Johannes replied to me: > > Traveller has plenty of worlds with one town. If that is > > a company town, would the starport be located for the > > convenience of the employees or for the ease of freight > > handling? > > > > You need a large enough parking lot that is empty at the right times, for > the ship to land.
Hello Johannes, I was thinking of a "proper" local spaceport/starport that is optimized for bulk cargo. Nothing is improvised, except for the passenger handling procedures ... > Given the SOP for free trader freight (which is > generated by the tables in question) is that the ship first lands and then > looks for cargo, not even putting your factory* next to or into the star > port will guarantee this, since the wrong ship(s) might be sitting next to > your factory. Yes, this scheme works best for bulk freighters on regular schedules. But then, you wouldn't want to load drybulk and wetbulk into a Free Trader or Far Trader, anyway. If you flood the cargo holds of a Beowulf, there is no way from the crew section to the engine room. Technically, wetbulk should require tanks instead of cargo holds, too. Regarding my non-Traveller ships, the bulk cargo is stowed in very large containers -- 20,000 stons for one ship, ten times 2,000 stons for the other. That means there could be one container type for grain, another for ore, yet another for milk or orange juice. > Moving the ship to the factory for loading operation would be an operation > that in most cases involves star port flight control. Which means the star > port authorities will propably not like the practice overly much and try > to discurage it. Unless the port knows that their business depends on bulk cargo. It is one thing if a Far Trader at Regina asks for permission to hop around, and another if an ore carrier is landing at Heroni. > If you have a standard setup with an upport and a downport and > unstreamlined ships go to the upport, and the factory is on the planet, > you limit yourself to streamlined ships. Yes, that is a major issue in Traveller with GURPS 3E, due to the 'virtual volume' approach to streamlining. > In some cases there will be legal reasons for ships not to leave the > extrality zone. > > If either the source or the destination prohibits direct access by the > ship, you are better off with shipping a container. > > There are some cases where i can easily see such a setup. For instance > with space stations and astereoid bases it works quite well, also with low > tech worlds, with little trade and thus also little traffic control. But > guessing without actually running any numbers i think getting such > conditions on both sides is not the norm. Make that low-population worlds, not just low tech, and single-industry worlds depending on bulk materials. > And for many table results there is an other problem with using that > approach. There also is the type of contract (i forgot how they call it in > FT and i don't have the book with me now, DFD, CIF ect) that determinates > what the freighter crew is responsible for. Most types specify delivery to > and from the star port. IIRC none really fits a case, where both source > and destination are outside the star port. Yes. > In case of a space station you could have the factory meet the ship docked > on an upport, but that sounds like an exceptional rather then a usual > setup. You could dock the ship at the factory, not the other way around. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
