Classic Traveller - Starship Economics and Design

TOC

• CT Review Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Generating characters

• Classic Traveller - Combat

• More IronMongery

• Travel

• Starship Economics and Design

• Computers

• Space Combat

• Space Combat - plugging rules

Starship Economics

The fifth major chapter in and we’re only a third of the way through the Traveller Book on page 52.

We open with the basic issue of “how do I afford a starship?” - and if you didn’t get a scout courier or a full/partial payment on a commercial ship as your mustering out benefit, the answers are basically cash, financing, or subsidies, and the rules give you the ins and outs of how much you can expect to pay if you can convince the bank or a local government to pay the balance up front. One note on subsidized merchants - you are expected to run a route, and are subject to callup.

Once that is addressed, well, owning a ship is much like owning a boat. The best way to make a little money is to start with a lot of money, because you need to pay your crew, fuel up, cover regular maintenance, cover docking expenses, and so on - all of these operational costs are detailed.

Page 53 covers means of revenue, from running cargo (Cr1000/ton), speculative cargos you buy yourself, running a mail route, and carrying special messages, with odds for each as well as tables in a later chapter adjusting availability and prices for population and tech level. These are also likely useful for adjusting prices on individual goods and player equipment.

I love the system, but given the examples I noted last time, even factoring for “it’s the future so a TL ‘B’ society can make ground cars cheaper” or some such, I don’t think the market tables and values are going to be as accurate as the ones Alex Macris built into ACKs.

Pages 54 and 55 cover rough example travel times, charts for cargo availability, and a checklist for revenue and expenses. Welcome to EVE online - or spreadsheets in space - but without the computer power.

It was utterly fascinating to my middle school self that they actually give examples of how a constant-thrust turnover flight path works, and how to calculate travel times using standard physics equations:

Starship Design

We get a few definitions, defining small craft such as shuttles and fighters, starships (100+ ton craft with jump drives), and non-starships (other large craft). Starships need to be built at class A starports, and class B can support other craft. After a brief introduction to factors like construction and design costs (naval architects need to feed their families too) as well as standardized designs, we get a breakdown of the main starship components, including how many of what kind of crew are needed.

The real heart of this chapter are the tables starting on page 58. Here you can find out what drive rating (A-Z) you need to get a certain jump rating in parsecs or G’s in acceleration, which you can then reference to look up how much space (mass) it takes up. The largest ship that can pull 6 G’s or Jump-6 comes in at 2000 tons - with lower values such as jump-1/1G or jump-2 being extremely common outside of military or specialty vessels. Page 59 lists out the bare stats for a number of common designs, and the chapter goes on to round out the rules and limitations of starship design, including weapons and hardpoints, and on board small craft and vehicles.

I spent a lot of hours in this chapter.

One place that Traveller got things really, really wrong given that home computers were already becoming a thing, is, well, computers.

It’s not entirely out to lunch at first glance. Remember that mass here is more about displacement than weight, and while some equipment will be denser, it won’t fill all of the available space. For computers, factor in you need a desk, connections to the ships hatches, sensors, security systems, and drives, as well as multiple terminals in larger ships, and anyone who’s seen a server room will immediately nod. Ditto anyone who’s seen naval gear, even through the 1990’s.

And then you see how large the programs are in relation to available storage.

Given the targeting programs you can run on archaic and underpowered hardware - even by today’s standards - and how quickly storage capacity ballooned, things rapidly break down. TL5 is basically a fancy analog fire control computer like what you’d see on a WW2 battleship like the Iowa. So that being limited makes sense, and in a “once you know it’s possible” kind of way, basic circuits could be assembled to handle rudimentary programming with the industrial capabilities of the time.

The problem is that by TL8 time frames, we had improved memory and storage, to the point where computer capacity by the year 2000+ massively outstripped the rest of the assumed technologies for TL9.

From a later chapter:

I’m not sure how to best deal with it. In some ways, again, the sizes make sense, especially for jump calculations that can be handwaved for their increasing complexity vis a vis distance (though even there, there is a degree to which you can pull a trick from Vernor Vinge’s Peace War and trade time for raw power), but the rest of the software suite, after a certain point, becomes rather inconsequential in terms of memory, storage, and processing power relative to the resources available. Even in systems hardened for cosmic radiation.

For now, I’m just going to play it as a retro future that never was, because I don’t want to (yet) sit down and figure out how to swap time for processing power, or how to account for resource usage for better sensor integration or targeting algorithms.

After that, you have some lovely artwork of the various standard ship types, a well-written section on designing custom ships that puts together the tables and standards earlier in the chapter, and then a brief section on deck plans - or how I wasted more time in middle school than on anything else (and damn near beat out Battletech and Car Wars…).

As a note, the standard deck plan assumes that the standard deck interval is three meters, and that two 1.5 x 1.5m squares of that height sufficiently approximate 1 ton.

And thus we conclude these two chapters, before we look deeper into the wonderful world of retro future computing per the Traveller rules.

While you’re at it:

If you like good books, the guys at Pilum Press have a discord server. Drop in, and if you haven’t yet, pick up a copy of everything they have at their website.

If you’re more into games, check out the Arbiter of Worlds channel, and the Autarch Discord server as well. There you will find discussions on ACKs, Ascendant, and a number of other non-Autarch RPGs and games like Traveller and D&D.