Scott Kellog writes:
>Actually, Cynthia, have you checked out the archives of vehicles? I'm not
>certain, but I'm pretty sure that Rob Dean posted a MegaTrav Leviathan
>from the GDW adventure. Before you spend a lot of effort I think you might
>take a look at what designs are already available.
*chuckle* Too late! I re-designed the Leviathan months ago, long before I
went ftp-spelunking in the archives and found the other version. Leviathan
always one of Steve and mine's favorite ships, so re-creating it under
MegaT was one of my high priority design jobs.
I am, however, happily lifting any and all designs I find in the archives
or floating by in new and old TML bundles. I never would have the time to
design so many ships, and I never would have thought of half of them. (In
particular, I never would have invented the Sword Worlds Overlord Heli-carrier.
Is it just my imagination, or does that thing bear more than a passing
resemblance to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier?)
Scott Kellogg:
>2) About, Price of components dropping. Well, I see your point, but
>I don't quite agree. At TL6 hard steel is first used, maybe a TL15 corp
>can produce it cheaper, but that money would probably go into a higher
>profit margin for the manufacturer. After all, The consumer is willing to
>pay the extra at TL6, so we fix the price and rake in more cash!
> The thing that will really make prices drop is if the company can
>make a lot of a certain unit, Increased volume, decreased cost.
>ie. The one millionth grav unit produced is going to cost less than the
>second the company produced. On the other hand, that cash is again
>probably not going to be passed on to the consumer.
Hmmm, well, I tend to feel that is dependent on the economic situation,
and is not something that should be hardcoded into the design sequence. Let
me put it this way: what you say holds true if the supplier has monopoly; in
a competitive situation, prices will lower as production costs lower. Compare
the prices of a PC today with the price of an IBM PC at date of introduction
in 1981, or worse yet, with that of CP/M machines (Gawd, I'm dating myself!)
a couple years before that. Not only that, compare the capabilities of
a "standard" PC (386SX, 1 meg memory, 40 meg HD, VGA) with that of a "standard"
PC then (8088, 64-128K memory, 1 360K floppy (actually introduced with 1
128K floppy), and monochrome text-only). Capability has gone up and prices
have gone down! In a purely market-driven, competitive situation, this is
what will happen. Personally, I think either prices are fixed due to collusion
between the megacorps and the Imperium, in which case small yards will offer
better deals just to get a slice of the action, or free market conditions
rule, in which case prices should probably be figured as they are for Vargr
worlds -- different each place. You could calculate them randomly, or
somebody could modify them for trade classes, etc. However, given that we
want some baseline "book value" for our starships, said "book value" should
at least represent the actual change in value of things due to technological
improvement in the item itself, and in the production process.
Scott Kellogg:
>Personally My feeling is that ships are too cheap. Look at the cost of a
>single TL8-9 radar evading bomber: approx 500 million$, if rate of
>exchange is approx 1Cr=1$, then the B-2 cost much more than a lot of
starships!
There are various bizarre reasons why the price of American military
equipment is artificially high. These have to do with the high R&D costs to
secure a government contract, and the need to recover those costs even if
Congress or the Pentagon decides to cut off the production run after 1
plane/ship/tank has rolled out of the factory; the often very short production
runs (how many Kennedy class aircraft carriers are we building?) that
disallow any of the advantages of mass production; and so on. Perhaps
you could represent these factors by disallowing the 80% discount from any
military craft that aren't produced by the thousands. Or, you could rule
that my modifications do not apply to military production.
I tend to look at ship design from the point of view of building civilian
and Scout service vehicles, rather than Navy/Army/Marine stuff. From the
non-military point of view, the pricing is completely cock-eyed. You compared
the cost of a B-2 to a starship; compare the cost of a small Great Lakes
freighter to a starship. A long time ago, you all discussed the fact that
a Free Trader can barely make bank payments, let alone enough to let the
owner retire in comfort. No real conclusion was reached. Let me point out
that in the real world, people don't start businesses that they don't expect
to make money at; and if they fail, 100 other people don't immediately follow
in their footsteps in the same business. For the MT universe to function as
depicted, starships must be profitable to own and operate, or there will be
no interstellar trade. The problem is, as written, the profitability of a
merchant ship DROPS as size increases. I now turn this post over to Steve,
who has been sitting in a corner quietly running numbers through a
calculator.
Steve Higginbotham:
Cynthia mis-states the basic problem - profitability decreases as PERFORMANCE
increases. A free trader (jump-1, 1-G) will be MARGINALLY profitable even if
your free trader is 5000 displacement tons.
HOWEVER, let's look at the basic unit of passenger transport in the Imperium -
the Tukera long-liner (why is it the basic unit?? because the various published
information about Tukera over the years all say so. In the Core, there are no
other passenger ships.)
