A Guide for Space Merchants

Notes For Merchants

The Five Kinds of Merchants

Bulk Carriers keep it simple, cheap, and big. They stick to fixed schedules and don't waste time and effort pursuing all the little specialty cargos that pop up here and there. Depending on how the ship is run, of course, they might pick up some, but their real bread and butter is providing reliable, dependable, mass service. The Bulk Carrier can offer things others can't, and one of the most important is long term service. A refinery owner doesn't want a ship to pick up a load of metal once and leave, never to return and leaving the owner to secure transport again in time for the next load. He wants a contract- every three months you pick up a thousand tons.

Subsidized Merchants are paid by a government, or in some cases another organization, to maintain a link between two points. The ship and crew may even belong to the government. Typically, the subsidized merchant will move cargo that is important but otherwise unprofitable- bulk food, for example- or provides service that the powers that be have decided is too important to risk interruption. Couriers frequently fall into this category, being paid by a government to provide parcel service. A subsidy need not be 100%- a Free Trader may accept a payment to visit a small outpost once a year that is otherwise unprofitable. A Subsidized Merchant does not necessarily mean a government-subsidized merchant. A corporation might have its own freighter travelling and forth on company business, if the corporation is unwilling to rely on the vagaries of profit oriented traders.

Free Traders, sometimes called Tramps, typically have a small ship, and as the name implies, are beholden to no one but themselves for routes and schedules. This freedom allows them the agility to pick up the special cargos the big carriers overlook and the subsidized merchants can't deviate for. Typically, Free Traders are the first to adapt to a change in economic conditions, and eventually get squeezed out by the other kinds of Merchants, which are more efficient in the long run. Because of the variety and constant need to adapt and outthink the market, Free Traders are used as the basis for Merchant campaigns more often than the other types. Most of this guide is geared towards being a Free Trader or Itinerant Trader.

Itinerants , the most common sort of starfaring ,merchants, have no starship of their own. And this isn't a bad thing. With no ship burning profit each day it waits on its departure, and no need to worry about the care of his ship, the Itinerant can afford to spend more time being his or her own sales agent, freight forwarder, and market scout. He can spend the time needed to make connections and contacts the other merchants have to pass up. The itinerant leases space on a ship, generally a big freighter, who's staff is too busy to chase the small specialty cargoes the itinerant tracks down. Frequently, the space is given out in return for services rendered as part of the freighter's crew during a journey- this is one way a big ship frequently operates undermanned. Sometimes, a substantial portion of a crew consists of itinerant traders. On rare occasion, it is practically the entire crew- a group of traders merely charters a ship and its key officers to make a run for them. The drawback, of course, is that the Itinerant is always beholden to schedules of others, making it hard to make promises and keep commitments. The itinerant trader is not the ship captain's first priority. It is a real bummer when you score a great deal involving four containers of cargo, and find the only available freighter will only allot space for two of them. Also, the Itinerant trader risks being a competitor to the ships he depends on. He has to stay small, and act as a sort of symbiotic parasite.

Passenger Carriers are really just a specialized version of one of the above types. (What do you call the "Itinerant Trader" who specializes in moving passengers, on ships owned by others? A Tour Director.)

The fact is, from the spacer's point of view, a passenger is just another kind of cargo (especially if they're hibernating) although usually one of the more difficult types of cargo. However, from the spacer's point of view, although there is substantial overlap in function, with cargo ships moving passengers and passenger ships moving cargo, it does take a different personality type to devote oneself to the moving of people, and be successful at it. Also, whereas most cargo space can accommodate cargo of different types, most cargo holds won't accommodate passengers. This leads to passenger ships tending towards radically different designs, and so the class is included here as a sub type of Merchant.

Being a Merchant Prince

You don't think it's easy, do you? What do you think you're going to do as small time trader, float into a star system, look up in your little guide to see that Planet A exports fruit, buy fruit, and take it to planet B that imports fruit? Oh, right, that's a sure way to be second best. Second best will pay the bills if you have a big, bulk carrier- provided you can keep it full, of course- but for the little tramps of space, the Free Traders, second best is a dead end. It's first prize or no prize. So the guide says they export fruit. What's the crop like this year? Are there any exceptional values? Any hot fads? Trends in Cuisine? Breaking market news that will affect the sale price? If you're going to be a merchant prince, expect to work at it.

