Trade and Commerce

TRADE AND COMMERCE REVISIONS

     I have been thinking about trade and commerce again in the last few
days.  I don't have any solutions to the problem to suggest right now.  In
fact, what I'm trying to do is to define the problem.  (-:

     Would we agree that the purpose of a trade system is to allow the
referee to put enough money into a game to allow the players to maintain
their own starship?  To do this, the system should not be so unbalanced as
to make it too easy to win vast quantities of wealth, nor so difficult as
to cause the players to go bankrupt every time they try it.  Ideally, it
seems to me that it ought to be set up in a way that will make the profits
proprotional to the risk...safe and steady will keep you eating, but a new
starship will require some risks.

     In order to design a new system, I think that it would be necessary to
set the background with some decisions about Imperial economics.  Are
planets mostly self-sufficient?  Do 'balance of trade' issues affect indi-
vidual merchants by making it difficult to sell things on backwater worlds
with few trade connections to gain Imperial money?  Do the megacorporations
tie up all of the steady trade in items with very high profit margins,
leaving only occasional deals of this sort for the little guys?  Do planets
routinely pass trade-restricting (or trade enhancing) legislation?  I think
the answers to all of these questions are probably 'yes', but we've never
been told so explicitly.

     I think it would also be very nice to get some idea of the volume of
shipping available in various regions of the Imperium--even something as
simple as the 'battalion strenght of armies' table from the Rebellion
Sourcebook or the 5th Frontier War articles in JTAS would be a help.

     Hmmm...maybe I do have a few suggestions after all...if I was piecing
together rules from the existing versions, I'd use something like the
original Book 2 rules with tech level effects added in for manufactured
goods.  I'd also modify some of the products to reduce the potential prof-
its from them--if you ever played with the old system, you'll remember that
machine tools, radioactives, gems, and computers were the cargos of choice.

Rob Dean