On Sun, 8 Jul 2012, Onno Meyer wrote:
Another option could be a "traditional" tramp freighter in
the thousand-ton range. That would be large enough to carry
a party of PCs and perhaps some interesting passengers, but
it probably isn't economical. This is no problem for a game,
the Traveller tramp freighters are usually up to adventures
instead of honest trading, too.
Brainstorming methods to make tramp freighters ecconomical:
They might be subventioned for some greater good. Like if you have no FTL
communication other then sending ships, and you want a certain frequency
of contacts with colonies or outposts, that trade little. I could imagine
that with some parameters, it is more ecconomical to pay freighters to
come in regular intervals, rather then building dedicated postal ships.
And if there are enoough such destinations, it might be better to build
small freighters for reaching them, then going there with half empty big
freighters.
You could get to a similiar scenario, if you have cargos, that dont# need
to be transported that urgent, that you use a courier ship, but waiting
till a large freighter would be filled, would still take to long.
It also might be that the ships or certain components of them are used for
some other more high end purpose and tramp freighters use second ships or
ship component.
Like the military replaces it's jump drives long before they become
useless for the use in civilian freighters. Most military surplus
jumpdrives do have the right dimensions for tramp freighters.
Or there are many surplus demilitarized military transport ships and that
is what a tramp freighter actually is. And that could have some additional
stats, that pcs want for their ship, that are not strictly neccessary for
a freighter.
You can replace military with some scout service or postal service or
similiar.
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