1. Know your end of the market. You cannot compete on a cost per ton basis with the big bulk carriers. Forget it. Even if you could, that's not what you do. The big bulk suppliers and buyers want dependable, regular trips, back and forth, and the competition for these runs is fierce. You want the service end of the market. You want to add in your wits and your agility, and your ability to adjust your schedule, to maximize value for your clients. And what do your clients want? Not 10,000 tons of titanium alloy every three months. They want special, unusual, or rare goods, or they want exceptional treatment. You're looking for the speciality items, the cargos that the bulk carriers won't bother with. You'll make it your business to bother with them. All you have to do is find them.

2. Study, Study, Study. Take an interest in the economics of a system, beyond the basics. Remember that when you see a snapshot, never assume it's in some kind of static equilibrium. Look particularly at future plans and be ready to move aggressively to take advantage of changes. Never turn away a source of information, and if it’s a private, unofficial source, so much the better.

3. Update, Update, Update. Immediately upon entering a star system, get the latest economic figures, fast. Really hotshot merchant princes have an agent on planet, either an employee or a free lance consultant, who has done this ahead of time and will be prepared to brief as soon as the ship enters local space. Here is where you get your edge. Studying will tell you what, typically, is good and bad about the system. Updating will tell you what's good and bad NOW.

3. Cultivate personal relationships. You need friends and contacts. You also need to press the flesh, and meet your clients and patrons face to face. You need to know who you can trust, and this is best learned by meeting in person.

4. Know your cargo. There are two kinds of freight. Speculative cargo is stuff you buy and sell yourself. You make a profit on the price difference between systems. Regular Freight is other people's cargo- you're just being paid to move it from place to place. It's not always simple- in fact, if it was simple, it would be going out on a bulk carrier. As a Free Trader, you might find yourself handling difficult and challenging cargo. Hazardous materials. High value shipments needing special security precautions. Livestock raises all sorts of problems. Moving a shipment of live bees to an agricultural colony can leave you with stories to tell. Pity no one's been able to figure out how to get the little beggars to hibernate, and you can't just send the eggs because a hive will only raise its own larvae. So beehives are shipped live- and carefully. Learn this sort of stuff and be ready to do what others are reluctant to.

5. Get the Parcel trade. If you have a good ship, and you have at least two regular stops- very regular, not "Oh, yeah, we go there a lot" you can try for the parcel contract. This is usually with a government, they will charter for so many cubic meters per month. The Good: It's usually easy cargo, and lightweight per cubic meter. It can be anything people put in little boxes to send to each other- parts from a manufacturer, a new sweater from Aunt Millie. All you have to do is get it to the proper parcel post station. The Bad: You have to win a contract. Not only do you have to be cheap, you have to be reliable.

6. Manage the Freight Forwarders.. The Freight Forwarder is the guy who matches cargos to starships. You don't have the time to do it. Do you really want to hang around a starport for weeks setting up freight contracts with shippers? Of course, the freight forwarder will want his percentage. But its usually worth it. You definitely want a few good frreight forwarders on your side. And you want them loyal. Don't become the "other guy"- you know, the shipper that gets the second rate cargoes while his pal gets the prime runs. If your business grows, think about making an employee a freight forwarder/ticket agent.

7. Watch the Competition. And remember they watch you. When you run across a wonderfully profitable run, they will want a piece of it as soon as they learn of it. This means you can never sit and rest. Learn who their friends are. Someone in the pocket of a rival will never cut you an even break. Remember, a competitor who doesn't overlap your turn is really an ally- for the moment, at least. With these merchants, you can pool resources and information, and swap cargos bound for each others' routes.

8. Special Cargos. These are the most important part of the Free Trader's life. Not so good as Speculative Cargo- fir example, if you buy 20 tons of automated vehicle washing equipment, what are the odds you're going to find a quick buyer for it? But, as these cargos are not shipped on a regular basis, the big bulk carriers usually can't be bothered. So here is an opportunity. This is where the Free Trader is actually needed by the customer.

9. Never Fly Empty

10. Keep to the high end of the market. Avoid competing with the bulk carriers, and yet still carry bulk products, by looking for quality. Don't just carry the run of the mill standard quality. Go into that orchard, or that shop, and make sure you are taking the very best quality, the sought after, small production run stuff. Put some effort into it. Even grain can make money if it’s the very best grain. You can't compete with a regular load of metal, but perhaps a smelter needs to ship a special sample shipment, or a shipment of a rare alloy being used for a particular non-recurring purpose.

11. Watch the calendar. Where you will be on Christmas? More to the point, will it be a place that celebrates Christmas, and will you have arrived with a hold full of gift items for sale on the local market?

12. Develop markets. Reserve some of your speculative cargo space for experiments.

13. Create a reputation. You want a good reputation, of course, but any reputation is sometimes better than none. Make sure people know you. If need be, buy a parrot and sprinkle your conversations with "Aye," and "Yar,".

Other Things to Know:

Shorting the Crew: The standard ship's crew roster does not get filled on a commercially or privately owned merchant ship to the same extent that it does on a government vessel. In fact, minimizing the crew is a high art among merchant ship captains. There are three reasons why merchant ship owners put such high regard on keeping the crew small:

1. Ship crews cost money.
2. Ship crews occupy space that can be sold to passengers.
3. Ship crews cost money.

The problem is this: all of a positions in a "standard" crew roster do have a role to perform. On a merchant ship, then, the trick is to find out what roles don't have to be performed at certain times. Here are a few approach to short staffing a ship.

1. Just don't do it. Some functions which are necessary for a warship may not be for a freighter. Communications officer? On a warship, a communications officer has to keep up tight beam connections with a variety of other vessels, continuously for a great period of time, perhaps days on end, so a relief is needed. On a freighter, the places you have to talk to are those with pretty much known locations. The ship's computer should have no more trouble aiming a tight beam communicator at a planet than the computer on the Voyager space probe does. Maybe now and then you have to do something fancy. OK, so then you temporarily abandon another position. Your ship can't change course and change communication targets at the same time, but think of the money you save. Navigator? Again, a freighter has an easy time. You know where you are going , and the navigation is easier. No need for a relief, one guy can do it. Sensors, also, are an "as needed" item.

2. Do it later. The big engineering crews on some ships are needed to handle the maintenance load. Save money by deferring maintenance until you hit port, then letting a professional team give your powerplant a tune-up.

3. Automate it. Some functions (with the approval of the game master) can be done away with through robotics.

Loading and Unloading.

Plane, Starship, truck, it's pretty much the same. In space, the lack of gravity will make things easier, and harder, and momentum doesn't go away, so the times don't change even though you don't really have to worry as much about crane capacity.

Unaided, a strong human being can load or unload about 1/2 a ton in an hour. To do this, the cargo must be in workable packages smaller than a pallet, obviously. Containers are right out.

A semi-mechanized work device that can move pallets such as a skid loader will move, on the average, 5 tons an hour with an operator. A fully mechanized device such as a forklift can move 10 tons an hour. No more than4 individuals, or 2 skid loaders or forklifts can unload a single truck, railroad car, shuttle, or container sized cargo hold without getting in each others way. In zero gravity, there are other devices which take the place of forklifts.

A specialized container handling device like a gantry crane or a specialized small spacecraft will move a container from a hold in about 10 minutes of work. Depending on the system, they take from 10 to 30 minuted to set up. A non specialized lifting system will take 50% longer to work and twice as long to set up. A container handling device needs a "footprint" of 30 meters x 100 meters to work, of which the smaller dimension is the length of the ship's hull that is taken up. Larger ships can thus be served by a number of devices, as can railroad trains. Pallet moving can occur in an around container moving, but will take 25% longer. A crane or other device can also lift pallets or individual vehicles instead of containers. Pallets will be moved in 4 pallet bundles. Continuous track systems can move containers, pallets, or vehicles much faster. They need a 50 meter by 200 meter footprint and move at much greater speed, moving a container every 2 minutes and a bundle of pallets, or a vehicle, in 3 minutes. These are less common devices and are found at large, busy ports.

