Re: (1879) Shipping? Common or Rare?

Jim Baranski asks about frequency of shipping in the Traveller universe, and
suggests that it would be similar to the sixteenth century on earth in many
respects. Yes but...

Since I have read more than I care to think about on the subject of trade and
economics from antiquity to the early renaissance (in pursuit of putting
together a working model for use in fantasy and war games), a better analogy
is probably caravan trade.  Sea-borne trade carried a lot of bulk goods over
coastal routes (e.g. Polish grain to France) because of the low expense of
shipping versus land transport.  Caravans were so expensive that only the
highest value luxury goods could be carried along.  Which version of things
we will model our revised economy on depends, as someone pointed out recently,
on how economical starships are to operate.

As far as planetary self-sufficiency goes, the most important factor to consider
is probably population rather than tech level.  If you have a planetary
population in the billions (9+) there is no way, no matter how cheap star travel gets, that they are going to be able to depend on imports for the necessities
of civilization.  Buy high tech weapons from the planet two jumps over, yes.
Import bananas for the wealthy, yes.  Import wheat or iron ore? No.  Planets
with populations of less than 100 million start to resemble, economically,
single nations on present earth, and probably would have export specialties.
I have always figured that a "Non-industrial" planet might still export
small specialty manufactured goods, and the concept of an "agricultural"
planet comletely covered with farms deserves to be relegated to the same scrap
bin for low imagination as "swamp worlds", "desert worlds", and so forth.  The
simplest planetary ecology is not going to be summed up in one word
(except perhaps, "Vacuum world").  Anyway, I'd like to see the trade system
take into account the population as being a major variable in determining the
quantity of trade.  Some examination of the balance of trade issue should be
considered as well.

Now from a gamemaster's standpoint, I'd be interested to know how this all
translates into an answert to the question "If I walk into a class B starport
on a Pop 7 world jump-2 from its nearest neighbor, how often can I expect to
find a departing starship?".  I tried one time to come up with a little
estimate of total merhcant ship tonnage in a region, based on an estimate of the
fraction of a planetary Groos Product provided by trade (using Trillion Credit
Squadron), and came up with things like 3-4 thousand merhcant ships of various
sizes plying the Sword Worlds subsector.  Seemed high, but when I built
navies for the Sword Worlds with TCS/High Guard, Narsil, a Pop 10 world, ended
up with 300 100,000ton battleships, and 800 or 900 supporting ships down to
2000tons in size.  Maybe.  The Traveller Adventure gave one the impression that
ships were pretty common.  Ah well, enough random thoughts on that.

Rob Dean

(Sorry, I'm still suffering from an ear infection and the baby didn't sleep
well last night, so I'm a little scattered this morning.)