, that might be exhorbitantly expensive or very cheap.

Maybe you can produce tons and tons of grain in a system and very little in another, and you know that the population of the second system is rising. Ten light years apart... So you start grain shipments, quarter of the speed of light. How do you preserve the grain that long? Well, you spread it out and irradiate it in the UV of the sun, and then you wrap it up with other resources, accelerate it, and it arrives in orbit in the system you're aiming at 40 years later.

While it might be argued that having such resources flying across interstellar space leaves them open to theft, remember that these are huge bulk, low value goods. Yes, you can accelerate out and redirect them, but its not the most attractive of crimes. Heck of a long time to spend stealing something worth so little.

Oh, I'll also add that the idea of manned vessels transporting cargo makes no sense to me at all. Why would you do that? You'd put as much cargo into unmanned vessels as you could, perhaps accompany it until it reaches sufficient velocity for the journey and you know its got the right trajectory, then you abandon it to its fate in interstellar space. Perhaps for really expensive cargo there would be a sound case for manning that vessel, but only if there is a problem with, say, piracy, and you can't develop an automated defense system at least as good as manning the vessel will achieve (which, IMHO, in a game system with interstellar travel, seems unlikely).

Quote from: Kyle AaronGetting stuff into space is expensive, and technically very difficult. If for your rpg setting the only law of physics you break is the one about no faster-than-light travel, then you're left with gravity wells to climb out of, atmospheres to enter and not burn up in, and so on. And all that leads to the great expense and hassle that real space travel is.

(sorry to bombard this thread with comments; I'm new here and this is a fascinating discussion you've been having).

I agree entirely.Thats why as much resource production as possible would be done in low gravity. Smelting minerals out of asteroids might be difficult in terms of energy, but if you can float asteroids nearer to the sun where you can harnass solar energy very efficiently, and then from the comparatively low gravity field of the asteroid blast your products away to where they're needed, you've probably reduced your energy cost for production and transport to a bare minimum. Same goes for producing food; if you can create self sustaining ecosystems on asteroids (not so far fetched in a sci-fi game) then you can start off with a very low energy cost for shipping food into space.

Then its all about gaining velocity such that your product gets where you need it within a timeframe that makes economic sense. A large enough panstellar corporation, without FTL travel, needs to play the long game here. If you've got FTL but its expensive then I would propose the same model. If you have FTL and its cheap and way, way FTL then that model starts to break down.

Quote from: flyingmiceOne thing I see again and again in SF RPGs is people shipping bulk cargo from system to system. Iron ore. Wheat. Cattle. This is WRONG!

This is a yes and a no for me. If you are talking about regular trade for trade's sake, then I agree. If you are talking about freighting essentials for survival's sake, then I disagree. People do what they have to do to survive, regardless of the cost. Also, you have to take into account what the market will bear. If some dope millions of kilometres away is willing to pay you an obscene amount for something that is readily available in your system, then it's worth it for you to ship it to said dope.

Still, taking your point a little further, sending space ships into battle is not cost effective either. If we agree that it's too costly to ship millions of tonnes of material via remote barges (that are essentially big boxes with engines), then it's certainly too costly to send crewed fleets of warships out into the great beyond to get damaged or destroyed. Fleets would be used more for home defense in the event of an attack. They would be an expensive posturing tool and little more - a lot like the nuclear stockpiles of the super powers during the Cold War.

Quote from: BalbinusPCs run tramp freighters, not massive cargo shipping vessels.

Food in the real world is not transported by tramp freighters so much.

And in most tramp freighter sf rpgs space travel is too rare and expensive to make food worthwhile or other easily produced local materials (and that's easily in the context of a spacefaring culture bear in mind).

So, medicines, unique items (Torvald's World crystalwine, carvings from the Mnori people of Deneb IV, artefacts from the lost civilisation of the XT4367 moons), people, stuff that isn't commonplace.

And illegal stuff of course, guns, drugs, stimvids, celebrity dna samples...

I agree with this analysis and with clash's basic argument.  I might even consider changing the trade charts a bit next time I run Traveller.

Clash,

I don´t see a big difference between your "formula" and the Far Trader model.
After all the FT version is just one instance of cost variables.

EDIT: The per unit price is important, but that goes without saying, and is also included in both models.