Example: A "Thorez class Courier taxis under a Gantry crane, and opens its hold. The Thorez is small and can be served by only one crane. Its 400 m3 contains 10 shipping containers, and 10 pallets. The pallets average 1 ton each. The gantry crane needs minimal time to set up, as the Thorez positions itself right under it. The Thorez's containers are unloaded in 10+ 10x10 minutes, or just under 2 hours. During this time, 1 man with a forklift truck has more than enough time to pull off all the pallets, which takes 1.25 hours. So, 2 hours later, all the cargo from the Thorez is in a terminal warehouse, or loaded aboard trucks for local delivery.

Effects of load level: If a hold is filled over 80%, it can only be unloaded in a "last on, first off" mode. If the hold is filled less than 80% but more than 50%, it can be unloaded in any order, except that any order other than "last on, first off" adds 50% to unloading time. If less than 50% full, there is no penalty for specific unloading orders. If the cargo has been poorly planned, and you cannot get the cargo you want out using the "last on, first off" method, because some cargo is travelling through to a next destination, you will have to unload cargo to reach the desired cargo, then re-load the "through" cargo.

Example: An "Atlas" class freighter stops at Broward while returning to Earth after a long voyage from Doris and is connected up to a single track offloading system at the orbital terminal. It has 300 standard containers aboard, a full load, but only 100 are being offloaded here (for transfer to a ship bound for Hermes). Its base unloading time for 100 containers is 210 minutes, or 3 hours and 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the ship's captain did not know, at Doris, that some cargo would be offloaded for transfer, and did not plan his load that way. The freighter then offloads 60 containers to get to the 80% mark. This takes 130 minutes. Of the 60, 20 are Hermes bound. 80 more containers must be pulled selectively, taking another 240 minutes. Finally, 40 containers are put back, taking 80 minutes. The whole affair took 450 minutes, or 7 hours and 30 minutes. Add an hour for breaks and lunch!

Roll on, Roll off cargo is driven off. One man can drive off 1 vehicle in 1 minute, but be sure to add time for the following; driving to parking/asembly area, returning to ship, and getting a vehicle that has been

prepped for transport into "ready to drive" status. This involves a check of fuel and fluids, and removing the protective coverings placed on some surfaces, removing straps and chocks, etc.

Good management: An appropriate skill check by a manager with an appropriate skill (see "Loadmaster Skill"), assuming the crew is trained, will multiply the unloading time by .8 while incurring no safety penalty.

Accelerated loading. At times, a crew can work at higher pace. During a time of crisis, for example, during wartime or in response to disaster, workers need very little prodding to do so. Multiply the loading time by .8 (cumulative with "good management, if both are appropriate). A other times, some sort of incentive is needed to get this benefit. There will be a safety penalty, though.

Dump it on the dock and go: The above times assume the loads are either going onto the ship, or are coming off and are going to some holding area, or waiting trucks, trains, etc. If the cargo is just being stacked at the side, cut 30% off the time. There is no bonus to loading time, though, if cargo is being loaded from dockside or from nearby transport.

Loadmaster Skill : A character with this skill is familiar with the operation of cargo handling machines, inspecting cargo, the safe handling and stowage of cargo of all sorts, and can optimize complex cargo loadouts for most efficient shipping.

Loadmaster skill can provide a modifier to such tasks as:

Using a cargo handling machine such as crane, walker, or forklift.

Checking to see whether cargo becomes dislodged, or shifts as a result of a violent maneuver, rough landing or storm at sea, etc.

Checking to see if a mislabelled or incorrect cargo is detected.

Avoiding safety problems due to incompatible cargos.

Hitting the target with cargos dropped from air or orbit.

Cutting time off loading and unloading tasks.

Properly sling loading an awkward or unusual cargo for hoisting.