TheRPGSite

Tempting the boundless fires of nerd-rage once more...

This is an expansion of a thread I started on the CoTI forum.

I relatively recently acquired the Mongoose Scoundrel book. The discussions about the viability of piracy were interesting, as were the somewhat lacking rules for Bounty Hunting (as I recall: You can determine, through a long, involved chain of decisions what the multiplier for the difficulty of any given bounty is, but there are no guidelines for what the baseline is... the accuracy of my memory is neither here nor there, however...)

However, despite several mentions of asteroid mining (and two of the dozen or so ships in the book being dedicated mining ships...), the 'mining rules' were both incredibly thin (two sides of a single page) and somewhat.... broken.

Specifically: If you ever find any metallic ores in an asteroid you found Gold. That's right, the base price for selling 'Dense Material' ORE is the same as the trade price for refined precious metals. Dense Material is 'asteroid code' for 'metal'.  I'll buy that in the name of streamlining that Radioactive Ore has the same value as refined Radioactives that people trade. Those hand held mining lasers are so high tech they refine as you mine!... but I'm sure most miners will prefer to use a Drone (which, honestly, does more work than the entire crew of even a fairly large mining ship).

One of the more annoying 'gaps' in the rules is that you roll for a potential four different resources (the last being 'find and ADVENTURE!'... exotics), and you roll for the percentage of a give rock being 'valuable', but you have no guidelines at all for breaking down those times when you get more than one resource.

All of this has been touched upon an naseaum in a short but sweet thread elsewhere, and could, in theory, be used as a damning indictment of the Mongoose version of Traveller, which is NOT what the thread title promises. I swear, I'll deliver the red meat very soon, but context is important.

It is highly notable that a prospector could very easily find a 150 KILOtons of Dense Metal (and not THAT much less likely, of the much more valuable 'Radioactives'.). Note that this requires a perfectly average set of rolls on the size of the asteroid and the amount of ore found. A higher roll on the first will multiply the tonnage by factors of ten.  A higher roll on the later will increase the tonnage around 10k per difference, up to a 'max' of about 300k.

Aside from the relatively poor arrangement of the table, this potential is not really an issue, by the way.  In fact, a casual study of asteroids from the perspective of a futurist suggests that this is actually something like NORMAL for asteroids.  

This then is the game breaker, the setting breaker.  

First: no world in the universe of Traveller would engage in heavy mining on a planet for the purposes of trade, at least not of any common metals.  It has been strongly suggested that all the easily mineable metals on earth (and any world of comparable size) were deposited by asteroidal impacts*, with only a small percentage being dredged to the 'surface' by volcanic action, and the crust itself is naturally metal poor, as all the good shit sinks to the core when the world forms.   Even if the world could engage with trade in metals to other star systems (which for whatever reasons could not cost effectively produce metal themselves, even from orbit), the mining is still cheaper and more efficiently done outside the gravity well in space.  

Secondly, the real money in traveller would not be in hauling the shit around but in dragging in from the rocks! There is, in fact, a model for this in the US in the 19th century.  Many of the men, such as Senator Clark (of Clark County Nevada fame) that made their fortunes in those days did so by owning mines (and yes, he did earn his money to buy those mines by trading eggs to miners... shut up and listen!).

Why on earth would anyone, knowing they could earn billions off of a single rock find, ever engage in the hand to mouth existence of free trading?  Now, I understand that Traveller was designed around a premise of making an living as a trader should be near impossible, thus forcing characters to engage in dubious activities (ADVENTURE!) to make ends meet...

But again: its silly.  The moment the characters have a ship that has a reasonable cargo bay then can go out and look for rocks. Compared to transporting for margins, they could just haul metal back to dock for profit, and once they'd found even a reasonable size rock (with, say, only a few thousand tons of ore, instead of hundreds of thousands of tons...), they can just keep returning to it for DECADES with their little 100 ton scout ship or whatever if that what they want.

Sure, you say, but mining is BORING. No PC worth his salt is going to spend the rest of his life digging space rocks!  

