Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY61.142 to FY61.172

This was a busy month in the timeline. There are a number of threads that all piled up on each other. The Dramune Run (SFKH1) is nearing completion, the Mutiny on the Elanor Moraes (SFKH2) occurs, the HSS History’s Hope continues it’s journey, the sathar make their final push on the saurian worlds to eliminate them, and we see the completion of the first ships for the new Strike Force Meteor come out of the shipyards.

In some cases, I had six different events on a single day. That definitely wasn’t planned. If I was really planning this out all in advance and not just doing it a bit at a time, I probably would have spread some of these things out differently. But, given the way I add in events and work out their consequences, this is how they fell out and it probably is more organic and accurate that way anyway. Sometimes events all pile up on each other.

It was also a tough month on the posting side. Because there were so many intertwined and detailed events happening, I had to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and so got behind in writing the updates and getting them posted. If you’re following along on Twitter, you would have noticed that there were large gaps of no daily posts followed by floods of posts over several days as I worked on getting caught up.

In any case, we made it through the month. Here are the events happening in the Frontier over the last 31 days.

Date (FY)	Events
61.142	The last shipment delivered by Obar Enterprises to Triad (Cassidine), a shipment of rubies from Pale (Truane’s Star), triggered a flag in a resource tracking system on Triad due to the speed of the high profile delivery. It is flagged for future investigation.
61.143	The UPFS Eleanor Moraes successfully arrives in the Waller Nexus system and begins scanning the system for planets.
61.144	The Gullwind successfully jumps into the Cassidine system and begins deceleration toward Triad station.
61.145	Strike Force Nova leaves Cassidine and begins accelerating for a jump to the Dramune system.
61.146	– Calculations nearly complete, the HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for a jump to YS06. If successful, this will complete the jump route between YS06 and YS05. – Initial scans by the UPFS Eleanor Moraes detects a potentially habitable planet orbiting Waller Nexus. An atmoprobe is launched toward the planet. They adjust their deceleration vector to take them into orbit around the planet which they dub Mahg Mar.
61.147	– After scanning the OFS179 system for 20 days, the 7th Saurian ark ship has identified all the planets near the star and none are suitable for colonization. They begin working on jump calculations to their next system. – Results of the atmoprobe sent to Mahg Mar indicate that the atmosphere is breathable but contains trace toxins. Breathing masks will be required at all time when outside on the surface. – The 8th Saurian Ark Ship is completed. With sathar ships in the system and suspecting that the ships that razed Rock (Sessar) will be joining them, the shakedown cruise is skipped and loading begins immediately.
61.148	– Arriving at Triad station (Cassidine), the crew of the Gullwind replenish supplies and spend a day decompressing from their recent encounters before making the final leg of their trip to Inner Reach (Dramune). – Having confirmed the destruction of the saurians on Rock, the Sathar fleet in the Sessar system begins accelerating toward the Sauria system to join with the other fleet there.
61.149	– The UPFS Eleanor Moraes settles into orbit around Mahg Mar and begins preparation for landing on the surface of the planet. – Fearing that this might be the last Ark Ship launched, the Saurians move all of the remaining cultural artifacts that were planned to be spread out across the remaining 12 Ark Ships under construction to this one. All resources are dedicated to getting this ship underway before the expected sathar attack occurs. – The Gullwind leaves Triad station (Cassidine) and begins accelerating for the final jump back to Dramune.
61.150	– The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps to the YS06 system and begins decelerating while planning their next jump. – A day out from Triad station, the Gullwind is intercepted by an assault scout, the MESS Maltharia. In the ensuing battle, the assault scout is damaged but takes out the Gullwind’s engines. It disengages, leaving the freighter adrift. (SFKH1)
61.151	– The first two ships for the new Strike Force Meteor emerge from the Pan Galactic shipyards orbiting Gran Quivera (Prenglar). They depart to Morgaine’s World (Prenglar) to begin exercises with elements of Task Force Prenglar. – Unable to repair the engines outside a spacedock, the crew of the Gullwind call back to Triad for assistance. The UPFS Melinda McCoy (destroyer) and UPFS Dirk (assault scout) respond to their mayday. (SFKH1) – After hearing the Gullwind’s crew’s story, the Melinda McCoy’s captain, Commodre Klat-tic M’tal, a vrusk, arranges a tug to take them back to Triad. He also radios ahead to SF Nova, current decelerating toward Inner Reach (Drammune) with the story. (SFKH1)