A Tukera long liner (Type RT) costs 247.08MCr. Therefore it requires an
initial investment of 49.4 MCr. Note that if this money were deposited into a
bank at 4.5% per annum, it would earn the owner MCr 2.223 per year.
The starship owner must make the following payments (per year) :
ship payments : MCr 12.354
maintenance : MCr 0.247
crew salaries : MCr 0.144 (approximately - this is the most
variable part - salaries are a function of
skill levels, among other things)
life support : MCr 2.500 (this cost requirement is silly, but
the rules use them, so I will, too)
insurance : MCr ??? (let's ignore this, or subsume it into
the ship's payments - too many variables)
total : MCr 15.245
The ship's revenues are as follows (with various loading assumptions listed)
passengers : (100%) : MCr 8.400
( 90%) : MCr 7.650
( 75%) : MCr 6.250
( 60%) : MCr 5.100
freight : (100%) : MCr 3.247
( 90%) : MCr 2.922
( 75%) : MCr 2.435
( 60%) : MCr 1.948
Totals : (100%) : MCr 11.647
( 90%) : MCr 10.572
( 75%) : MCr 8.685
( 60%) : MCr 7.048
Notice that the best case assumption produces losses of MCr 3.598 per annum.
I personally disbelieve in the 100% assumption. I prefer the 90% assumption,
since I believe that there would be more ships running the route if there was a
higher demand, and I disbelieve that the ship was created with the EXACT size
to move the people that want to be moved all the time. However, I digress.
Using the 100% assumption, at the end of the mortgage period, the ship-owner is
in debt to the tune of MCr 193.32. With the ship payments removed, that debt
will be cleared in 22 more years.
So, at the end of 62 years, your starship will BEGIN to make money for you.
Note that this discounts the need to amortize the debt induced over the years.
If that assumption is made, the ship will break even after 75+ years.
After that, the ship will make the owner MCr 8.755 per year. Since the
effective life span of a ship is about 100 years (source : old Traveller),
the ship will make the owner MCr 332.7 over it's lifetime (IF he has a full
load EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE 2500 FLIGHTS.
Over the same period, the owner would have made MCr 3981.073 by putting the
initial investment in the bank at 4.5%.
I have never heard of an investor getting rich by putting his money in a
savings account. I have also never heard of an investor getting rich on an
investment with a LOWER return than a bank (by a factor of SEVEN). I can't
even recall ever hearing of an investor who MADE an investment like that
twice. I suspect that they are all collecting Welfare now.
In fact, that analysis can be applied to EVERY merchant ship ever designed for
MT. Virtually all J-3 ships will tend to suck up money for generations. MOST
J-2 ships will also. Given that the J-2 ships are primarily passenger ships,
with adequate stewards, they can come out slightly ahead. They don't come out
ahead of the savings account, but that is someone else's problem. J-1 ships
will mostly make a little money. They even make more money than a savings
account. Not quite so much as most Money Market accounts, but, again someone
else's problem.
Note that fuel costs were ignored in this discussion. It can be demonstrated
that it is more cost-effective to buy fuel at a starport than to use wilderness
refueling. Therefore the profits indicated will never actually be achieved by
a ship. ALAS!
Cynthia has just suggested that passenger/freight fees could be raised.
Possibly. In a normal economy, doing so would encourage local development of
resources, rather than interstellar trade. More people would stay home, and
ships would be in worse shape than ever. Besides, there are indications that
the Imperium regulates passenger/freight fees to the existing levels.
As to the suggestion that the starships operate by spec trade rather than
freight consignment, this IS possible. It is also possible (probable, in fact)
that the smart investor will buy the stuff up WITHOUT pouring money into a
starship, and ship it as freight. Let some other fool lose money by buying a
ship. There will always be idiots who go broke doing this, who can be milked
by an alert investor. Note that in the case of a subsidized route, the
government is the idiot in question, and the populace is the entity being
milked by the alert investor.
Therefore, most investors will NOT invest in a starship, which will lose them
gobs of money, but rather make use of someone else's starship (so someone else
can lose gobs of money, while you MAKE gobs of money). There is every
indication (from the tables) that only a small ship (400 tons or less) can make
any significant amount of money by spec trade. Significant in terms of
starship payments. If there was that much money to be made, Tukera would get
an exclusive contract, and the profit to a starship owner would vanish.
The upshot is that no ship will ever make enough money to convince the buyer to
buy it. So either there are NO ships, or the government buys and runs them
all, to the detriment of the private sector (read: PCs). Or we lower ship
costs. Which we did.
Notice that in the Vargr Extants, ship prices can be as much as 30% lower than
normal. This might lead one to suspect that virtually all ships are made in
the Extants, or that there is a major black-market in Vargr ships (if the
Imperium tries to control ship prices at that arbitrarily high level).
--- Steve & Cynthia Higginbotham
P.S. Does anybody remember the cheap "standard" hulls from Old Traveller Book
2? And the cheap A & B jump drives? Where did those go? And why?