Well... you are right, of course. Most PCs are, by design, go getters of some sort. They were generals in the army or merchant princes (who, for some reason retired poor and with a nasty mortgage...) or whatever route the player took in rolling up his character.  Such people did not become free traders to spend the rest of their lives shuttling between a single rock and a single dock!

Aha! But why would it never occur to them to HIRE a few NPC's to keep the money train rolling?  Now they are businessmen... oh... wait... that's boring too, right?  Well... yes, but the who concept of free traders is basically being a businessman, so we can't exactly use that as an excuse here.  If anything, getting that automated gravy train up and running gives them MORE leeway to engage in dubious activities (ADVENTURE!).  

And once they start paying salary and other expenses on rock farming, they'll probably start looking for ways to reduce overhead and increase profit.  Lets assume that our mythical players are not typical PC's with the cavalier disregard for NPC lifeforms that we all see so frequently.

In real life, what sells for more money than unrefined ore? Refined metals, right? What sells for more than refined metals? Metal products! And what sells for simple metal products? Complex finished goods!

Now, Traveller sadly lacks ANY information other than prices for any of that crap (and in some cases the prices may seem to violate that causal chain. That's okay, shit like that happens in real life, which is why people steal copper pipes off the side of churches. Pipes are pissant products that are near worthless in resale values, but Copper! That's worth something, my man!). Still, why wouldn't players start demanding information like that? How much would it take to set up a microgravity refinery? How about tooling some machine parts for resale?  How hard IS IT to set up a simple space dock to churn out smallcraft hulls anyway?

Here is what I invision a really wicked player doing if the GM gives him any latitude at all to deviate from rails.  Buy a ship with a decent cargo bay and a couple mining drones and a Jump Six drive (yes, this is a multi hundred ton ship... but you can skimp on just about everything but the life support) and head to one of those 'dead end' systems that need a J6 drive to hit, the sort no one is using.  If it has a gas giant, great, if not no sweat.  

Now prospect the shit out of that system. You'll find plenty of ice asteroids to refuel with, and to keep your oxygen stores up. If money is an issue (and I'm sure it is) you can set some drones up (supported by a small craft if necessary) to tap the veins of the metal rocks while you look for radioactives (may take a few days, possibly a couple of weeks on the outside), but bringing a few hundred tons of radioactives to market will pay off everything.

Once you've made your big sale, you bring back your infrastructure equipment (or, if you can get some to start with you already have it).  

Have the GM explain to you exactly why you can't build a crude space station out of an asteroid's shell.  You've got hydroponic gardens and SCOP tanks for food, Ice for water and for cracking air/fuel.

Step two of our master plan involves building a space dock that can turn all that metal into ships, starting first with small-ships. 10 ton and 20 ton fighters, 50-100 ton haulers for infrastructure and then bigger for system defense.  Once you've got trillions of credits worth of various metals, the GM can't really tell you that you can't build it, all he can do is tell you you'll have to run trips to civilized space for products you can't make yourself (which, strangely, you'll need to do anyways just to hire people to run your industrial base in rocktopia!)

Since its so far out of the way, even if the Imperium wanted to do something about it, they'd really have to struggle to get any assets out there... and if they try before you've got a small craft spacedock up and running the GM is playing with godlike levels of precognition on their part.  As long as you don't need massive quantities of 'handwavium-25, only mine-able by bonded imperial midgets from the super-secret moon of Imperia-stan!', you can even build your own J6 drives to make your inevitable, unbeatable, space fleet from all that ore you're mining! (yes, you would build massive 'carrier ships' to haul the NON-JUMP warships you will be using to actually fight with.  

You may not conquer the Galaxy like this, but you can certainly be a powerful nuisance.

Or you could just bask in the utterly obscene piles of cash you can earn in a year or two just hauling the thousands of tons of ore ever year while you jaunt through space in your utterly pimped out custom ride doing various dubious things (ADVENTURE!) with your personal crew of powered armored bad-asses, just because you are rich enough not to care.