61.152	– After three days in orbit generating a preliminary map of Mahg Mar’s surface, the crew of the UPFS Eleanor Moraes selects a preliminary landing site and the ship descends to the planet’s surface. Work begins immediately on overhauling the ship’s engines. – The HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for the jump to their next target system, a binary M dwarf system 7 light years away.
61.153	– The sathar attack fleet from Sessar arrives in the Sauria system. The remains of the sathar fleet still in the system begin accelerating toward Kischen, the saurian homeworld. The Battle Rays tailing this fleet radio the news home and begin accelerating home as well. – The Gullwind arrives back at the CDC shipyards around Triad. Luckily there is room available in the shipyard and the Gullwind is immediately admitted for repairs.
61.154	– Calculations complete, the Saurian ark ship begins accelerating for their jump to the FS58 system, an F3 start, probably too hot for them but more likely than the M0 star they are currently at. – Strike Force Nova arrives at Inner Reach (Dramune), they only spend a day at the station before continuing on to Fromeltar.
61.155	– The decelerating fleet from Sessar is detected by the saurian forces, three days away from the planet. – Fully repaired, and short on cash, the Gullwind departs the CDC shipyards and once again begins accelerating toward Dramune. (SFKH1)
61.156	– Overhaul of the first engine complete, the captain of the UPFS Eleanor Moraes, Winston Marlboro, authorizes an initial scouting expedition to survey the surrounding area. Preparations begin for an expedition that will leave in the morning. (SFKH2) – After a day of acceleration, the crew of the Gullwind have noticed that they have a shadow, a pair of ships following their course but always remaining just at the edge of radar range. They suspect it is the UPF Melinda McCoy and Dirk but cannnot confirm this. (SFKH1)
61.157	– With the sathar fleet less than a day away, loading of the last Ark Ship is aborted with only 90% of the material goods and 50% of passengers loaded. The ship departs Kischen with a small military escort and heads toward the Precipice system, the last remaining saurian system. – A small detachment of the sathar fleet breaks off from decelerating and begins accelerating in an attempt to catch the departing ark ship. – The HSS History’s Hope successfully completes the jump to the new system, which they designate as YS07. Decelerations commences as they prepare to plot the return leg of the jump. – Shortly after Captain Marlboro, along with most of the ship’s crew, departs to begin surveying the surrounding area via airship, Bill Terry, first officer of the Eleanor Moraes, turns on the remaining crew and stuns or otherwise incapacitates them, taking over the ship. (SFKH2) – With the ship secure, Terry remotely orders the survey robot accompanying the airship to attack and destroy the airship. The captain is injured as is the chief engineer. After a brief message from Terry explaining that he is abandoning them on the planet, he cuts all communications between the survey party and the ship. (SFKH2) – Salvaging what equipment they can, the uninjured members of the survey party are ordered by Captain Marlboro to take the survey robot and proceed overland to recapture the Eleanor Moraes. There is still 45 hours of work to do on the ship’s engines before Terry can leave so they must hurry. (SFKH2)
61.158	– Battle of Kischen – The remaining saurian forces engage the attacking sathar vessels. After hours of battle, the saurian forces are destroyed but the sathar vessels are similarly devastated. – The remaining sathar forces around Kischen begin bombarding the planet, paying particular attention to heavily industrialized areas. The remaining ark ships under constructions are destroyed. – Three days out from Inner Reach, a small group of ships breaks off from SF Nova and begin decelerating back toward the inner system. – The crew of the Eleanor Moraes continues their travel back toward the ship. Bill Terry uses some of the survey robots remaining at the ship to attempt to ambush the party while en route but they manage to defeat both of his attempts and overcome the natural obstacles in their way. (SFKH2)
61.159	– The 7th saurian Ark Ship successfully jumps to the FS58 system. They begin decelerating and scanning for planets. – Strike Force Nova makes the jump to the Fromeltar system and begins decelerating toward Terledrom. – Realizing that he won’t get the engine overhaul completed before the rest of the crew arrives, Bill Terry begins preparing the Eleanor Moraes for liftoff anyway. (SFKH2) – The Eleanor Moraes crew arrives at the ship before Terry is ready to lift off. Breaching the defenses he has put in place they gain access to the ship. In a tense standoff on the bridge, the crew convinces Terry to surrender. (SFKH2)
