Wildstar writes:
> everyone's concept of how much interstellar traffic there
> actually *IS* in the Imperium varies greatly. Heck, I'm not even
> self-consistent in my own view.
>
> At one end of the spectrum is the "luxury trade" concept. This is that
> interstellar trade is a relatively rare and expensive thing, and that even
> the busiest ports have at most a few dozen ships in port at once. This
> point of view seems implicit in many of the earliest Traveller
> materials. Trade therefore makes up a very little part of the Gross
> Imperial Product, and most worlds are almost entirely self-sufficient.
Based on the assumption that it takes two MCr worth of civilian shipping
to generate the revenue to support one MCr worth of warship, I once worked
out that the civilian shipping tonnage in Aramis Subsector (we get quite a
lot of info about merchant shipping in Aramis in "The Traveller Adventure")
should be almost precisely 100 times as great as it was. My solution is to
say that 99% of all civilian shipping is hyper- and mega-freighters
(100,000 to million tons freighters) engaged in routine, year in, year out
freighting of bulk material. Such ships are so expensive that only with an
iron-clad decade-long contract will anyone build them. They are NOT used
for speculative trade, and their scedules are as predictable (and as dull)
as anything. The last percent is the luxury trade, and every merchant ship
we've ever seen in an Old Traveller or Megatraveller scenario belongs to
the luxury trade (well, in the case of Free Traders the proper word is
speculative, but you know what I mean.
> The other end of the extreme is where the Imperium is one large
> interstellar economy; with most worlds dependent on interstellar imports
> or exports to maintain their technology and standard of living. Such a
> model calls for hundreds or thousands of ships in port at even
> moderately busy systems. This point of view is implicit in almost
> anything written for MegaTraveller.
The above suggestion reconciles the two views. Of course, if you don't
agree with the basic assumption the whole thing falls apart.
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