[hal]

Hi Steve,
One of the things worth noting is that one could easily SELL solar panels to low tech worlds as a means for powering up batteries where necessary.

Note too, that when I originally presented the information in my first two posts, it was for the Mongoose Traveller forums. Normally, anything like this would also have been posted to the Citizens of the Imperium forums, but, having had issues with the Moderator breaking the forum rules with his own posts, I resolved to stay clear of the forum. Since then, I've run into others who have left CotI for much the same reasons. :(

In any event, the whole point in bringing this up, was to point out that some "goods" are profitable for long distance shipping despite the seemingly prohibitive cost of 1,000 credits per jump (Old style CT rules) or the rules used in MgT or the rules used in GT.

My sneaking suspicion is that if a good/item is manufactured at a TL 10 world, sold at TL 10 prices - the prices for TL 10 goods on TL 9 or less planets will depend upon which TL 10 manufacturer is closest to the world in terms of jumps. Now, if you have world A that manufactures widget A, and World B that manufactures Widget A - the real issue might end up being the quality of Widget A when manufactured, or it might be that World B offers features not found with the product that World A does not include.

Take for instance, the batteries used to power energy weapons. If, for every 10 batteries sold, the battery Manufacturer includes one solar panel charging station - you KNOW that the manufacturer will not sell that charging station at a loss. To make the charging station pay for itself, he likely would increase the battery cost by say, 10% of the break even cost of the charging station, making his batteries a touch more expensive than the other ones. But then he can market his product saying "For the low price of 100 credits, you can by a charger station, or you can buy 10 batteries and I'll throw in the charger for free" If he sells his charger station separately, he would get his usual profit margin plus the cost of manufacturing etc. The other way, he has a built in incentive for people to buy his batteries in 10 battery lots.

In any event - for my own Traveller campaigns, the cost for shipping is either of Volume based or weight based (ie, if the weight for the volume exceeds 5 tons, the shipping is weight based, if the volume is such that the weight is less than 5 tons, the shipping costs are volume based). This way, something that is 10 tons I mass, ends up using 2 dTons of volume - and shipping costs are weight based.

So - maybe someday, it might be worth it to classify how many item units can occupy 1 dTon of volume, tally up its weight, and also its cost overall. Then toss that into the "speculative goods" category as speculative cargo. The real issue is "how much protective volume is required to handle goods so that they aren't damaged in transit". With the M1 Garands - I largely suspect that the 7.3 cubic feet used for 10 rifles does not imply that each rifle uses up .73 cubic feet by volume in and of itself. Some of that volume is simply for ease of access for the rifle itself, along with structural bracing for the box.

When I tried to figure out what the weight of the case sans rifles would be, I had to cheat a little...

I set up my spreadsheet to calculate the volume of the box by its outside dimensions. Then I set the spreadsheet to remove 1 inche from each dimension and calculate the new volume for that new "inner box". Subtracting the inner box from the outer box gave me a pine box with 1" thick boards. That in turn gave me about 1 cubic foot worth of volume, and at 33 lbs per cubic foot density for pine, gave me a box that when empty, was about 33 lbs. Toss in 10 rifles at 10 lbs apiece, and that crate would weigh between 133 lbs to a likely 150 or even 175 lbs with internal bracing etc. (I used 150 lbs myself).

So, how big do the boxes have to be to carry a TV, Radio, medical supplies, etc? THAT is an exercise I can't give an answer to. But if I go with a rule of thumb that is each item takes up between 2 to 3x its normal volume for packaging - I figure it won't be TOO far off the mark and give us workable estimates. If high tech material science can give us armoring that is more effective against damage, or higher structural strengths etc - then High Tech packing technology for shipping probably kept apace with material technology.

Somewhere in the rules for character creation, are rules for what high tech goods above your campaign average technology is worth. I want to say x10 or something like that (maybe it was in GURPS VEHICLES?) - but a modest x2 price increase due to shipping would seem to imply that high tech goods produced on worlds - for export, would readily be competitive pricewise with goods on a lower tech world even at 2x the cost. Why use 1950's telephones when you can get by with 2018's cell phones?

One could also imagine for example, some enterprising fellow buying old broken cell phones on a world that can't repair them, and offering 10% of what the phone is worth in exchange - ship them to a world that can repair them, and then selling refurbished cell phones elsewhere at a profit. The only thing keeping that from happening is whether the cost of shipping the broken phones plus the repair costs is less then what the item can be sold for elsewhere.