Well 'Merchant Prince' came along at the end of CT so it's safe to assume that it supersedes TCS & Striker.

The problem is that economics (which as someone else has asserted, is NOT a rational process) in the far, far, future of the TU just doesn't work the same way that it does in the 20th-21st centuries.

At least that's the way GDW saw it w/ Merchant Prince & their other products that dealt w/ the issue.

I imagine the 'economists' of earlier centuries would say the same thing about the 20th-21st centuries (it's INSANE!) as you're saying about the 55th(?)!

p.s. If you *really* want 'realistic'  then Jump Drive *has* to go away along w/ a lot of other things. But then it's not Traveller anymore. Traveller has so many other 'non-realistic' aspects that it's really just a case of personal preferences. Some people don't like 'Merchant Prince' economics & some do. The reasons are actually tailored to accommodate those likes/dislikes.

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On Mon, 11/3/14, Ian Whitchurch <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Database of non-sector Amber Zone worlds
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Monday, November 3, 2014, 9:35 PM

 "Also, there was a bug in the
 trading routine. Instead of getting a bonus for bringing
 cargo from a higher tech system to a lower one, the opposite
 was true. I sent GDW a ltr explaining the
 problem"
 Nahhh,
 you saw the wrong problem.
 The
 actual problem is that, under the Merchant Prince rules as
 written, lo-tech worlds run a massive Imperial Credit
 deficit they cannot solve, because under the rules as
 written, they all want to import lo-tech goods and hi-tech
 worlds dont want their exports.
 If you
 have floating local currencies, then you can just devalue
 your local currency, so whatever it is you produce is
 cheaper and whatever you import is more expensive, and both
 TCS and Striker kind of did this ... this would therefore
 eliminate the DRM, as lotech hand-made shoes or shirts or
 paintings or whatever are sold for export for nearly
 nothing.
 But
 this implies that lower-tech goods should be much, much
 cheaper in Trav than they are.
 TLDR :
 If you want a realistic universe, then either you have a lot
 of people working elsewhere and sending money home (which
 could explain all those "low pop" worlds - they
 have very few citizens and lots of imported guest workers),
 or you had lots of hi-tech workers visiting lo-tech worlds
 (but two jumps is roughly a years income for a TL15 citizen
 on average Striker earnings).

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