I'm assuming the Free Trader is a common and popular model, so there could be additional savings based on demand (I'm not an economist, either). The additional 200,000 savings are just other production savings relevant to this specific model. However, my solution is the in-game one you've already identified: it's simply because it's a prefab design. I appreciate that this post is a bit of a Hail Mary, but if there are any Traveller math experts out there, any assistance is more than appreciated.Ĭlick to expand.I'm not really familiar with Traveller nor am I a maths expert. Why should this be the case? I suspect that the answer has something to do with this sentence from the page before– “The cost increases with the distance travelled and is for a single jump”– but that only raises the question of what happens to the price if you require more than one jump to reach your destination? As the number of Parsecs Travelled increases, the increase in cost varies wildly, sometimes going up by a fraction (5 to 6 parsecs), sometimes doubling (3 to 4), and, from 5 to 6 parsecs, going up by a factor of ten. The ‘Passage and Freight Costs’ table on page 207 of the Core Rulebook makes absolutely zero sense to me. Well fine, you say, but did you remember to take a 10% discount because it’s a prefab design? Problem is, that puts us as MCr 45.522, still around two hundred thousand credits off. When we add the cost of the component parts, the total comes out to MCr50.58, while the list price is MCr 45.342. We cannot for the life of us get the cost of a Free Trader (High Guard, page 122) to add up.
As he’s asked me questions about how the numbers of Traveller work, I’ve discovered that in a couple of instances I have no good answer to his questions. I am diving into refereeing my first Traveller game, and one of my players has gotten way deeper into the math of ship design and economics than I had anticipated.