On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Onno Meyer wrote:
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 ...
The parking lot needs to be next to the factory, Which usually (exceptions
would be astereoid bases and such) means an investment in real estate on
part of the factory operators. Which can be done, and under some
conditions the investment might be negligable.
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.
If you have multiple bulk freighters (going to different destinations)
coming at the same time, or if the bulk freighter picks up different cargo
as well, you might also get non trivial logistics challanges.
Anyway the table is IIRC intended for free trader freight, so the results
should work for free traders, or otherwise the "if the results make no
sense, the GM must discard them and reroll" rule must be invoked. The
latter rule needs to be invoked at times anyways, because due to "soft"
factors, such as parts of the workd description, that aren't reflected in
stats, might make some table results impossible. I am just not yet decided
if a type of cargo always has to be rerolled, independent of the worlds in
question. Given i write myself a program to do the rolling, i have to
decide if i let it automatically reroll.
A wet/drybulk cargo for a freetrader would usually mean, that the trader
needs to supply suitable containers. Rules for containers including
renting, buying and reselling them are supplied.
Alternativly a Beowulf might dedicate part of it's hold as tank or drybulk
area. Buy some transparent aluminium, someone makes a ship
building/engeneer (vehicles) or other suitable skill roll, having the
facilities of a good enough star port at hand is handy.
And while they are cononical i think most if not all traveller freighter
deckplans make no sense at all. I'd build it engine room, bridge, crew
quaters, passanger quaters, cargo hold. In an emergency you can open a
door and shout if internal communications fail, if crew needs to move
between bridge and engeneering (engeneers need extra help for lifting,
engeneers need to repair something on the bridge) it's easier, and a
hijacking attempt can't seperate bridge and engennering.
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.
Traveller has a set of 3 standardized sizes and a number of types (one
wetbulk type for anything from orange juice to petrol)
It also fits well into Traveller to have different containertypes as well,
though it usually would be that the client of the trader would supply
them, making the cargo break bulk.
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.
If you do it that way round, at least as legal fiction, either the factory
enters the extrality zone, or the extrality line is at the airlock between
factory and ship. That avoids legal issues with the ship leaving the
extrality zone, and you stay compatible with contract types other then ex
works or delivery free domecile (depending if you pick up or deliver).
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