We've arrived at the final page! And, in true old-school gaming style, it's just one long table. It's the Trade and Speculation Table, with all the goodies you can buy and sell with your insanely-expensive cargo starship!
So, as previously mentioned, the table uses a 10s-1s dice roll system, where a roll of 1 and 1 is an 11, not a 2. In general, the higher your second die is, the pricier the item you find will be. The items aren't really grouped in a particular way, but there are some patterns. The 30s are mostly agricultural or consumables; the 20s are basically metals. Here, I'll just list them.
11-16: Textiles, Polymers, Liquor, Wood, Crystals, Radioactives.
21-26: Steel, Copper, Aluminum, Tin, Silver, Special Alloys.
31-36: Petrochemicals, Grain, Meat, Spices, Fruit, Pharmaceuticals.
41-46: Gems, Firearms, Ammunition, Blades, Tools, Body Armor.
51-56: Aircraft, Air/Raft, Computers, ATV, AFV, Farm Machinery.
61-66: Electronics Parts, Mechanical Parts, Cybernetic Parts, Computer Parts, Machine Tools, Vacc Suits
Note that the 51-56 items are individual, not by tonnage. Everything else is tonnage.
So, the priciest item on the list is the computer, at a whopping 10,000,000 Cr. Compare that with Steel, at 500 Cr/ton, or Grain, which is 300/ton. I can't see anyone making anything whatsoever with grain as their cargo. All of the items in the 50s (except Farm Machinery), as well as Gems and Radioactives, all top a cool million credits (individually or by the ton). The two I mentioned earlier (Steel and grain) are the only ones under 1000 Cr/ton. So, unless you specialize in transporting computers, gems and radioactives, you're going to be struggling to make ends meet flying a merchant ship.
Okay, the next two columns are the DMs, one for purchasing and one for selling. Most of them are no worse than a +/-3 to the roll, but some of these DMs are pretty huge. If you're on an agricultural world, your Textiles, Wood and Liquor are going to be very, very cheap to buy; Textiles get a -7(!) DM, and that's just to start. Gems, on the other hand, get a -8 to buy if you're on a non-industrial world. In the other direction, Radioactives get a +7 DM if you're buying them on an industrial world, and an additional +5 if you buy them on a rich world. That's a +12 on a rich, industrial world. Minimum roll: 14, or 300%. Nobody in their right mind would EVER buy Radioactives from that world. But that +7 on industrial worlds is interesting. Does that mean that it's cheaper to buy plutonium on a non-industrial world? That would be nice. Vacc-suits are pretty cheap with a -5 to buy them on non-agricultural worlds. I guess that makes sense; more developed worlds (or ones that can't support agriculture) would have more use for a vacc suit.
On the other side of the equation, the resale DMs have just as big a jump in some cases. Like the purchase DMs, most fall in the 1-3 range. But don't try selling farm machinery on a non-agricultural world; you'll get a -8 DM to your sale price. And if you're carrying gems, you want to find a Rich world, because they get a +8 DM for resale. Those are the most extreme, although there are a few 5s and 6s in there.
The last column is for quantities. These range from a lowly 1D for things like Radioactives, Gems, and all the 50s, to as much as 5Dx10 for aluminum. That's a lot of tons, up to 300. How many ships have that much carrying capacity to begin with? I'm sure there are some. If you've got a ship with a hull size of 1000 tons, you could manage that, but you're not going to want to be carrying aluminum at a mere 1000 Cr/ton; you'll want silver, or even tin, which has a 3Dx10 for quantity, but costs nine times as much as the aluminum.
So, there's a lot of stuff to absorb on this page. It's a wide variety of trade goods, with a lot of opportunities for serious profits. Of course, if your ship is carrying computers or five tons of gemstones or radioactives on board, you'd best hope that you kept that transaction really, really quiet, or you can be sure the pirates will be showing up at some point to help you share the burden.
The interesting thing, though, is that you have no guarantee that you'll have a valuable cargo available to trek across the stars; you might get stuck with a shipment of grain, which even at the maximum 8Dx5 roll is 240 tons, at 300 Cr/ton that works out to 72,000 Cr for the entire shipment, assuming you get an average roll for your Actual Value Table roll. On the other hand, you could luck out with a shipment of Air/Raft vehicles, which are 6 million credits each. Of course, you still have to pay for them...
I imagine that the trade routes for certain goods in a region will be pretty well mapped out; the poor agricultural world will be selling liquor, wood and foodstuffs to the industrial worlds, while the industrial world will be selling them farm machinery in return (at substantial profits). Note that non-industrial does not necessarily mean agricultural, nor does non-agricultural mean industrial. Poor planets are going to be pretty good for selling things, not so great for buying them (although buying gems on a poor planet and selling them on a rich one is a great way to get rich in a hurry, with a difference of 11 between their modifiers).
So, that wraps up the Starships book! I'm going to take a brief interlude before getting into Book 3. I think I'd like to design a starship myself, so I'll try doing that before starting the next book.
No comments:
Post a Comment