How important is fuel?

[infojunky]

How important is fuel in your games?

A suggestion in another thread mentioned doing away with fuel requirements entirely. Which is a thought.

But,

I have been pondering using a ships Jump ratings as speed per parsec i.e. a J6 ship travels 1pc in 28 hours instead of 168 hours.
Please note a J6 ship with 10% fuel tanks would take in general 38+ hours for each leg depending on how fast they can refuel. Also note if one plots out long distance travel times they won't be much shorter than without the change. The biggest change is in local traffic.

Side-note, communication time in historic Traveller has always been a problematic issue, things often happen in the fluff way too fast.

 

[Spinward Flow]

How important is fuel in your games?

Tell me if you've heard this old Aviation Joke before.

There are three things in aviation that are completely useless to you, regardless of how much of a surplus of them you have at any given time. Those three things are:

1. Altitude above you
2. Runway behind you
3. Fuel in the truck

 

[whartung]

Fuel is a problem for exceptional situations, and for strategic movement, but it's a non-issue for most day to day operations. It's plentiful and available, ships are very powerful and sip fuel (even in TNE ships typically have more than enough fuel for routine operations, combat it not a routine operation), which is part of the what makes space flight cheap and ubiquitous.

 

[kilemall]

How important is fuel in your games?

A suggestion in another thread mentioned doing away with fuel requirements entirely. Which is a thought.

But,

I have been pondering using a ships Jump ratings as speed per parsec i.e. a J6 ship travels 1pc in 28 hours instead of 168 hours.
Please note a J6 ship with 10% fuel tanks would take in general 38+ hours for each leg depending on how fast they can refuel. Also note if one plots out long distance travel times they won't be much shorter than without the change. The biggest change is in local traffic.

Side-note, communication time in historic Traveller has always been a problematic issue, things often happen in the fluff way too fast.

I’ve upped fuel use in two IMTU ways.

I have missile design/build rules where they are built like small craft/non starships, but have a high fuel use rate. My refsplanation is the mini mini reactors inside them don’t have efficient coolers and so they have to dump heated fuel to get rid of it. Reason is of course to limit range/not allow frac-c missiles.

The other major one is I have expanded damage results for radiation hits. One of the effects is fuel. The fuel is not destroyed per se, but it is rendered unrefined. The ship may have fuel for weeks to go but jump escape may risk unrefined until processed again.

 

[Condottiere]

It's meant to be friction, and fundamental to the game concept.

 

[Kakistocrat]

Fuel is […] plentiful and available, ships are very powerful and sip fuel […], which is part of the what makes space flight cheap and ubiquitous.

CR 8000 for a middle passage ticket doesn’t seem particularly cheap — that’s two months’ salary for a starship engineer.

 

[Condottiere]

You write it off as a business expense.

 

[mike wightman]

It depends.

If I am running a hardish sci fi game then fuel is important.

If I am running a Third Imperium like game that involves ethically challenged ship crew then fuel matters.

If I am running a planet of the week Third Imperium setting or even more outlandish sci fi then fuel does not matter one jot, unless relevant to the plot.

If the players just want to get on with the game and travel from world to world then their ship is powered by a fusion reactor that requires refueling once every twenty years, or a matter/antimatter system, or a captive black hole, or vacuum energy or any other handwave.

 

[Spinward Flow]

CR 8000 for a middle passage ticket doesn’t seem particularly cheap

It's Cr6000 for a stateroom berth in order to travel 1+ parsecs ... plus another Cr2000 for life support and board (air, water, food, temperature regulation, etc.).

Considering the distance traveled, that's dirt cheap.
You're basically talking Cr2454 PER LIGHTYEAR per parsec when traveling J1.
If the ticket price is per jump rather than per parsec in YTU, you can cut that price IN HALF when traveling 2 parsecs at J2, or by ONE THIRD when traveling at J3.

In terms of credits per kilometer traveled ... that's STUPID CHEAP compared to any kind of "local" transport options.

 

[Kakistocrat]

You write it off as a business expense.

If you can afford CR 8000 to begin with, and you’re confident that your claim would withstand scrutiny by relevant taxation authorities.

It’s Cr6000 for a stateroom berth in order to travel 1+ parsecs … plus another Cr2000 for life support and board (air, water, food, temperature regulation, etc.).

Considering the distance traveled, that’s dirt cheap.

Sure, on a per petameter basis, it’s extraordinarily inexpensive; but a claim that space flight is “cheap and ubiquitous” when a ticket costs two months’ salary of a qualified person with specialized technical knowledge seems inaccurate to me. It could well be ubiquitous for those who have the dough-re-mi, but its cheapness is debatable. Both cheap and ubiquitous might apply to an airplane ticket from, say, New York to Florida, or from the UK to Spain; even a week-long transatlantic cruise would be much cheaper in terms of a percentage of an engineer’s annual salary than the CR required for a trip to a neighboring stellar system.

 

[infojunky]

If the ticket price is per jump rather than per parsec in YTU, you can cut that price IN HALF when traveling 2 parsecs at J2, or by ONE THIRD when traveling at J3.

In Traveller it is per destination regardless of jump..... Thus a destination 3 parsecs away as the stated destination has the same cost whether it's on a J1 or J3 equipped ship.

I am very tempted to figure out the cost of travel based on the cost of ship's operation for the time a trip takes then adding on the profit as a surcharge over that.... Say cost plus 6000cr for a High Passage and 4000cr for a Middle.... Related I am tempted to add a steerage level between those and Low...

 

[Grav_Moped]

I am very tempted to figure out the cost of travel based on the cost of ship's operation for the time a trip takes then adding on the profit as a surcharge over that....

Did that. For LBB2 it's dependent on regional max TL (costs per payload ton per parsec vary by ship size.) HG too, but I did not check that.

The 400Td Standard Hull makes a difference when used. There's a sweet spot for J2 at 1KTd and J1 at 2KTd. TL-15 (W+) Drives are better, Z Drives almost magic. But they make ships that the LBB2/7 trade mini-game cannot support.

Someone else -- I want to say it was @aramis -- did something similar years before I did.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The 400Td Standard Hull makes a difference when used.

Indeed ... so much so that it's almost painful to be forced into scaling up to 500-600 tons due to just how much of a difference the 400 ton standard hull makes. Of course, the challenge is to figure out a way to utilize the engineering displacement most effectively with minimum waste tonnage (always a complicated mix of choices).

One of the really nice things about the 400 ton standard hull though is that you can make some really rockin' low tech starship designs with it that can be remarkably flexible in commercial operations. Totally a sweet spot for ACS construction, indeed!

 

[kilemall]

Did that. For LBB2 it's dependent on regional max TL (costs per payload ton per parsec vary by ship size.) HG too, but I did not check that.

The 400Td Standard Hull makes a difference when used. There's a sweet spot for J2 at 1KTd and J1 at 2KTd. TL-15 (W+) Drives are better, Z Drives almost magic. But they make ships that the LBB2/7 trade mini-game cannot support.

Someone else -- I want to say it was @aramis -- did something similar years before I did.

By the time you are building custom 3k plus hulls, you are playing on a different level. Probably gone through an intermediate stage of running a subsidized line with intrigue and complications of which routes you get.

Eliminating financing for one, taking on cargos and passengers for several jumps, having a full cargo hold of speculation, etc.

But that’s for small timers. You are bumping heads with the big lines- subsidized ships for the biggest juiciest routes that don’t need it but they have the clout to get governments to finance, megacorps subsidized ships for guaranteed routes and multi-thousand ton holds shipping product for sector wide distribution, profit sharing deals for scrappy upcoming not quite megacorps, Leviathan like trading missions for developing new trade streams, etc.

Mercantile and operational competence is a given. But do you have the SOC, clout, security/spec ops and acumen to play in the big leagues?

 

[Spinward Flow]

Eliminating financing for one, taking on cargos and passengers for several jumps, having a full cargo hold of speculation, etc.

This is almost certainly the strategy for ships that are "too big" for the single (next) destination game. When you abandon the "small time tramp" business model and switch over to a pre-programmed itinerary along a specific (predictable) route, you can sell tickets to each future destination along your committed route. That way you aren't working on a basis of repeated single iterations of filling up your shipping manifests to single markets, but rather working on a basis of parallel carriage simultaneously to multiple markets. You can therefore have "carryover" ticket purchases for passengers and cargoes that need to travel 2+ destinations down your declared route.

And it's this "stocking up for multiple destinations" that then permits the extension of the small time free trader tramp rules from LBB2 to be extended up into the "higher end" bulk carriers operating in the 1k+ tonnage ranges. They're able to do it because they trade freedom of navigation (tramp trading) for predictability and the parallel carriage capacity for multiple markets along their trade route itinerary. Ticket pricing works on a basis of "per jump" along the itinerary, with multiple tickets needing to be bought when passengers and cargoes need to be aboard for multiple jumps (so 1 ticket per 1 jump, regardless of parsecs traveled).

Tramp trading ... going wherever the winds of profit blow you at any given time, wandering among the stars with no preset destination determined in advance ... is something that only the "small fry" free traders have the luxury of indulging in (and going bankrupt while doing).

Bulk traders ... have a schedule to keep and a route to service. They've got overhead and maintenance to pay for and can't go scurrying off on adventures or start chasing market trends when opportunity comes knocking. They're effectively "bound" to their routes and they're not allowed to deviate from them (and even misjumps will incur a pretty severe penalty!). The bulk traders are simply working a very different segment of the market than the tramp traders are, although there are some obvious overlaps.

Tramp traders are free to be "nimble" with their ships and their business models, because they're such small time operators.
Bulk traders are behemoths running on rails, usually with "local support" on each world along their route that gathers up cargo and passengers for them in preparation for a scheduled arrival and departure.

The small time "adventuring" traders are simply operating in a very different manner and with a different business model than the big boys are.

 

[Condottiere]

Remembering the Westerns I've watched, and especially in Confederation space where stellar density isn't great, I thought about establishing staging posts in empty hexes.

 

[Ulsyus]

Remembering the Westerns I've watched, and especially in Confederation space where stellar density isn't great, I thought about establishing staging posts in empty hexes.

The thing is they're not likely to be empty: rogue planets, kuiper belt objects, etc. We've got Farout out to 175AU, objects like 90377 Sedna at more than 500AU, Oort Cloud objects out to 50,000AU. Given that these would be a about 0.09, 0.24 and 24% if a parsec, the first two would still sit in a system's map hex, but an Oort Cloud would reach right to the edge, so there's likely to be plenty of other things out there to map and travel too in the deep dark. Given estimates for Sedna give it potentially large quantities or methane and water ice with a hydrocarbon (tholins) also on the surface, and estimates are similar for other objects in its vicinity, I'm happy to put objects like that out in interstellar space.

They could make great settings, as waystations or space oases with starship caravanserai built there to service the J1 or J2 ships moving across a sector.

 

[Condottiere]

I was thinking more about the ones who have jump factor one drives, where you try leveraging time for costs, capital and operating.

 

[whartung]

The issue isn't whether there's something to put tanks on, it's simply that regardless of what's out there, it's likely not sufficient to provide enough fuel. I mean, who knows, maybe a mission can go out and hunt down a few million dTons of an "icesteroid". How long you will get out of a million dTons of asteroid depends on the traffic.

A million tons of freight, at 60% cargo volume for a J2 ship (this pretty well holds for most any size larger ship). So for each MdTon of traffic, you need 1.6MdTons of ship, so each MdTon of traffic is 160k dTons of fuel per jump number.

Just to get a sense of how big these remote fuel depots may need to be.

Also, if you wanted to provision a remote fuel depot, at, say, a J3 distance, a J3 tanker can "move" about 15% of its size in fuel. The rest is need for the jump out and back and the other mechanics.

So, it will take roughly 6MdTons of tanker trips to provision a 1MdTon remote fuel station. At a fuel rate, that means it cost 4x as much fuel to move 1 unit of unit of fuel. Charging 10x the fuel rate for a remote station would be a "fair" price.

Anecdote, I visited a gas station, literally out in the "middle of the desert" that had signs basically saying "quit whining about the prices, we're in the middle of the desert".