61.160	– The Gullwind makes the jump to the Dramune system and begins decelerating toward Inner Reach. Almost immediately, their shadow reappears and hail the Gullwind, identifying themselves as the Melinda McCoy and the Dirk. They begin decelerating with the Gullwind, slowly closing the gap between the ships. (SFKH1) – With the ship secured, and the captain and chief engineer recovered from the airship crash site, the crew of the UPFS Eleanor Moraes send a subspace message back to Theseus informing the Frontier Expeditionary Force HQ of the recent events and their status. (SFKH2)
61.161	– The last saurian Ark Ship successfully jumps to the Precipice system. They immediately radio ahead to the outpost there to prepare for a full evacuation as they begin decelerating toward the planet Edge. The sathar ships pursuing them return to the main force orbiting Kischen. – Two assault scouts, part of the new Strike Force Meteor, are completed at the Triad starship construction center. The UPF crew takes command of the vessels and begin accelerating for a jump to Prenglar. – The UPFS Eleanor Moraes receives a response from the FEF HQ that the CMS Osprey is being dispatched from White Light with material and personnel to effect repairs. The Moraes crew is to continue their primary mission of surveying the planet until the Osprey arrives in 28 days. (SFKH2)
61.162	– Deceleration complete, the HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for the jump back to YS06. – After two days of deceleration, just as they are approaching the orbit of Outer Reach, the Gullwind and it’s escorts are enveloped by a powerful jamming field preventing all communications. They are assaulted by 9 vessels (3 frigates, 2 corvettes, & 4 assault scouts) that include the Outer Reach militia. (SFKH1) – After a brief but intense battle, the UPF vessels are destroyed and the Gullwind is disabled and taken in tow. The Gullwind and UPF ships manage to destroy one of the corvettes and an Outer Reach militia assault scout as well as severely damage one of the frigates. While under tow, the jamming field is maintained to prevent communication. (SFKH1)
61.163	– Strike Force Nova arrives in orbit around Terledrom (Fromeltar). They will remain in the system for 16 days while it waits for the ships detached in the Dramune system to catch up. – The CMS Osprey begins accelerating for Theseus and the first leg of their mission to rescue the UPFS Eleanor Moraes. (SFKH3)
61.164	– Now slowed in the inner system, the 7th saurian Ark Ship discovers a habitable planet. However, due to the intensity of the star (F3 vs their native G8), the high gravity (1.5g) and slow rotation (40 hours), they deem the planet unsuitable. Preparations are made to depart the system. – The Gullwind arrives at Darkworld station, home the Malthar who orchestrated their capture. The crew is overwhelmed my the Malthar’s robots when whey refuse to leave the ship.
61.165	– The 7th saurian Ark Ship begins accelerating for their next jump which will take them to the Theseus system. – Having destroyed all visible traces of the saurian population on the planet Kischen, the sathar fleet begins accelerating toward the Precipice system.
61.166	The 8th saurian Ark Ship arrives in orbit around the planet Edge (Precipice) and immediately deploys shuttles to start loading the population.
61.167	The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to YS06 completely charting the route between the two systems. They relay the jump data back to their home foundation on Histran via subspace radio and begin the return journey back to YS07.
61.168	After incorporating lessons learned from the false start and several weeks of successful operations, Synthcorp’s “Muffin Button” is declared a success and begins to roll out in other locations on Inner Reach.
61.169	With the population and as many supplies as possible loaded from Edge, the 8th saurian arkship begins accelerating out of the Precipice system. They decide to follow the general direction of the 7th Ark ship and begin accelerating toward OFS191.
61.170	– The two new UPF assault scouts arrive at Morgaine’s World (Prenglar) and join up with their sister ships exercising with Task Force Prenglar. – The 7th saurian Ark Ship successfully jumps into the Theseus system where they immediately detect radio signals from the inhabitants and ships in the system. – Vectoring their deceleration to stop deep in the outer system, the saurians begin studying the signals coming from the inner system. They are not detected by the system’s inhabitants. – The sathar ships make the jump to the Precipice system. They detect the saurian ark ship beginning its acceleration out of the system. Several ships are detached at high speed to try to intercept it.
61.171	The CMS Osprey arrives at Minotaur station (Theseus) where they are briefed on all the details available about their jump route and the Moraes crew and status. They take on additional supplies for the stricken ship. (SFKH3)
61.172	Two more assault scouts, destined to be part of Strike Force Meteor, are completed at the Streel shipyards orbiting Pale (Truane’s Star). The UPF crews take possession of the ships and begin accelerating for a jump to Dixon’s Star and then to Prenglar.

