Traveller: Cargo and freight

This is my fifth and, for now, final post musing about some of Traveller’s quirks.

Last time, I worked out that if Rethe/Regina imports all its food, then it needs 4.8 million displacement tons of red kibble every week, shipped from nearby Inthe. (This is standard Adam Smith free market economics - focus on what you're good to buy what you're not so good at. So Rethe, being a densely-populated world, produces something (although it's not clear what) and buys in food and other things.)

Assuming that's what it does, I’m going to think about logistics. (Well, some of them – I don’t work in logistics, so of course I’ve overlooked something.)

The problem

We must transport 4.8 million tonnes of red kibble from Inthe to Rethe, every week.

It’s a two-parsec jump, so we could use 200-ton Far Traders. Except that, as I have already calculated, we’d need about 75,000 of them. Every week.

We’re going to need a bigger boat.

How about the 200,000-ton Galika Megula, the largest freighter in Mongoose’s High Guard? Well, with a cargo of over 136,000 tons, Rethe still needs 56 of them, every week.

So let’s go even bigger.

Lego container ship on Flickr

Container shipping

I’m reading The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson and a few things struck me.

• One, the shipping container is relatively new, and I’m not surprised that the paradigm of ruthlessly efficient freight isn’t part of Traveller’s DNA. 
• Traveller’s vision of merchant shipping has a 1950s vibe about it, with non-standard freight sizes, loading and unloading on site. It looks nothing like today’s container shipping. (As I’ve been reminded, a core foundation for Traveller is EC Tubb’s Dumarest saga. That was first published in the 1960s, when container shipping was just getting started. I don’t know whether Traveller’s trading rules reflect the Dumarest saga, but if they do, I suspect it’s because EC Tubb was writing about the merchant shipping world he knew about. He may not have known of the coming freight revolution.)
• Container shipping is much more efficient than its predecessor. It means that merchant ships spend much more time at sea earning money (rather than sitting at the docks being loaded and unloaded), drastically cutting the cost of freight.

Traveller’s ships really don’t carry much cargo - not compared to what a world like Rethe needs. While Traveller’s ships are ideal for adventuring, they’re not terribly practical if you need to feed a world.

Instead, we need ruthless efficiency!

Feeding Rethe

As I’ve said, Rethe needs to import 4.8 million tonnes of red kibble every single week. It needs to be efficient and reliable.

Here’s my idea of how it would work.

Build a fleet of truly massive merchant ships, each able to transport 1.2 million displacement tons of cargo. So four a week would solve our shipping problem. (Of course, four a week probably still means a fleet of about twenty ships, allowing for return journeys, stopover time and maintenance.)

To speed up cargo delivery, the cargo holds are constructed as six huge demountable pods. The pods are streamlined, and massive tractors transport them between the starport (or wherever they are loaded) and the cargo ships. 

The pods are huge: 205,000 tons. If they were boxes, they’d be about 300 x 100 x 100 m in size. (For comparison, a Lightning Class Cruiser is only 60,000 tons.)

The spine of the ship (little more than a massive jump drive – and over a kilometre long) is not streamlined. It just travels back and forth between Rethe and Inthe. A round trip looks like this:

Arrive at Inthe

Travel to the highport. Detach cargo pods from Rethe containing whatever it is that Rethe exports. Attach cargo pods filled to the brim with red kibble. While cargo is unloaded and loaded, refuel and refresh crew and supplies as necessary. Travel to jump point and jump.

Arrive at Rethe

Travel to the highport. Detach cargo pods from Inthe containing the red kibble. Attach cargo pods filled to the brim with exports. While cargo is unloaded and loaded, refuel and refresh crew and supplies as necessary. Travel to jump point and jump.

Rinse and repeat. Endlessly.

(I’m assuming that Rethe has highports. I know that with a Class E starport, it shouldn’t have highports. I question the canon in this post.)

Let’s build a megafreighter!

So here’s the Titan-class megafreighter. I’ve designed this using High Guard and a spreadsheet. I may have made mistakes, but hopefully not big ones. 

We’ll start with the cargo pods.

205,000 ton demountable, streamlined cargo pod

• Breakaway components: 4,100 tons
• Cargo space: 200,900 tons.
• Cost: 10,455 Mcr

I imagine these attached to the Titan’s spine in two groups of three pods, the pods in each group spaced equally around the Titan’s spindly hull.

1,830,000 ton Titan-class megafreighter

The total tonnage is made up of:

• A 1,830,000-ton dispersed breakaway hull. (TL 12)
• Six 205,000-ton cargo pods
• Manoeuvre-1 (18,300 tons)
• Jump-2 (91,505 tons)
• Power plant (61,000 tons, generating 915,000 power units at TL12)
• Fuel: 494,100 tons (for four weeks of operation and one jump-2)
• Bridge (500 tons – this is an overestimate)
• Computer/20
• Sensors (civilian – 1 ton)
• Crew 2051 (one captain, one pilot, one astrogator, 1690 engineers, 198 mechanics, 99 administrators, 26 sensor operators, 16 medics, 98 officers). That’s a lot of crew – I’m going to come back to that.
• Staterooms: 2051 (8204 tons)
• Other cargo 11,790 tons (this is spare tonnage – could be used for living areas for the crew).

And it costs a fortune – I didn’t price it out, but it’s not cheap.

Crew

But over two thousand crew? That seems … a lot.

If your assumption about starships is that they are masters of their own destiny, travelling from system to system in whichever direction their owner’s whimsy takes them, then having a huge crew to deal with any issues makes sense.

But if you are just going backwards and forwards between two systems? Do you really need nearly 1900 mechanics and engineers, nearly 100 administrators, 26 sensor operators, and 100 managers (officers)?

That seems overkill. And expensive.

As far as the engineers and mechanics go, how much can go wrong that can’t wait a few days? I would imagine that 90% of issues wouldn’t be a problem during jump and can wait until the ship has arrived and the local engineering team can fix it. (Or, if it’s a longer job but can be completed in jump, then the ship jumps while the work is underway.)

I haven’t changed the crew requirements for the Titan, but I know the company bean counters will want to make everything as efficient as possible, and I’m sure they’ll be checking that everybody is adding value. If the Titan is as reliable as I like to think, I expect the headcount will be reduced.

Variants

The Titan is a big ship. Is there any way of making it more efficient?

M-Drives: Removing the M-Drives saves 18,300 tons in the drives themselves, with a proportionate saving elsewhere (crew, power and jump requirements and so on). Is that an option, assuming the operators use tugs at each end? If you operate the same jump route for decades, how accurate are your exit and entry points?

(As for jump masking, I imagine positioning the tugs (and maybe other facilities) to allow for jump masking – much as today’s mariners account for the tides.)

Drop tanks: Using drop tanks saves over 360,000 tons (giving savings elsewhere, such as crew and so on). However, drop tanks are expensive and often don’t survive the experience. Given the potential savings, I would expect part of the R&D budget to revisit the question of drop tanks. (I’ve wondered about this in a previous post.)

Modular fuel tanks: I imagine it takes a fair bit of time to refuel a ship with nearly half a million tons of liquid hydrogen. Even if drop tanks aren’t an option, I can imagine using modular fuel tanks that can be filled up in advance and attached along with the cargo pods to minimise the time between jumps.

Move operations to Paya: As I noted before, Paya/Aramis would be a better source of red kibble than Inthe, as it’s closer. Requiring only a one-parsec jump, the Titan is significantly smaller – not just saving over 240,000 tons in fuel, but also making the rest of the ship smaller as well. With four ships arriving every week, that’s a weekly saving of 480 million credits (around 25 trillion credits a year). It wouldn’t be long before moving operations to Paya would pay off.

And everything else…

And all this is just for importing the red kibble. Alongside this, there will need to be vast amounts of infrastructure, including:

• Enormous fuel processing stations
• Fleets of cargo pod tugs to get the kibble in and out of orbit
• Massive distribution systems to get the kibble to hungry mouths
• Water processing to ensure that kibble can be rehydrated
• Maintenance and spacedocks
• Accommodation for all the workers
• Loading and unloading of other goods – there’s more to life than just red kibble
• Passengers – arrivals and departures
• Administration and paperwork
• System defences to protect against piracy

I haven’t considered any of these – just thinking about importing millions of tons of red kibble has been quite an exercise.

But this is the kind of far future I like: vast megafreighters, billions living in space cities, and a vibrant interstellar economy.

That’s it for now

And that’s it for now.

I’m sure I’ll have some other grumbles about Traveller, but it’s time to leave the Third Imperium in peace for a while.