But that is a personal choice, I won't judge you for your lifestyle.







Imagine that living the good life, in Traveller goes something like this...


????
Find rocks
Mine rocks
Profit!

Only, that series of question marks is: Get a starship... and the default assumption of any traveller game is that the PCs have access to a starship.

Also, to put in in perspective: One of the earliest asteroids ever spotted from earth is conservatively estimated to have enough ore in it to match a century of terrestrial mining and recycling.  It literally is a trillion dollar resource in todays dollars. One rock.

Also: Minor snafu in the asteroid size chart (well, I know or suspect various others but...) the smallest rocks in the chart listed are 1 Dton. While such rocks do exist in space and in the asteroid belts for sure, the smallest PRACTICAL size of an asteroid is ten-twenty times that size (also, how does one mine 1-2% of a 1 ton asteroid, when resources are measured in tons?).. boulders the size of a VW bug are essentially debris or landscape. I doubt any prospector would seriously look (six hour minimum scan time, seriously. He's better off just hauling it into his cargo bay and letting the drone eat it while he looks for more rocks. Ten/twenty minutes to scoop it (by the rules) and AT MOST two hours for a dude with a mining laser, vs SIX to scan!) over a pebble when he could be mining Ceres.


*Seriously: I'm so becoming an aeronatautics engineer and building my own space ship capable of hitting the asteroid belt and back and I'm fucking mining rocks for real world profit. Check this space in ten years, biatches!

Good post. You really ought to go to the //www.travellerrpg.com site and post it in their traveller forums.

The economics of Traveller were always rooted. Nobody is going to put out a forty-year mortgage on a ship which can just fucking disappear into the darkness of space and never be seen again.

Don't sweat it. Sure, you can start mining asteroids. But I as GM would make you roleplay.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Of.

It.

Just adventure, it's more fun.

Curiously, this is something MMO can do.

I remember a long time ago when I was playing the original Everquest, I had a character whose entire life revolved around the silk trade. She specialised in fighting giant spiders (a type of monster that most people avoided because their lethal poison) and worked hard to train up her tailoring and chemistry skill so she could make skill armour herself without frequent (and costly) failures.

Also, as a player, had to learn about the player market and where and when sell her goods (this was before they added a automatic bazaar). So the whole cycle from the hunt, the crafting and finally the selling was really felt quite complete and each stage had it's own challenges.  

In practice it was a wholly inefficient way to gain levels and make money. And it wasn't traditional roleplaying in the sense of there was no story and little in-character interaction. But it felt in-character, I was interacting with the world in a meaningful way (actual people were wearing armour I made) and it was entirely satisfying to be playing the game on my terms.

It wasn't till I tried Anarchy Online that I discovered actual roleplaying in an MMO, but that is a different story.

Quote from: Spike;410001Tempting the boundless fires of nerd-rage once more...

This is an expansion of a thread I started on the CoTI forum.

I relatively recently acquired the Mongoose Scoundrel book. The discussions about the viability of piracy were interesting,

One of the Holy Trinity of Traveller Flame Wars. Along with near-C rocks, and Female Aslans in comfortable shoes.

Quote from: Spike;410001Or you could just bask in the utterly obscene piles of cash you can earn in a year or two just hauling the thousands of tons of ore ever year while you jaunt through space in your utterly pimped out custom ride doing various dubious things (ADVENTURE!) with your personal crew of powered armored bad-asses, just because you are rich enough not to care.

Supply and Demand. The increase in the supply will cause the Price of metal to drop to a point little over the cost of mining it. The fallacy of Classic Traveller (including Mongoose) based economics is that the prices are constant over time. Thus there are exploits. Of all the versions of Traveller only GURPS Traveller in the form of GURPS Far Trader ever addresses this issue properly.  Even then is mostly in the context of interstellar trade.

Yeah, I leave the piracy alone, since I could see that

A: Its a hot topic already

B: I fundamentally agree with any number of the points of discussion re:piracy I've seen anyways (including the way it is presented in the books...yar!), which means I've got no point of reference that even fits Traveller as written.


Regarding the Economics tangent:  I agree in part. However it seems frequently that availability of metals is a major limiter in industries. The price will only drop until the demand naturally increases as more people get into the marketplace (since, you know, its cheaper now) and start doing stuff with it.  

A greater degree of granularity would help. There are dozens of elemental metals, yet in mining they all fall under one heading and price. Under trade they fall under three or four groupings based on rarity.

But at the end the 'value' of any given metal could never practically fall under the labor cost of mining it, the successful entrepeneurs would would then be the ones would could transport it to market most efficently (which is one reason I asked about why Traveller has never (or if it has: where?) discussed costs/dtons for manufactory equipment and refineries and so forth, much less the difficulty of setting up a space dock...   producing finished goods in situ removes one of the biggest actual costs in Traveller, transportation.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;410109The economics of Traveller were always rooted. Nobody is going to put out a forty-year mortgage on a ship which can just fucking disappear into the darkness of space and never be seen again.

Don't sweat it. Sure, you can start mining asteroids. But I as GM would make you roleplay.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Of.

It.

Just adventure, it's more fun.

Haha. Since everything is done is six hour 'shift' blocks, this would be 'very hard' to drag out much.

'Okay, shift one, roll to scan the rock. Okay, you've got a big one, that's five shifts to scan the whole thing. Roll percentages of ore... wow.. so... two days have passed and you have 200k tons of metal right there...'

Trying to drag those two days out to make it so aggrivating that players would not try to get a trillion credit strike to fund future adventures seems like it would be more hassle then it would give.

Interestingly, one of the comments from the CotI thread was that the Beltstrike module (adventure?) that was coming out would include guidelines for 'selling off' a massive rock to a corporate interest for, essentially, a finder's fee, among other things.

Quote from: Spike;410442'Okay, shift one, roll to scan the rock. Okay, you've got a big one, that's five shifts to scan the whole thing. Roll percentages of ore... wow.. so... two days have passed and you have 200k tons of metal right there...'

It's like I'm really playing EVE Online! :P

You know, finding a mountain of gold and keeping it are two very different things...

Starting a colony like your example is actually covered in T4's Pocket Empires.

Plus after about TL12, when the Nuclear Damper and Meson Screen come into use, you have technology capable of fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces coupled with fusion power so you can effectively build whatever elements you wish down to their specific isotopes dependant upon how much energy is available. That would certainly change industry.

Quote from: Peregrin;410445It's like I'm really playing EVE Online! :P

I am a fan, I am.

Quote from: jeff37923;410446You know, finding a mountain of gold and keeping it are two very different things...

Starting a colony like your example is actually covered in T4's Pocket Empires.

Plus after about TL12, when the Nuclear Damper and Meson Screen come into use, you have technology capable of fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces coupled with fusion power so you can effectively build whatever elements you wish down to their specific isotopes dependant upon how much energy is available. That would certainly change industry.

I would guess that controlling those two effects to use them in industrial capacities would be how one, eventually, gets to higher TL industry... though otherwise we are supposed to ignore those unintended consequences, yes we are!

Quote from: Spike;410448I would guess that controlling those two effects to use them in industrial capacities would be how one, eventually, gets to higher TL industry... though otherwise we are supposed to ignore those unintended consequences, yes we are!

Not exactly ignore them, Striker indicates that this is the only way we can make Superdense or Bonded Superdense materials (metals with thier electron structure partially collapsed to make them stronger).

Quote from: Spike;410441Regarding the Economics tangent:  I agree in part. However it seems frequently that availability of metals is a major limiter in industries. The price will only drop until the demand naturally increases as more people get into the marketplace (since, you know, its cheaper now) and start doing stuff with it.  

I am not sure what the technical term is but what happening is when there is abundance of a particular material that is cheap to produce people tend to discover new uses for the material. When it become expensive people try to find substitutes and use new different type of material to do the same job.

Quote from: Spike;410441A greater degree of granularity would help. There are dozens of elemental metals, yet in mining they all fall under one heading and price. Under trade they fall under three or four groupings based on rarity.

Far Trader is about what I considered the limit of gamable. At some point the simulation breaks down or fall beyond the limit of a person to handle. What I suggest that you make it irrelevant to the characters situation. It doesn't matter if they make 1,000,000 cr a day it not going to solve their problem. You do this by working with the players to create background within your Traveller setting. This background will provide hooks to guide their initial choices and the rest of the campaign consist of them following up the consequences of their actions and the consequences of that.

Having refereed a fantasy setting for 30 years I found it to be the most reliable way of keeping players adventuring and not stopping to exploit loopholes in rules.

Quote from: Spike;410441But at the end the 'value' of any given metal could never practically fall under the labor cost of mining it, the successful entrepeneurs would would then be the ones would could transport it to market most efficently (which is one reason I asked about why Traveller has never (or if it has: where?) discussed costs/dtons for manufactory equipment and refineries and so forth, much less the difficulty of setting up a space dock...   producing finished goods in situ removes one of the biggest actual costs in Traveller, transportation.

However the price can fall so far that only those groups, like a megacorp, that can practice a large economy of scale can turn a profit. This is what effectively what happened with many agricultural sectors in the United States particularly staple crops like wheat and corn.

Something like, "gear X with site Y produces Z money over T time," would be a lot better for me. The vaguer the better.

I feel like the more you dive into the specifics of commerce in an RPG, the harder it is, for me, to be immersed because it just isn't realistic no matter how hard you try.

Quote from: Spike;410442Haha. Since everything is done is six hour 'shift' blocks, this would be 'very hard' to drag out much.

'Okay, shift one, roll to scan the rock. Okay, you've got a big one, that's five shifts to scan the whole thing. Roll percentages of ore... wow.. so... two days have passed and you have 200k tons of metal right there...'

Nonsense! There's no such thing as "just make a roll." You have to roleplay it! And while you're doing that scanning, who's watching out for other prospectors with big-arsed mining lasers ready to jump your claim? Who's swabbing the decks?

If my buddy can turn a 20-second GURPS combat of 5 characters vs 12 gargoyles into a two-and-a-half session epic, I can certainly make your mining last months.

Or you could just adventure. Up to you.

"Breaking the setting" is just another way of saying, "but I was just playing my character." It's an excuse for being a cocksmock.

Not on my watch, little man, not on my watch.

Quote from: Cranewings;410461I feel like the more you dive into the specifics of commerce in an RPG, the harder it is, for me, to be immersed because it just isn't realistic no matter how hard you try.

That is because it is just a game, designed to simulate a fictional reality and not Real Life itself.

This is something that happens a lot with Traveller (any version), while it is designed to be fairly realistic within its hard science fiction candy coating - it is not Reality and that causes a regular series of cries that "Traveller just isn't realistic enough!" Usually from someone who has some experience in the field that they are saying Traveller doesn't represent well enough. There is a planetary scientist out there who regularly weeps and wails loudly that Traveller world design and star system design is not realistic enough, and it is amusing that he has not come up with a better system while many less credentialled affecianadoes of the game have to suit themselves.

Thing is, for a game its pretty good at being realistic while still being flexible and playable. As a college level course on a subject other than Science Fiction Gaming In The Far Future, it is woefully inadequite. If you are buying Traveller to use as something other than a game, then you are already fucked in the head. At best, it could be used as an entertaining basic teaching tool if so applied to be that but overall Traveller is still just a damn fine game.

I hear ya.

Quote from: Cranewings;410484I hear ya.

And thank you for not thinking that I was "calling you out" on this. Your post just provided the perfect springboard for my own.

I actually worry about this sort of thing with the Science Fiction game I wrote / am writing (very part time). I don't have much in the way of commerce rules, and the magic system makes it closer to Final Fantasy than The Forever War, but there is a lot of tech.

