I really think the only way to make sense of Traveller trade is to posit that there is a high-volume, regularly-scheduled trade network between the larger and richer worlds. This would be analogous to container shipping on present-day Terra. The ships involved are big and specialized, and so are the port and transshipment facilities they use. Ordinary players don't interact with this system at all, beyond obeying traffic control instructions to avoid colliding with any of it.

Meanwhile, at the smaller scale, there are the ships characters care about -- tramp freighters, subsidized merchants serving smaller and poorer worlds, and so forth.They work the niches that the big container-shipping network doesn't occupy, on the margins (of population, economics, the law, or whatever).

I live in Los Angeles; the port of Long Beach is one of the wonders of the world, with dozens of giant container freighters in port at any given time, and huge cranes, trains, and fleets of trucks moving freight around on an unimaginable scale. There is also a modified WW2 LST that comes in from the tiny village of Two Harbors on Santa Catalina Island once a week to drop off a load of trash and pick up a load of food and other supplies. The PCs are on the latter. :)

On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 9:56 AM Frank Filz <xxxxxx@mindspring.com> wrote:

Hmm, traffic volumes…

I had worked on encounter charts that reflected how ships actually had to travel, then started wondering how many ships (and what types) are in port…

I still need to come up with some kind of table to define what ships are in port (for reference, I fundamentally use CT 1977).

I’ve decided now though that the encounter roll will just be off the standard table and doesn’t implicate any sort of travel volume, just the potential for an interesting encounter. The next step will be to define “interesting”.

There is a part of me that would love to work up traffic volumes across my mapped region, but I’m really not sure how well that works out. I’m not sure the Traveller method of producing a setting (random star ports, random space lanes) provides for any sort of realistic trade patterns.

Hmm, I just thought of something… Recently I read the story of a Pan Am Clipper that travelled West from the Pacific theatre at the start of WWII. That story would be an excellent view of what Traveller star ship travel might be like from a logistics stand point. Sure, they didn’t trade along the way or anything, but you could get an idea of what travel with a J-1 or J-2 ship that has to put in at some pretty rinky-dink star ports could be like.

Frank

From: xxxxxx@simplelists.com [mailto:xxxxxx@simplelists.com] On Behalf Of Evyn MacDude
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 6:44 PM
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
Subject: Re: [TML] J3

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 10:30 PM Frank Filz <xxxxxx@mindspring.com> wrote:
In my ATU, I have plotted out routes for the subsidized liner and subsidized merchant based on their jump capability and the encounter chart.

Right now I am sidelined on Traffic volume along said routes.

--
Evyn
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