Actually I guess travel and shipping don't have to be cheap just because ships are, provided there is a good ongoing expense to running a ship, which brings me back around to fuel.
In Traveller, it's water, so pretty cheap (or free if you have scoops). Pretty much everything else goes with unobtainium, which I kind of want to avoid. But if I'm assuming a hand-wavey version of fusion, heavy water (or super-heavy) might be the thing. I thiiiiiiink this is where Traveller is going with water-as-fuel, though it doesn't really explain why a ship would need to carry raw water if it only needed to extract the heavy water from it.
The story benefit of using water is that it means starships can explore without needing infrastructure. But if it's heavy water, a starship could probably carry refining equipment, if only at a small scale. With multi-jump fuel capacity, there's almost no need for a regular ship to do this, and with my constrained map, it's probably safe to assumed that every known system has a refinery even if it's the only thing on the planet (or in the system; for desert mainworlds the refinery would have to be gas-giant based).
How starships work: costs
I have occasionally noodled about with making jump drives black-box Ancients tech, which has good and bad points.
On the good side, Ancients are inscrutable and who can say why they sold a J3 drive to a random group of murder hobos for pocket change.
On the bad side, why would a random group of murder hobos suddenly in possession of a piece of expensive technology not just sell it and live a life of luxury somewhere instead of scraping by as asset-poor murder hoboes?
I mean, even with regular Traveller ships that's a valid question: tramp freighter-ing is a lot like the "how do you make a million dollars at $X? Start with two million dollars" joke. If you have the scratch to make a down payment on a ship, is it really better than taking that money and using it to buy passage around the galaxy/metaverse on other people's ships (and occasionally chartering one when you want to go somewhere odd)?
The answer of course is "because players want autonomy."
This militates toward having (PC-sized) starships be fairly cheap. But then I have to figure out what other impacts that has: if they're cheap, there are a lot of them, and if there are a lot of them, star travel/shipping is pretty inexpensive, and what does that make the gameworld look like?
How starships work: costs
Traveller ships are ruinously expensive; you need an enormous down payment and a forty-year mortgage, and most ship designs can barely break even. I can't remember if this came from Dumarest.
Firefly ships, on the other hand... a retired soldier, from the losing side, was able to buy a junk ship and get it flying. (I own the RPG and should probably look at what their expectations are for PCs getting their ships, but this is just what I remember from the show.)
I probably want something in between. Jump drives feel like they're the sticking point, especially with a limited number of Type A starports. It keeps bringing me back to "what if there is a magic jump crystal" because that lets a PC group discover the most expensive part of the ship. It's super-cliched though, but that's because it works: a ship with a cracked drive crystal might be basically worthless, so if adventurers can acquire one without paying for it (or being implausibly overpaid with one, or whatever), that can be the first adventure.
It doesn't have to be a magic crystal; the first Trav adventure involved salvaging a (very) long-derelict ship. If there's a good source of derelict ships, that works.
How starships work: cargo
I've pretty much covered the can system already, so the only question left for that is: how many cans should the typical PC ship carry?
I'm going to say probably the J-3 ship works as it is, and a J-2 ship carries... three cans? That seems like a reasonable tradeoff. It costs a little more to ship things faster, so that mostly makes up for the lower cargo capacity. But not completely; PCs will have to scrape a little more, take riskier cargoes, to run a faster ship.
Again, with the more limited map, it's pretty likely that a PC group will be able to contract with a broker and have moderately reliable cargo contracts every time they make port. Or they can cut out the middleman and go with the space equivalent of Craigslist/FB Marketplace, which is more likely to lead to Adventure.
How starships work: passengers
Tramp freighters in Traveller are pretty hilarious if you stop to think about it. You've got high passage and middle passage (and low passage, another thing that came straight from Dumarest) and some basic rules for ticket prices and... as long as you get a stateroom to yourself, it costs just as much to ride on a tiny murder-hobo ship that no one on the planet has ever seen before and never expects to see again, as it does to ride on a regular scheduled airline-equivalent.
(I guess it makes sense that only other murder hoboes are going to want to book passage on the former, and that's how you get adventures.)
There's less of that in my smaller universe: tramp freighters may get around, but the pond simply isn't big enough for ships to be fully anonymous. But still, a tramp freighter isn't going to have the luxuries of a regular passenger ship - where "luxuries" are as basic as "having a dedicated kitchen instead of a harried steward reheating frozen dinners." It's like comparing an airline meal to a train's dining-car experience.
Picking up one-off passengers on a tramp freighter is not going to be terribly profitable, is what I'm saying. The people willing to do it will not be willing to pay much; it's a step above hitchhiking, most of the time.
A more profitable way to take passengers will be accepting charters. A starport of any size will have brokers who screen both ships and charters, but smaller worlds will have the equivalent of Facebook Marketplace, with all that that implies.
2025-09-30 2025-09-30
How starships work: passengers, more thoughts.
A destination world near a high-population world - such as Chalice 1206 near LiLowerPe 1108 - will lead to a lot of "vacation charters." Wealthier travellers will take a well-appointed cruise-ship type, but there's also a market for once-in-a-lifetime vacations for working-class folks.
Chalice has a regular traffic in "canned" tours: a steward who owns an all-in-one stateroom module will assemble a tour group of however many passengers they can cram in (and convince the life support to keep alive for a week), and pay whatever cargo ship has adequate can hookups to haul their tour from LLP to Chalice and back again. These tours are always distinct experiences, in one way or another: imagine being in a 6x15m (20x50 foot) box with as many as fifteen other people for a week.
Some guides make the trip a themed event of its own, hosting card game tournaments (usually social, but sometimes gambling), film festivals, or other sedentary activities. Most are more like cross-country bus trips with strangers.
Hauling a canned tour can lead to a lot of adventure seeds: perhaps one of the passengers finds a way to message the player characters: they're not tourists, but press-ganged workers. Or there's a dispute amongst the passengers, and someone (perhaps even the tour operator!) has been summarily dumped out the hatch into the ship's passages.
2025-10-01 2025-10-01
How starships work: passengers, still more thoughts.
One of the things Traveller lifted wholesale from Dumarest was the idea of low passage: travel in suspended animation, inexpensive but with a rather shockingly high risk of death. I'm going to keep part of that. Low passage is certainly a thing but it is, or at least can be, relatively safe.
Low passage chambers have fairly low power requirements, and the risk does not rise significantly with length of time spent, at least for the short travel requirements across Charted Space. One does have to trust that one will get to one's destination, especially if it involves transfer between ships, but otherwise it's a fairly cheap way and reliable way to get from here to there.
It's also a more likely way for tramp freighters to carry passengers, at least between well-populated worlds. It doesn't require crew dedicated to the passengers, aside from the engineer's time making sure the equipment is running normally. This cuts down on the opportunity for adventure, unfortunately. There is still the opening for equipment failure requiring a passenger to be revived mid-trip, or a non-frozen passenger/stowaway reviving frozen passengers for some kind of shenanigans.
