Merchants and Money

[email removed] (Adam Naylor) writes:

>When I was wondering through my collection of archive material (The stuff
>I managed to get before my uni restricted out of campus FTP and Telnet .)
>I saw a for posts from people talking about the high cost of free traders
>and how they are not economically viable . I am not sure about the outcome
>of these discussions but here are some ideas I was mussing about with .....

>(Lots more stuff)

	First, note that "Free Trader" has two meanings:
1)	A particular ship, the Type A Free Trader
2)	Someone who makes his/her living by running a small merchant vessel

	The Type A only has Jump-1, and so is not particularly well suited for
spec trade, which is where the money is.  Other ships, such as the Far Trader,
are better suited for this.  The Type A is at its best in dense clusters
of Hi-pop,
Hi-tech worlds - i.e. most of the Imperium (until recently), but NOT the
Spinward Marches.

	A party trying to make money hauling freight + passengers will
probably go broke.  A party that has the right skills and a Jump-2+ ship
with decent cargo capacity can make a lot of money on spec trade.
(On one occasion, I cleared more than a million credits on 3 jumps)

	This means that no handwaving is needed to justify the existence
of independent merchants, or the willingness of banks to loan to them.
For particular techniques and numbers, I posted some quite a while back that
should be in the archives.  The main problem with is that the rules give a
totally wrong impression of what the best ships are and how independent
merchants make money.
				Capt. Kagarillian Grant

alias

					W. Dow Rieder

 	When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems
start to look like nails...