Just because I'm moving soon doesn't mean I can't continue doing this, right?
Page 6 continues the expenses involved in flying a starship. I get the feeling that the costs are going to be more than can be expected to be earned from a typical merchant voyage, which will give the players a good reason to use that ship to go adventuring and find more money somehow. Of course, even going on these adventures will cost them money, so they'll have to go find even more. It's a vicious cycle, one GMs around the world dream about every night.
We have another fuel formula, this one telling how much fuel is required per jump. The bigger the ship, the more fuel is required. Divide the mass displacement of the ship by ten, then multiply that by the jump number of the engine, and you'll know how much fuel you need. I haven't got that far yet, but I get the feeling the mass displacement numbers are going to be really high.
The example given is a 'type 200' ship, which means 200 tons. With a jump number of one, that means the ship needs 20 tons of fuel, at 500 Cr per ton, or 10,000 credits for one single jump. Yeah, that's going to get expensive in a hurry. Is a 200-ton ship big or small, though? I'm used to modern space opera like David Weber where ships are measured in the 10,000-tons for the tiny ones. So, Traveller ships are either going to be tiny, or insanely expensive to fly. Or both. And you thought fuel prices were high now.
Life Support costs 2000 credits per stateroom per voyage. Crew members' quarters count as staterooms, too. Low passage (aka suicidal) passengers cost only 100 credits per trip. And the captain has a decent chance of collecting that back anyway with the betting thing going on. Who would ever use Low Passage?! And it's one person per stateroom, regardless of how many people are in the traveling party.
Routine maintenance is next, at only 1/1000th of the ship's cost per year, so...crap, ships are going to be insanely expensive to begin with, aren't they? If it takes 40 years to pay the darn thing off, that's not encouraging. So, maintenance is going to be expensive, too. At least it's only once per year, unlike the fuel costs.
Crew salaries; you gotta pay your people to run the ship, or they'll run away. There's a cost list for the typical crew; pilots are the most expensive at 6,000 Credits, and that's per month. Medics and gunners are the cheapest, but it's still a monthly cost. Oh, and if they've got high skills in their job (more than a +1 DM on the skill), they get an additional 10% of the monthly cost per +1 over the first. It might be worth hiring onto a ship at those rates, to be honest, especially for pilots and navigators.
The last one is berthing costs, which bleeds over onto the next page. It's the cheapest expense, at only 100 Credits to land the ship; if you're there for more than six days, though, they charge an additional 100 Credits per day after that. Some places, of course, will be more expensive; the 100 Credits should be considered a low-end berthing.
And that wraps up another page of Traveller. Stick around; there's more to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment