Yep. If I pull out my crystal ball, what I see emerging from the recipe "limitless cheap power and resources plus magic-level advanced technology" is a bunch of nearly self-sufficient planets, space colonies, ships, and other enclaves, mostly run by AIs, and mostly populated by sophonts who devote their lives to hobbies and social maneuvering. In other words, Iain Banks' "Culture". Trade would mostly involve luxury and one-of-a-kind items that either can't be synthesized elsewhere (which takes some handwaving) or derive their value from authenticity.

Add transhumanism to the recipe and things change beyond speculation, of course. But even the Culture would make a difficult environment for roleplaying. Banks has to plot things very, very carefully to make individual people play any noticeable role in events, after all. 

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 12:47 PM Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

But, since this Hi-Pop TL8or9 *planet* gets along w/o even any intra-system commerce, it makes just as much sense to declare that TU merchant trade consists of 10kDT J1, 7kDT J2,  4kDT J3, & a few 3kDT J4 (for places like Andor/Candory in the 'Marches) merchants/liners from CT LBB3 esp when considering all the resources that intra-system commerce could access right here.

That also fits nicely w/ the oft-stated idea that CT Trav is patterned after 17/18th century merchant ops.

The current 'container' system didn't appear until the '70's & probably was still in it's formative stage when first MM conceived of the TU so I doubt that there was much influence on CT. MT, of course, was quite different as another company (DGP) was primarily responsible for it & they changed quite a few things to suit their preferences. (I've always wondered how cognizant they were of early CT material as it often appeared that there was much they were unaware of) Also, by then, 'containerization' had advanced quite a bit.

But, in the end, it always comes down to personal preferences.
There has been so much contradictory 'authoritative' info published over the last 40+ years that the idea of a definitive 'canon' has been greatly eroded.

From: Catherine Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
Sent: Monday, January 7, 2019 6:04 PM
Subject: Re: [TML] J3

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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