I play Traveller a little differently. Marc Miller was heavily inspired by Dumarest and the fiction of Jack Vance. And while I may have “borrowed” the Dirdir, the Pnume, and the Star Kings for past campaigns, most of my science fiction inspiration comes from writers like C.J. Cherryh, Larry Niven, and Bruce Sterling. I tend to favor less hospitable universes and smaller settings.
Which is to say, I really wanted to come up with a good reason to steal the trade clans from C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union setting. It turned out to be easier than I thought.
Starship Economics 101, Traveller-style
Book 2 starship economics is extremely straightforward: If you want a ship, you mortgage your soul with a bank, and end up paying 220% of the price of the ship over 40 years of payments. During that time, you are lucky if you can barely scrape by. Ken Pick wrote a series of articles for Freelance Traveller talking about the economics of scraping by, including the calculation of a ship’s Commercial Efficiency Rating (C.E.R.). The C.E.R. of a ship is simply the Net Tonnage (the cargo/passenger carrying tonnage on the ship) multiplied by the jump range and divided by the cost of the ship in MCr. This is basically a ratio between how much money the ship can bring in, and how much money the ship costs. The higher the C.E.R., the better off the ship owner is. A C.E.R. above 5 is profitable even simply selling transportation at Cr 1000 a ton. A C.E.R. between 3 and 5 can be profitable if they add in speculative trade. A C.E.R. below 3 is pretty much unprofitable, and must be subsidized.
The Type A Free Trader, for instance, has a C.E.R. of just above 3. It’s profitable enough to make someone imagine they could make an honest living with it, but not profitable enough that they can make a living easily with it. Which is exactly what you want for a game of desperate traders.
But why would anyone in their right mind go into that much debt if it was so hard to make a living? I’m not talking about adventurers. I mean, why would Joe Average Trader do so? Especially if Joe is able to save up the 20% down payment on the ship? The down payment on a Free Trader is about seven and a half million credits! That’s enough to live like a king for the rest of your life! Sure, once you pay the ship off, it becomes a big profit factory… But you’ll be eating cup noodles for 40 years while you wait for that to happen!
Which begs the question, after that ship is paid off, how long will it remain operational? Classic Traveller doesn’t really say. Book 1 mentions that, with really good rolls, a Merchant player could end up with a 40 year old Free Trader free and clear. It mentions that the downside is that the ship is 40 years old, but it doesn’t really say anything about that being particularly bad…
How long do starships last?
Commercial aircraft get used heavily, and tend to have a service life of about 20-25 years. It’s not so much the time, it’s the cycles of pressurization. Each time a commercial aircraft is sealed up, pressurized, and flown, it stresses the fuselage and wings. And commercial aircraft get used heavily, so they could see multiple pressurization cycles a day, on short hops. Long haul aircraft, ironicaly, tend to last longer, because they go through fewer pressurization cycles over time. Everything else – engines, avionics, etc – can be maintained pretty much as long as there are parts available.
Book 2 starships, in my mind, are similar to commercial aircraft. If you exclude the High Guard rules, you see ships that carry no armor to speak of, which are made to get a job done. Book 2 starships, however, go through far fewer pressurization cycles than commercial aircraft. True, the pressure difference is more extreme, but it’s not that much more extreme. You see adventures written for Classic Traveller with starships that are quite old – some approaching 100 years old. My suspicion is that, so long as they are maintained properly, a Book 2 starship can easily last that long. There will probably be more expensive maintenance at some point – drive replacement, perhaps – but I think the expectation is that a properly maintained starship should still have plenty of life after the 40 year mortgage is paid off.
Enter the Trade Clan
In C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union setting, merchant ships are often owned by families and trade combines. A combine is simply a corporation, like Oberlindes Lines, so there’s nothing new there. But families… Trade runs in this setting can take a long time. Ships may fly routes that take them from station to station to station, and those routes may be months (or years) long. Ship people, in that setting, tend to be tightly knit, because they’re the only people that they see consistently. The people they meet at stations (or planets) are good for a drink or a fling, but you might not see them again for a year, once your ship casts off.
It sounds a lot like Traveller. It sounds like something that could develop naturally in Traveller.
Say you buy a Free Trader. You mortgage your soul. You live on cup noodles and you scrape by, and you go from world to world. Say you meet someone, and you fall in love, and they come along with you on this spacer’s life. Years pass. Kids come. They grow up, learn to help with the ship… Some of them might leave, but some might stay. And then, forty years later, you pay your last mortgage payment. The ship belongs to you. To your family. Now you’re making profit! And your family is growing. Your kids fall in love with people, and some of those people come along. The ship is getting a little crowded. But, since you know how to make money on the ship, you’re not worried. At some point you’ll retire, hand the ship down to your kids. It makes sense to me – my mother’s side of the family are commercial fisherman, and there’s a family boat. It’s been handed down through generations, and it’s typically crewed by people who are all related to one another.
You see, you’ve learned how to make 200% of the price of that Free Trader in 40 years. Which means you could make the price of another Free Trader in another 20. You’ve taught your kids to do the same. So in 20 years, you buy a second Free Trader, because the family needs it. Or maybe you make enough money to buy a larger ship, free and clear. At this point, after all, you’re effectively making twice as much money as a mortgaged captain, because you own your ship free and clear.
This is how it is in my current Traveller universe. Most trade ships are owned by families and combines. The families, in homage to Cherryh, are called Trade Clans. The successful ones become names, well known. The influential ones have sway with governments. With other Trade Clans.
And the captains with mortgage payments? They’re still the desperate ones. Desperate because they’re barely scraping by. Desperate because of that mortgage payment. Desperate because they don’t have a name, they don’t have a family, they don’t have a clan.