Steve Higginbotham writes:
>Hans Rancke-Madsen:
>>And then the PCs has to come up with 1/5th of the purchase price up
>>front. Say that there are 6 equal partners in the group who's just
>>acquired MCrimp 600. That's 100 million credits per adventurer. I don't
>>know about your players, but mine would start wondering why their fool
>>characters didn't just buy an annuity apiece. Even if they buy really
>>conservative blue chip bonds they should be able to get 1% per year.
>>That's a million credits per year. That's a lot of high passages. Who'd
>>be a free-trader?
>
>So who would do it if they had only 6MCr? At the kind of return a 30
>year T-bill pays, those same six guys could settle down to a life of
>luxury on most worlds. Note that your standard of living only costs
>Cr30,000 per annum unless you are a noble.
How true (sigh!). Still, at least you might use the lure of the stars as
an excuse. With a 1MCr annuity of 1 or 2 % you don't get enough to travel
at will among the stars. I suspect, however, that most PCs (and most free
traders) will get their ships second (or third or tenth) hand. In any case
I'd like to keep the cost of civilian ships down as much as possible (while
making warships as expensive as possible - that's the dillema).
>>Agreed, but I don't want the average pirate to be as small as the PCs
>>ship, just the occational one. On the contrary, I want the average
>>pirate to be so tough that the navy will be unable to station a
>>squadron adequate to deal with the average pirate in all frontier
>>starsystems. I want the navy to have to settle for keeping the
>>important planets inviolable (and I do mean inviolable; no Vargr
>>corsairs or Aslan ihatei need apply) and just patrol the frontier
>>systems from time to time.
>I like the idea. But interstellar trade will evaporate except to the
>protected systems, in that case. And pirates like that are more like
>Boskone: foreign warships masquerading as pirates.
I'm not saying that pirates ought to be able to stand up to the Navy.
But if the average pirate can deal with a Gazelle, then the Navy will
need to use Chrysanthemums to patrol, which more than halves the number
of patrols they can afford. If the average pirate can deal with a
Chrysanthemum, then the Navy will need to use Sloans and so on. The
problem is that the bigger a pirate becomes, the bigger prey it needs
and the bigger nuisance it becomes, so there is a limit to how big they
can become.
[>>> and > = Steve, >> = Bertil]
>No. You can only fight pirates where you are. The number of ships
>would be the minimum required to put an adequate force in EVERY system
>needing them. The Navy size would be AT LEAST as large as required to
>do that. If it wasn't, then merchant traffic would collapse, and the
>Navy would be forced to deal with the problem by building more and
>better ships.
You're wrong when you assume that merchant traffic will collapse unless
the Navy can suppress piracy. On the contrary, piracy is self-regulating.
If it becomes too great a burden on trade, then the number of merchants
will decrease, true, but then the number of pirates will dwindle too,
whereupon merchant traffic will pick up, which will allow the piracy
traffic to pick up too, etc. etc.. You can't _have_ pirates without trade
to prey on. And when the potential profit outweighs the risks, merchants
will be out there trading, pirates or no pirates.
You're right in saying that any government will try to suppress piracy
(unless properly licenced ;-), because any profits will be greater
without piracy-caused overheads, but a government will not necessarily
suppress it totally. If they have the means to they will, of course, but
the (political) cost of actually building more ships is an immidiate one
(increased taxes, which the government will be blamed for), while the
benefit of getting rid of pirates will only appear later, and will often
not be credited to the government, but simply taken for granted. Thus
extra money will not be available unless the pirates are such a nuisance
that pressure is brought on the government by the merchant community.
Look at history. It's only in the last two centuries that piracy has really
been brought under control, chiefly because the various government fleets
finally became big and/or efficient enough to make piracy unprofitable (and
even today we sometimes hear of pirate-style robberies). Certainly the 16th
17th and 18th Centuries (where the great trading companies flourished) had
their share of pirates as well as national fleets.
>>>If you want to cut the number of warships, try eliminating piracy as
>>>a consideration.
>>
>> I'd like to cut the number of warships to make piracy easier.
>
>Lovely pipe dream. Won't happen unless you remove ALL governments
>operating at above the planetary level. Pirates need bases, and if
>there is an interstellar government, they will have the resources to
>remove the pirates. If they don't, then the subordinate units will
>ignore them, and the interstellar government will cease to exist.
No, pirates need to be able to hide from government fleets, which is
not quite the same. The whole problem arises out of the fact that it
_is_ the same in the Traveller universe as it is now (because the
Navy is big enough to patrol all systems adequately at all times),
so what Bertil and I want is to reduce the size of the Navy.
>And if piracy levels are high, then worlds will be forced to develop
>their own resources, rather than importing things, and the merchant
>traffic will cease, and the pirates will disappear.
Never worked that way on pre-spaceflight Terra. Merchant traffic will
cease only when it becomes unprofitable and pirates can't make trade
unprofitable (unless state-subsidized).
>Try looking at historical examples of piracy. Piracy as a problem
>appeared when there was something to steal, and vanished shortly
>thereafter (except during wartime, when the Navy was busy elsewhere),
>when the merchants forced the Navy to deal with the problem.
We seem to have read different history books ;-) Try one about the
Caribbean and see how long it took from the first government attempt
to suppress piracy until the last pirate was caught.
> Why play Traveller if there is no
>interstellar traffic? There won't be if the pirates are kept, and the
>Navy is removed. And if the Navy isn't removed, then the pirates will
>be (by the Navy).
Only if the Navy can find them. The problem is that there aren't all
that many areas to patrol and more than enough Navy ships to patrol
them. Pirates can rely on disguise to keep them safe between strikes
(looking like innocent merchants), but that dosen't help if there's
warship within range when the pirate actually attacks its prey.
>50 years ago the Navy was bigger. 60 years ago it was smaller. 75
>years ago it was bigger (but not as big as 50 years ago). 100 years ago
>it was MUCH smaller. 150 years ago it was smaller still. Ditto for
>200. The Navy size has never been limited by money available.
Yes and no. It is limited by the amount of money that the citizenry is
willing to or can be coreced into spending. Look at what happened after
the Peace of Amiens. Most military men and quite a few politicians knew
that they would most likely be at war with Napoleon again as soon as he
had had time to rebuild his forces, and yet the government reduced the
navy to its peacetime complement. Why? Not because they didn't need the
ships, but because people refused to keep up paying an income tax of four
shilling in the pound.
>It was always limited by NEED.
Yes, but you don't need to eradicate piracy to keep commerce flowing,
just to keep it within bounds.
>> 100% of GNP in taxes is the maximum they will get, and even long
>>before that their return will begin to decrease with increased taxes.
>
>I take it they don't do "deficit spending" over there. That is the
>process of spending money you don't have. Most governments use it, and
>make up the difference by printing money. This is called "inflation".
You can spend money you don't have, but only to get ressources on credit.
You can't use ressources you can't get. I won't belabour this point
though, because it's obvious that the Imperium could afford a lot more
than it curently does (_Striker_ talks of 3% of GNP (rising to 15% in
wartime) and we've examples of far more than that in history). What we
have to stick to is that the 3% represents the amount that is politically
feasible to use (and as I've written earlier, I'm working on a way to
reduce that for high-population worlds). So the problem is: Given a fixed
budget, how can we reduce the size of the Imperial Fleet to something that
will allow pirates to survive on frontier worlds?
>>Reread TCS. I agree that it says what you say above. But it also says
>>the opposite. Start a campaign. If someone keeps the peace and dosen't
>>get attacked for a century, how many ships does he have then? As many
>>as he started with. Will they be the same ships? Ostensibly, yes, but
>>they can't be, can they? So the 10% maintenance figure must include
>>peacetime replacement of the ships. I suspect that glitch snuck past
>>the TCS authors because nobody in a game campaign ever manages to spend
>>any time at peace.
>
>No. TCS assumes that if you want to build new ships, you decommission
>old ones: put them in ordinary, mothball them, whatever you prefer.
>Then use the extra money saved from maintenance to build new ones. And
>the situation you describe is exactly what happened in the USA between
>wars last century: the ships got older and more decrepit until the
>shooting started, then they were replaced by modern ships.
Ah, but in TCS my century-old ships dose not become decrepit. That's
what I mean when I write that it is ostensible the same ships, but that
it can't really be. I repeat: TCS assumes both things.
>>PS. Your other posting about the government just raking in more taxes
>>or printing more money was a joke, right? I don't have to refute that,
>>do I?
>
>I hope not. But governments DO do things like that. How do you think
>inflation happens?
Inflation happens because you CAN'T do things like that, but governments
think you can ;-).
Seriously, if you look behind the GNP to the actual ressources that are
there, you will run into a genuine limit. Unfortunately not enough to solve
our problem though, so I have to fall back on a political explanation: The
3% spent on military forces represents what it's politically feasible to
spend. If that's insufficient to provide a fleet that can supress piracy
totally, then that's just too bad ;-)
> And keep in mind that the USA's fraction of the GNP
>spent on the military is almost ten times as high as the one ascribed to
>Imperial worlds. There is a lot of room for increasing the fleet size
>in the Imperium.
Oh, I agree. But please don't tell the Emperor :-)
Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
[email removed]
- ------------
"A subsector official pompously states that the
subsector armed forces have four Kinunir class
ships in service, each with enough troop strength
to put down any military operations that threathen
the peace of the Imperium."
---Adventure 1, The Kinunir