> On Aug 16, 2017, at 2:36 AM, Amber Witherspoon <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, in the TU that I'm working on, ships are cheap, jump drives
> aren't. I gave every component except jump drives a 75% discount (I
> really wanted my cheap small craft so I can have space RVs), while
> jump drives are at 150% book cost.
> Now, the issue with this is that with the freight and passenger income
> as written (especially with the assumptions that Mongoose writes
> in...), there's no need to adventure except as an accident (I know
> I'll take a safely profitable milk run any day over having to do shady
> stuff to make ends meet... And where's the adventure in that?).

So here’s the solution. Unfortunately, it means ‘throw out the rules’ and make it up yourself.

Published freight/pax rates are for the big commercial lines. PC-scale ships operate as charter vessels.

Jane PlayerCharacter with her 65-year-old creaky free trader with the patched together Jdrive and that wonky grav compensator in the forward hold that always causes weird shifts in the cargo cannot compete with those rates not if she wants to keep flying, eating and keeping her crew.

*everything* on a PC-scale ship is speculative trade.

Someone needs to get a box of widgets to some off the beaten track place with a D starport that only sees a regular ship every 3 months and it’s a rotating schedule so the next one going there from *here* is in 6 or more. Unfortunately they need this *right now*, or as *right now* as can be gotten.

Jane PlayerCharacter is now competing with any other similarly situated tramp in port for the contract. You can develop some sort of table or formula to generate a range of what Jane and the logistics factor negotiate for.

You get a couple passengers who want to go someplace. Why aren’t they using the regular lines? Same reason as above, where they want to go is not going to be serviced for some time, they want to move under the radar, or they’re looking for adventure or ‘adventure on a tramp freighter plying the stars'.

You don’t have to go full-bore murder hoboes, but small ships like the ones PC’s have subsist on the scraps the regular transports leave behind, not the published rates.

Likewise, if your PC’s arrive in port and need to go someplace they can either go to one of the Bigs, pay the official rates and be subject to the schedule of the Bigs, or they can charter a PC scale ship and follow their own schedule.

Again, what it costs will depend on who’s available for charter.

View it like the hub-and-spoke system of air travel.  There’s a lot of places between the hub-and-spokes that have irregular, intermittent or no service at all.

Just last week, the last airline flying out of our airport direct to NYC dropped Tucson from their routes. The local airport authority is looking to entice a replacement carrier, but consider this in Jump transport terms: getting to NYC now requires traveling to Phoenix, then picking up a direct flight from there (or worse, a flight from there to Hobby, O'Hare or Atlanta, then to NYC) which in the TU could be several weeks.

Or you could charter a ship here and jump to NYC directly.

Fundamentally the transportation economics and rules in all the OTU’s are irretrievably broken, and if you want realism or to nudge your players without railroading them, you have to rewrite the whole thing.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs