# EONS #46: Trader Captains



## doctorhook (Mar 8, 2017)

I voted for this like 15 minutes ago--that's some service, Morrus!  (Nevermind that it was already way ahead in the voting.)

Looking forward to the article about Pigmen too!


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## easl (Mar 10, 2017)

Great article! As a subscriber, I say your contributions continue to impress. Well worth the dollar per.


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## Morrus (Mar 10, 2017)

Why, thank you sir!


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## easl (Mar 14, 2017)

Just spotted two errors in the example calculation (at least I think they're errors)

#1: 133 days = 4.4 months, not 2.2 months.
#2: Livestock is a restricted good, so profit should be 28%, not 14%

Running a couple of sample calculations, some initial observations:

Your costs and profits will be the same doing 1 5-parsec trip or 5 1-parsec trips with the same type and amount of cargo. 
It's really hard to make a profit using a Class 1 ship.  For example, you could load weapons into the Class 1 courier given in the base book AND if you had a pilot that boosted the FTL to 3 (lowering travel time to 49 days/parsec), you will still lose money on every trip. 
Profit margins for small ships (even class 2 and 3) will be in the range of $thousands per month.  Because of this, I would recommend GMs use the "1 MCr = 1,000 Cr" rate, because there ain't no way your PC crew in their class 2 freighter is going to be able to afford a mortgage using the larger conversion number...at least, not trading.  Even in this case, the math of trading doesn't really match up with mortgage costs. For instance, the Murphy example of carrying 50 CU of livestock, properly calculated, gives a profit margin of about $1800 Cr/month.  The mortgage on that ship would be 22,000 Cr/month. Even filling the Murphy's 161-CU hold with cows only gets you to 7,400 CR/month net profit. 
Remember the Hauler gets +20% CU cargo space.  That's really valuable.  Especially if it's secreted and you don't mind carrying illegal or restricted cargo without a permit.


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## Morrus (Mar 14, 2017)

Some useful observations there, [MENTION=6856073]easl[/MENTION]. I do have some thoughts on them! You may be right, and it may need a little tweaking, but I wanted to add some extra food for thought. In order --

1. Sure. You could model in some extra complexity there. I'm not convinced it would add to the game, but it's worth exploring! 

2. Assuming you have at least 4 PCs, you have no crew cost there. That said, those small ships are designed for shorter runs - they don't even reach 1 parsec in operational range. I would assume inner-system trade there, maybe to a close-by neighbouring system. The limit on the CHA roll per parsec does seem to break a bit at those lower values.

3. Yep, the article assume that 1MCr=1,000cr. In general, that's my base assumption - the 1,000,000cr is more a nod to _Traveller_ than anything else. 1,000cr works much better in almost every way - you can buy a small ship like you'd buy a used car. Note that the mortgage cost of a _new_ Murphy is about 15Kcr, but you're not going to buy a brand new combat capable ship like that just for trading. An older Murphy could be 10% of that cost (-2% per year of age, minimum 10%, one flaw per full decade).

4. Good catch!


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## easl (Mar 14, 2017)

_1. Sure. You could model in some extra complexity there. I'm not convinced it would add to the game, but it's worth exploring!_

Oh, I don't want to. The comment on trip length vs. multiple trips was more of an "FYI".  I like the way it works now, as it gives trader PCs more flexibility on how they want to run their business - a player won't feel pushed into one option or another over profit margin.  The determining factor for small ships is going to be their increment - a 3-5 parsec trip in a class I vessel is going to be hard on the navigator.  Fortunately, fuel is cheap so if the need (or profit) to go a long way is strong, a crew can just assume they're going to pay double fuel costs and go with it.  That is a relatively minor factor in terms of profitability.

_2. Assuming you have at least 4 PCs, you have no crew cost there. _

Yeah, in my mind I call that the "Firefly option," because they never seem to get paid.    In theory, a PC crew should still be paying itself.  Particularly if the background of the campaign is that they met and decided to throw in together and buy a ship in order to make a living.  Besides which, how else are they going to afford all those cool-sounding weapons you put in the book? Heh.

_That said, those small ships are designed for shorter runs - they don't even reach 1 parsec in operational range._ 

Oh, you can put together a Class 1 ship with FTL 4-5, 10-20 CU of cargo space, and an operational range of 5-10 parsecs pretty easily. They're viable small transports...ideal for running very high-end goods (the type that pirates keep an eye out for) or taking on clandestine government missions, say? 

But the real reason I focus on them is because a class 1 or class 2 ship has a crew compliment about the same size as a gaming group.   That's also the size range of the Millenium Falcon and Serenity, two pretty iconic fictional ships that PCs may be thinking about.  But you're probably right, in a "realistic" space trading economy the cargo ships would likely be built as big as is feasible and the crew minimized down to only what's absolutely necessary (i.e., they'd be large Transports in your Starship Construction terms)


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## Morrus (Mar 14, 2017)

Even at FTL 4-5 your'e not travelling 5-10 parsecs very quickly. I think it's about FTL-10 where it hits about 1 parsec per day. 

In my own games, I tend to avoid "trading as downtime" campaigns, as ultimately you don't end up playing the game, you just end up playing with a spreadsheet. I generally try to ensure any given trade run is an adventure, or associated with one.

I don't think Han Solo ever got rich smuggling. 17K credits was a lot of money to him. And, like you say, the Firefly guys barely made ends meet.


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## easl (Mar 17, 2017)

easl said:


> Profit margins for small ships (even class 2 and 3) will be in the range of $thousands per month.  Because of this, I would recommend GMs use the "1 MCr = 1,000 Cr" rate, because there ain't no way your PC crew in their class 2 freighter is going to be able to afford a mortgage using the larger conversion number...at least, not trading.




After a little more fooling around with things, I must modify/take back what I said. It *is* quite reasonably easy to make a profit using a small ship. The trick is to take the _Haggler_ exploit, which lowers the purchase cost of the goods by 2-18%, depending on whether you take the Smuggler or Trader one, and what you roll. (Smuggler gets the better exploit, it gives an extra d6%).  For small ships, this is where most of your profit will come from: purchasing 10-20 CU of goods at ~90% of list price, shipping them to a vendor 1 parsec away, then selling them for list price +1%.

FYI I've put together a basic excel sheet that does the calculations for traders.  What's the best way to ship it to you for your review?


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## Morrus (Mar 17, 2017)

Just attach it here! That said, I have Open Office, so I might not be able to use it.


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## easl (Mar 18, 2017)

Attached!  I think...


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## Morrus (Mar 18, 2017)

That seems to work in iWork Pages! 

I hadn't thought ahead to passenger fares yet, but your idea seems very reasonable. I haven't run any numbers, but conceptually it sounds great. Maybe add some kind of adjustment for clandestine passengers who would like to "avoid Imperial entanglements, if you know what I mean". Perhaps they're restricted or illegal, too?

So cabin fare might be in the region of 100 LUX x 15 parsecs x FTL-10 = 1500. Maybe in an AL 10 setting, that might make travel very expensive since ships go 10 times faster and travel much further. Perhaps divide by 10 in an AL 10 setting to represent how trivial the journey is in comparison? I do agree using LUX as a factor is an *excellent* idea.

This is very, very useful.


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## easl (Mar 22, 2017)

Morrus said:


> So cabin fare might be in the region of 100 LUX x 15 parsecs x FTL-10 = 1500.




The main thing I thought about when trying to come up with passenger fares is that, if passengers are very very lucrative compared to cargo, nobody would want to run cargo.  With the 1%/parsec limit on profit margin, that means a 600 credit/CU good would earn 6 credits/CU/parsec.  So I tried to make passenger fares be in the same 1-30 credits/CU/parsec range that most of the cargo falls into.  I don't know if that's realistic, but I like systems where the PCs have many equally good options of what to do, so they can pick their own path and not get punished mechanically for it. Making passengers about as profitable as cargo - however unrealistic that might be - does that.

{Edit} Looking at my sheet with fresh eyes, my passenger fare is still too high; it's actually the expected profit from running Fabric x FTL, so probably 5-10 times as profitable in an AL 9 setting, making passengers equivalent to a $1000-$2000 value good or a $500-$1000 value restricted good.  That's probably not great, though I could make an argument for calling them "restricted" by saying any passenger ship must be licensed, regularly inspected for heath violations, etc. So I'm thinking the current values probably need to be divided by 2 at least. Dividing by 2, that would make transporting a standard passenger in an adequate luxury FTL 5 ship the equivalent of a 500cr/CU cargo, like raw fuel.{/edit}


In any event, thanks for your feedback and feel free to do whatever you want with it. You are absolutely right that my passenger system would not work for AL10+ ships, though maybe at that point you just drop distance out of the equation and just use luxury and time.  And agreed, I didn't take on the issue of illicit passengers.




> This is very, very useful.



Well it's a very, very fun system.


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