Terahertz Ray Goggles, a full page of type 8 font radar rules, three ways of cooling laser rifles... I'm no physicist, I'm google smart, so I'm sure anyone that actually knows about this stuff would tear it apart.

I was just trying to give it enough depth that casual gamers could feel like there was something behind it. I imagine they did the same. Writing science fiction is hard.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;410476Nonsense! There's no such thing as "just make a roll." You have to roleplay it! And while you're doing that scanning, who's watching out for other prospectors with big-arsed mining lasers ready to jump your claim? Who's swabbing the decks?

If my buddy can turn a 20-second GURPS combat of 5 characters vs 12 gargoyles into a two-and-a-half session epic, I can certainly make your mining last months.

Or you could just adventure. Up to you.

"Breaking the setting" is just another way of saying, "but I was just playing my character." It's an excuse for being a cocksmock.

Not on my watch, little man, not on my watch.

I welcome my ebil aussie overlords with welcome arms and lasers fully prepared to shoot down the claim jumpers.

I could point out this sort of breakage could be discovered by accident.

It was pointed out to me, and referenced in my OP, that one principle of Traveller's 'default' assumption is that you can't really make enough money, in the long run, doing trade to pay for your ship, thus you will take on dubious missions for sweet sweet cash to keep your midlife crisis... er... starship up and running.

Now, sometimes that dubious adventure will be less than profitable, at least on the surface. I know, for example, that in the Gurps Trav game I played in we wound up 'dealing' with some terrorists who had taken the 'flight control' hostage (well, my character was a mercenary, so there was good reason to be hired for that...).  On  the individual scale the pay was nice, from the standpoint of running a ship it was equivilent to searching the couch for loose change.

If we'd turned down that 'adventure hook' we could have spent the day or so out there finding rocks.  There is a better than 60% chance of finding 100k+ tons of ANYTHING.  Even if we never decided to make a career out of it, a single 'session' worth of mining could, theoretically, pay off our ship, and even if we had to abandon our claim, it would certainly pay a couple of months worth of mortgage and maintenance fees.  

Even if not pursued to the 'setting breaking' extreme, it can certainly put a wild spin on the typical topography of the average traveller campaign. Instead of squeezing out a few percentage points of profit per ton of cargo you are losing a few percentage points of profit per ton of cargo, on a bad day.

I'll try to put up a longer post covering some of the crazy that's been running through my head re:traveller for the last couple months that led me to this amusing diversion of point.

JFTR, I think the only thing that would "break" traveller would be messing with the jump drive and communication rules.

A week per jump and limited jump distances makes the imperium what it is, it makes the traveller setting what it is. It makes the governments in traveller necessary.

Changing those would break traveller.

Adding high level nanotech, the ability to replicate things might hurt the setting, but not break it.

Transhumanism? Cybernetics? AI? As long as the travel and communication rules remain the same, they would not break traveller.

As to getting rich, or at least making a decent living off of asteroid mining, hey it's gotta happen so so many people wouldn't do it. it should be possible to get rich off it, but not easy.

So.

On advice from the Mongoose Guys, I got the Beltstrike Adventure for Mong Trav to see if it did, indeed patch any holes in the mining rules.

I get the impression that the dude who suggested it (who was, in fact, the dude working on getting it print ready or something) took my criticisms to heart and 'expanded' the mining rules just to make me happy.

This is, sadly, not a good thing.

Don't get me wrong, the addition of the 'Belter' lifepath, and a writeup of a 'Platform miner' (btw: 5000 dton ship only processes 200dtons of ore per shift. A 10 dton mining drone averages something like 12 dtons of ore. Can you say 'bad investment'?  I kid! Sort of...) are both welcome additions that could have easily been slipped into the Scoundrel book rather than make us purchase an adventure to get rules.  Also: The belter Lifepath breaks with the traditional pattern of 'three sub-paths per' that I had grown to expect was universal. There are FOUR sub-paths, one of which is 'researcher', which makes my head hurt.

