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Old 04-07-2012, 07:24 AM   #1
DaveCarr
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Default Booking Passage

I have a question concerning GURPS Vehicles.
The rules cover ownership, operating costs, and even renting various vehicles.
Suppose your characters want to book passage on a ship/airplane/locomotive?
What would be the fare charged?
Keep in mind the length of the trip, quality of accomidations (first class vs steerage), food, etc.
How much luggage would you be allowed?
On a related subject, rates for moving cargo. Modifiers for Hazardous items.
Of course, there will be reaction rolls, but I'm looking for a base line for a Fantasy merchant scenario.
The info should be Generic for other TLs.

Thanks in advance.
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Old 04-07-2012, 08:32 AM   #2
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Booking Passage

I could be misremembering, but I think there are general-purpose rules for the cost of a lot of services, in the GURPS 4th Edition core books. Costs derived from the Cost-of-Living of the character's Status.

There might be costs for transportation too.
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Old 04-07-2012, 11:23 AM   #3
Refplace
 
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Default Re: Booking Passage

Spaceships has the cost and some of the setting books have it for that setting a well. I do not recall seeing it in the basic books. However that does not mean its not there. But I dont see it in the index or travel section after a brief glance.
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Old 04-08-2012, 05:31 AM   #4
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Default Re: Booking Passage

Do you know the cost of the vehicle and the operating cost of a trip? Then decide how patient your ship owner is. Then a rough calculation is easy.

If a trip costs T (including his own salary, any crew, fees, fuel, water, etc), carrying N passengers, then a shipowner will need to charge T/N per person to break even. (If he takes fewer passengers on a trip he has to charge more: he still needs to make T total to not lose money on the trip.) He'll charge enough more than that in profit to return the cost of his ship in, say, 10 or 20 years: figure how many trips he does per year, and he wants the price of the ship over 10 or 20, then divided by the number of trips, in profit per trip. More patient shipowners can charge less and get a competitive advantage, but there's a lower limit to the ROI that people will stand for.

People renting their ships will be paying shipowners and will probably work out to about the same prices after competition settles on an equilibrium.
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Old 04-08-2012, 06:03 AM   #5
DaveCarr
 
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Default Re: Booking Passage

Thanks everybody for your input.
I guess I was looking for a "hard and fast" rule when it should be a "case by case".
Now how about cargo? Importing a ton of Widgets to B will cost ?$?
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Old 04-08-2012, 07:09 AM   #6
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Default Re: Booking Passage

Cargo or passengers go by the same general principle. Shipping rates are proportional to the daily operating cost of the vessel, multiplied by the number of days spent in transit, divided by the number of units shipped. There'll be variation to cover the depreciation of purchasing the vessel, financing any loans, and the risk factor of the trip.

So it's going to depend a lot on circumstances. But for your specific original question, let me lay out some assumptions:

* The ship carries about 100 tons of cargo.
* The ship cost $500,000 to build and $250,000/year to operate. (That breaks down to $180,000 in salary for the 20 crewmem and $70,000 for maintenance parts for the vessel. Maintenance could be a lot more, or the crew could be smaller.)
* Passengers can be taken on instead of cargo, at the rate of 6 passengers per ton with each passenger getting about 100 lbs of personal luggage. Luxury accommodations count double; steerage count as half.
* 150 man-days of supplies weighs about a ton. You have to account for the weight for the crew, but not the cost (effectively, it comes out of their wages). For passengers, food costs about $10/passenger/day.
* The vessel will need to be completely replaced in about 10 years, so 1/10th of its cost needs to recovered every year. And the owners would like to double the size of their fleet, so they want another 1/10th the cost every year.

Taking all that together: a two month passage (enough for a trans-Atlantic trip if the ship isn't very slow) for 10 adventurers and their allies requires 2400 man-days of food for the crew (2 ton) and another 1200 man-days for the passengers (1 ton, $12000). Assuming the captain manages to take on cargo sufficient to fill the hold, he'll spend (250,000 / 12 * 2 + 500,000 / 5 / 12 * 2) = $58000 on the trip. Each of the 97 tons of cargo will need to bring at least $600 in shipping fees. Passengers are 6 to the ton plus rations, so each ticket will cost $700.

That's assuming that's there a port on the other end of the trip, and the trip itself is very safe. If there are notorious pirates that intercept 25% of the transits, then the captain will probably want to raise his prices to recover 25% of the value of the ship and the crew's ransoms - say another $200,000. Each ton of cargo now has to bring in $2700, raising the ticket price to $1050. Of course, with cargo costing 4x as much to ship, the captain may not be able to fill his hold, raising the cost for each ton even further. At an extreme, the adventurers may be the only cargo on the ship, in which case each ticket costs $25,800.

