Johannes asked: > An other Traveller preperation: > > Are there any resources about natrual resources, that concievably can be > mined in one system and shipped to other systems. > > I mainly need it as flavour texts, for encounters with miners or as to > what freight is about. I don't want to invent pages of unobtanium > names. I could just pick some element or combination of elements at > random, but i want to avoid player questions like "how can it cost so > much, if it can be distilled in large quantities from <whatever causes > headaches later, if i declare it to be rare>", or the players knowing that > it is flameable, when this does not fit the plot.
Hello Johannes, are you playing a space trading game? If so, the costs of interstellar transport will be a key question. Arguably, 200-dton Free Traders and Far Traders cannot operate at a profit, which forces their crews into all sorts of interesting adventures. * Stardrives are rated for volume, not mass, so running empty is almost as expensive as running fully loaded. If a freighter has a profitable cargo going from A to B, that would explain shipping almost anything back from B to A, instead of going empty -- including clean water or organic waste, if that is hard to find. * That being said, most raw materials should occur in most systems. The question is how expensive the extraction becomes. A classic Traveller raw material is lanthanum, which isn't rare, but it is unknown enough that you can technobabble at leisure. * Within a system, getting stuff from asteroids may be cheaper than mining on the planet, because of the reduced transport costs. You can get a reactionless thruster and a fusion reactor (or solar cells) dirt cheap, and that will move kilotons or megatons within a few years of flight time. Sorry, no convenient links from me :-( Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