But that is neither here nor there.

Expanding the mining rules, or 'How not to respond to customer feedback':

First its nice to see that the Mongoose people read the same Wikipedia articles I do.  No, that is not a thinly veiled critique.

No. The problem here is that for every notional expansion they managed to break something.  I welcome the addition of the 'exotics' table to tell me what I find when I roll for an exotic result. Thank you. Now lets work on not formating random bullet points into the middle of the table, m'kay?

Also: The addition of a line explaining that you roll percentage of 'ore' seperately from size of asteroid is welcome, though not exactly hard work.

However: not only did you NOT address how to divide up multiple types of 'finds' in a single asteroid, you actually REMOVED the dtonnage for half your asteroid results (literally, 8+ you just get its classification as a small or large planetoid and its diameter...). You still roll for a Percentage of that Dtonnage, mind you, you just don't know what that is.  Its nice to know that we could hollow it out and fill it with millions of colonist/miners/factory workers... but how much ore did we haul out in the process?

The formatting of the tables is the worst, just sort of crammed together like. Still, at least we have a purpose for the prospecting skill, but that and the exotic results tables are, almost literally, the only expansion of the mining rules.

Now, however, we can read about all those fancy metals that can be mined. Without any rules based context, mind you.  Since I can look up in wikipedia a list of all these very real ores this isn't exactly great. Bauxite? really? So nice to know I can get bauxite when I mine an asteroid. Now, if ONLY THERE WAS SOME FUCKING WAY TO ROLL FOR BAUXITE!!!!

Really. They 'expand' the value table, believe it or not. Now you can determine that 'dense material' (the 'valuable' you actually roll for...) is STILL 50,000 credits (FUCKING GOLD, MANG!), but that Iron is 400 credits and nickel-iron (I think, fucking sloppy formatting) is 1000credits a dton. But still no way to actually ROLL those results.  Hell, a copy and paste from any fucking edition of Traveller's trade goods table would be just as informative, if not more.


Then, at the end, we get a discussion of claims and claim jumping and a nice 'rule' for selling off those mega-asteroids (I'll sum it up: You get 7+1d6 % of the value of all the ore, or ten percent if yer lazy, if the GM doesn't try to claim that several trillion mass tons of metal is worthless to Corporation X to mine... see above discussion of why this is important. Selling even one decent sized rock will net a party of adventurers plenty of money to buy a ship outright, and NOT bog the game down into the minutae of hauling ore for the rest of their lives).

Problem with the entire claims/claim jumping rules. Not that they are 'bad' rules, per se... I mean there be built in adventures and the like right there, but that they are based on a purely terrestrial concept of mining.  You have to get a prospectors license, file the claim, mine it within x number of years....

or, you know, you take advantage of the fact that space is faaking HUGE and you just... you know... GO AWAY from all the beaurocratic nonsense and mine the shit out of some rocks somewhere where no one is there bugging you.

Let me put it too you thusly: Why don't we ever hear of 'Gold Rush' era mining in Europe? Could it be that an organized bunch of humans have been combing the dirt in the region since the bad old days and its all found/claimed/mined out?  If some schmoe finds gold in the dirt in Bavaria its probably 'junk' from some king's burial hole. Now, if someone finds gold in 18th century California, where the natives still think flint knapping is a valid enterprise... chances are its because there is a fuckin' huge ass vein of the shit under your feet, and its time to get digging.

Ditto belt mining. I imagine that all 1.9million or so asteroids that make up the main 'belt' in the solar system have been picked clean AGES ago by the time of the Third Imperium. People move out, away from all those rules and regulations to find places where they can make their fortune without spending it on paperwork.   The point, my friends, is that space is FUCKING BIG.  Inconceivably so (and that word does mean what I think it means, if you know what I mean).  No matter how many alien polities we come up with, there will STILL BE MORE SPACE!!!!  

Sorry. Pet peeve.