Does that help explain the situation and the math?
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Old 04-08-2012, 07:47 AM   #7
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: Booking Passage

I'm working on a setting where these things might be of relevance. I'm re-engineering vehicles again and again, but here's one example* that I'm trying to work into the setting:

TL9^-ish private ornithopter, worth $285k, 1800mph (Edit: apparently, the spreadsheet no longer sets the 500-mph limit; gotta recalc), 11 passenger seats OR 5½ tons of cargo.
11,000 miles Peking to New York will be flown in a little more than 6 hours, spending about half the fuel in 2 fuel cells.
Assuming fuel cells for power, that's $800 per ton of fuel. Each of the two fuel cells takes ¼ of a fuel tank's of fuel to fill, and SM+4 fuel tanks are ½ a ton, that means we spent ¼ of a ton on fuel, or $200.

11 passengers at $500 per will bring in $5000 per day (I'm assuming that beside the $200 fuel there is up to $300 for maintenance/fees/insurance/emergency repairs on average). With 20 such flights per month, that's $100,000 per month. Even if half of that goes away to return loans etc. (easily paying for the craft in half a year), the pilot still has the other $50k in salary. Neat?

Of course, if there are few willing passengers, things don't look as good.

* == written up as a TL10^ example; I already accounted for shorter endurance at TL9^ in this post.
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Old 04-08-2012, 08:25 AM   #8
mlangsdorf
 
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Default Re: Booking Passage

You're charging each passenger for a full load of fuel.

I'd calculate the monthly expenses as
* 20 days fuel @ $800/day = $16,000
* 5 year depreciation for the 'thopter = $4,750
* 220 quality meals @ $10 each = $2,200
* Pilot salary = $15,000
* 5% monthly maintenance fund = $14,000
* 30% overhead = $11,0000

$68,000 in expenses. If each trip is full of passengers, a ticket is $310. Assuming an 85% booking rate, tickets go up to $360.

Unless your pilot has some kind of monopoly on the Peking-New York route, I'd expect him to be severely undercut when charging $500/passenger. And that's assuming that all the other aircraft flying Peking-New York are also small ornithopters. Larger craft are generally more efficient, so they may be able to undercut him even more.
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Old 04-08-2012, 08:53 AM   #9
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Default Re: Booking Passage

The Stardrive section of GURPS Spaceships 2 Traders and Liners covers this for space but the math is given so it can be ported to other distance measurements.
there is a lot of other stuff in that book that is good for any kind of vehicle based merchant campaign.
Low Tech Companion 3 Daily Life and Economics gives you some sample ships and a page on cargo costs but is not really detailed enough.
This is one of the books I would like to see done for a variety of TLs and setting variations. A Nice book patterned roughly after Travelers Merchant Prince that includes formulas to calculate ship costs and income for any vechicle type and some economic data to handle this kind of campaign.
It wouldn't need to handle building ships just use a few sample types as examples or maybe a table of several types from various books.
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Old 04-08-2012, 10:58 AM   #10
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: Booking Passage

Quote:
Originally Posted by mlangsdorf View Post
You're charging each passenger for a full load of fuel.

I'd calculate the monthly expenses as
* 20 days fuel @ $800/day = $16,000
* 5 year depreciation for the 'thopter = $4,750
* 220 quality meals @ $10 each = $2,200
* Pilot salary = $15,000
* 5% monthly maintenance fund = $14,000
* 30% overhead = $11,0000

$68,000 in expenses. If each trip is full of passengers, a ticket is $310. Assuming an 85% booking rate, tickets go up to $360.

Unless your pilot has some kind of monopoly on the Peking-New York route, I'd expect him to be severely undercut when charging $500/passenger. And that's assuming that all the other aircraft flying Peking-New York are also small ornithopters. Larger craft are generally more efficient, so they may be able to undercut him even more.
Thanks for the analysis. While I do not claim my numbers to be the Absolute Truth©, I would like to say a few things in their defence:
Quality meals look like an extra. They're no big deal, and apparently many modern flights don't provide them any more, even though they used to.
The 5% monthly maintenance is outrageous. It is the maintenance cost of a very cheap craft (to be more precise: 1% per week). Now, I didn't pay much attention to Insurance, but it starts at 0.1% of craft cost, and goes up to about 0.3% under nastier circumstances.

Finally, I'm not expecting a monopoly on the mentioned route. On the contrary, I was assuming (though alas did not make it explicit) that I expect the pilot to be picking up charter races 'on demand', flying wherever the money is. And $500 is not a lot for a private pilot to get undercut by companies. For comparison: Kyiv-Reykjavik is slightly above 2k miles, yet costs from $700 to $3k on a mass flight by a big company, not by private charter. And that's with the pilot, the maintenance technicians etc. receiving a TL8 salary for making it possible.
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