> = Michael A. Surman
>> = Steve Higginbotham (TML msg 3324):
>>Since it wants to buy anything brought in, it must do so with
>>Imperial Credits. Where do they come from? In the real world, you get
>>nothing anyone wants to buy. It's a mystery to me! Government subsidies?
>>Not likely, the Imperial government is too Laissez faire to do that.
>>Magic?? Probably. The GDW people don't seem to be capable of adding,
>>much less doing economic (or any other) analysis of their system.
>
> Can't agree with you more. Especially the last sentence. Therefore,
> has anyone seen a commercial game/publication that has a decent
> economic system?
I started to work on one a few years ago, but put it aside as too big a job.
I did analyse the trade tonnage in a couple of subsectors and got unmanagably
huge numbers. Glisten subsector (not one of the high-population ones at all)
wound up with 44.000 ships of an average tonnage of a 1000. I based this on
the naval budgets of Trillion Credit Squadron as showing a bare minimum. (I
assumed that in order to pay the few planets who actually built these ships,
the rest of the planets had to deliver goods to other planets (Glisten will
hardly be satisfied with an IOU for umpteen billion akian guilders unless
they can buy something for those guilders AND have it delivered)). The one BIG
assumption I made was that every ton of military ship "represented" two tons
of commercial ship (I got that number out of a fantasy RPG. Does anybody know
what the numbers are for real-life nations? That is, what is the proportions
between America or Britain' or France's naval and trade fleet?)
The fix I came up with consisted of dividing trade ships in two categories:
bulk and luxury. Bulk carriers are huge ships ranging from 10.000 T for the
very smallest to 1-200.000 T on the average to millions of tons for the
largest. They are engaged in long-term haulage of food and rew materials
between the worlds. They have regular routes that don't change from one year
to another (You don't build a super- or hyper-carrier unless you have a
guaranteed employment for it for the next several decades). Luxury trade is
evrything else. Everything we've seen in any Traveller and Megatraveller
publication to date, up to and including the 5000 T Akerut freighters from
"The Traveller Adventure".
Bulk trade is boring (which is why we've never heard of it before :-). It is
also 99.9% of all trade. I originally choose 99% as the number and then
checked with the trade of Aramis subsector. In "The Traveller Adventure" we
get a considerable amount of information about the companies trading there. I
made a few interpolations and a couple of rather big (but not unreasonable)
assumptions and came up with a number that was almost exactly the one I got by
calculation, except it was off by a factor 10. So 99.9% is what I use now.
>>As to the Cosmic Computer analogy, consider that the average merchant
>>There was a ship (approx. 1,000,000 MT tons) described as too small to
>>make it worthwhile to put FTL drives into. So the average ship like that
>>could buy up the entire wine harvest, store it in one corner of Hold #10,
>>and then finish loading later. The economic parallels between Piper's
>>works and MT are virtually nonexistant
>
> Two things jump at me here. In the Trav/MegaTrav universe either the
> ships are too small or the planets don't produce as much as in Piper's
> books. I would assume that planetary production is relatively similar
> in both universes therefore it leaves ship size. Why aren't there big
> freighter's in Trav/MTrav? It would seem to be a very economical way
> to ship goods.
Yes, if you use them all the time. Imagine the capital loss (I think that's
what I mean) of a 1.000.000 T ship standing idle. That's why I feel justified
in making bulk trade tightly bound to loooong-term employment.
> As it stands now, speed wouldn't be affected much because
> most ships travel at jump 1 or 2 anyway.
Another advantage of long-term haulage is that you know in advance what size
jump you're going to need. Whereas I consider Free Traders with jump-1 quite
silly. (The ability to bypass an unprofitable or even dangerous star-system
is IMO indispensable for a roving trader. Forget about trading mains. A planet
that dosen't buy or sell anything is a barrier to jump-1 ships in itself.)
> Or it could be that since GDW
> doesn't understand economics planets don't produce much therefore small
> ships are adequate.
It was amazing the way naval ship sizes changed when GDW produced Trillion
Credit Squadron. In "Twilight's Peak" the squadron that enforces the Algine
interdict consists of a Kinunir class "cruiser" and a couple of Gazelle
class escorts. In "Fighting Ships" the squadron that enforces the interdict
of Andory consists of two Tigress class battleships! Not to mention the way
a Kinunir before TCS was a mighty 1200 T cruiser and afterwards was a puny
1200 T "cruiser". Nowadays cruisers are spinal-mount carrying ships of between
20 and 75.000 T and are produced by the hundreds, but back then a Kinunir was
a ship to be reckoned with and had been produced by the dozen. It is a pity
that GDW didn't stop for a moment and think about the consequences of
upscaling the naval ships.
I wonder how the 400 T corsairs make out nowadays. They used to be a threat,
at least in the 1000 year old authentic frontier sector Spinward Marches. It
sure is lucky for us referees that the Imperium never decided to build just
one less battleship and place a squadron of Gazelles in every star system,
empty or not, thus ending piracy forever...
BTW. I've also decided to reduce the naval budget of high-population worlds.
I haven't worked out the details, but the main idea is to introduce an
_optimum_ population for each star-system. Once you exceed that, the extra
people won't generate extra naval revenue (that is, any increase in
productivity from having more people producing is swallowed up in having
still more people not producing, but still requiring support). After all,
the proportion of telephone sanitizers and bureaucrats are higher in a
society of millions than a society of thousands. So a system with an optimum
population of 1.2 billion and an actual population of 4 billion would have
it's naval budget based on 1.2 billion and not 4. Of course, a sliding scale
would be better, perhaps even one that resulted in a _lower_ revenue the more
the population were above the optimum, but that would be more complicated than
I care for.
How to determine the optimum population? That's the bit I haven't had the
time to work out yet. Something based on the physical characteristics of the
system's main world, plus a random roll of 2D* 100 million to reflect the
value of the rest of the system (the last factor only for sufficiently
high-tech societies, of course). Come to think of it, tech level would
come into the first part too, wouldn't it?
Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
[email removed]
- ------------
"I know there are some people in the world who do not tolerate their
fellow human beings, and I just can't _stand_ people like that!"
(after Tom Lehrer)