Okay, so we’ve figured out to spend tons and tons of money on running a ship. Next up, how to make money with one so you can pay all those exorbitant bills. There are three basic commercial uses for a starship: Passengers, cargo, or mail.
We start with cargo; random rolling will determine how much
cargo is available at any particular place, depending on where the cargo is
bound for. Roll one die for each point of population on the destination world.
The number of dice is the number of cargos going to that world; the roll per
die is the weight in 5-ton increments for the shipment in question. This is
important, because you can’t break a shipment into two parts if it’s too big
for your ship to carry. So, if there are three thirty-ton shipments, your
85-ton cargo capacity freighter can carry two of them, but not the third.
You get paid 1000 Credits per ton of cargo carried; that
ship I mentioned above can earn up to 85,000 Credits for a full load. If you
want, of course, you can buy your own goods and carry them to another world,
hoping to get a decent payoff.
Next up, passengers. You can carry both cargo and
passengers; in fact, it’s suggested that you load up on cargo first, then passengers
‘will present themselves.’ So, if you fill it, they will come. There’s a
complicated table to determine how many people actually want to take a trip
across the stars with you. The higher the population, the more people will want
to ride. And the population of the destination world might modify the number of
passengers; people want to go to the higher population planets; the lower ones
don’t get as much traffic, obviously.
This section continues on the next page, so we’ll get to
that next time. I apologize for the slow posting rate, but packing takes a lot
of time.
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