The GT:FT rules, at least, were an attempt to reflect 'actual' interstellar trade, because I think it's important to have answers to questions like 'So, does Kinorb have a regularly scheduled service ?'.

It also formalised the rule that makes free traders actually viable - risk premiums for taking cargo to and from dangerous places.

After all, someone has to supply those illegal smuggler settlements on moonlets that some megacorp thinks is it's property ...

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 1:29 AM, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 1:21 AM, Ian Whitchurch <ian.whitchurch@gmail.com> wrote:
You're mistaking a tourism business for a cargo business, I think.
 
But I could actually imagine free/far traders in the TU doing much the same, particularly if each backwater port only gets a few visits per year.


Which is my point: The free/far trader rules do not - and were never meant to - reflect "actual" interstellar trade.

They were meant to reflect the sort of "trade" that Han Solo carries for Jabba The Hutt.

Or (to be thoroughly anachronistic) to reflect crew members like Kaylee . . . sitting in her folding lawn chair by Serenity's open cargo hatch, commenting to a passing Shepherd that he's not looking at the destinations but rather at the ships . . .


--
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein
"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby
"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester
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