And here’s the full timeline to download.

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

HSS History’s Hope – part 2

This isn’t the post I had planned to do this week but since my game session last Wednesday fell through, I can’t post the details of that adventure yet. So I’m going to revisit the HSS History’s Hope this week. Hopefully we’ll get that game session in on Wednesday and I can post up all the goodies from that adventure.

A few weeks back I was contacted by long time game fan Matt Crymble about the HSS History’s Hope and the timeline project in general. Matt’s on-line involvement in Star Frontiers predates even my one as he is one of the original list serv members from back in the day that I was never a part of. We featured some of Matt’s creations in early issues of the Frontier Explorer and he created the Khad’dan, or yazirian honor blade that figures into a lot of the fan material.

He asked me if I was interested in any help on creating the ship and while I already had KH stats and partial deck plans for the ship, he did a wonderful write-up on the ship’s history. So let’s look at the ship a bit closer.

The HSS History’s Hope

History of History’s Hope

This is the write-up Matt sent me:

The HSS History’s Hope began life as an Imp Class Yacht which was modified into a racing yacht. The vessel class was initially selected for reliability and comfortable long term crew habitation, both critical for the exhausting pace of multi-system racing. Its speed was boosted at the expense of some maneuverability and as a racer it held a distinguished career even though it was not considered a champion. Unfortunately, the highly competitive nature of interstellar racing meant that the ship was too expensive to maintain without champion results and it was eventually made available for sale.

The vessel’s reliability and comfortable crew accommodations also made it a good choice as an exploration vessel and the extra bracing that was added for the increased acceleration from a standard Imp Class make it a sturdy little ship. The racer was slightly modified again after being clandestinely purchased by True Yazira and was rechristened the HSS (Histran Star Ship) History’s Hope out of the Scree Fron system.

Little modification was needed to turn the vessel into an exploration ship, though extra food and fuel stores as well as crew comforts and spare parts were added. Additionally the ship’s precision racing navigation station, known as the “sailing bridge” aboard ship, remains unchanged physically having only received new software to assist with the difficult astrogation tasks of plotting entirely new jump routes.

Because of its status as an exploration vessel the standard radar system was upgraded to include a planetary radar mapper and a planetary scanning system. The planetary scanning system can also work as a limited energy sensor in a focused area in an emergency while in interstellar space. The History’s Hope retains the ability to land on atmospheric worlds with habitable G ratings. The Assault Rocket launcher has been removed though a small part of the mechanism remains and parts were later added to give the vessel the ability to launch atmoprobes.

Crew compliment for a ship this size is small. This is a holdover from its racing days when extra crew was considered extraneous and the vessel is usually crewed with experienced spacers to ensure all needed skills are present. The extra crew berths are taken up by scientists and other specialists with most of the remainder being used for the extra storage necessary for such a long journey.

I hadn’t thought of the idea of an old racing ship, but I had intended it to be HS 4 and an old yacht. So I love this backstory for the ship. There are just a few things in his write-up that I am going to change. Otherwise, it will stand as is.

Modifications

First, it wasn’t “clandestinely purchased by True Yazira.” At least not explicitly. The ship is owned by the Yazira Heritage Foundation (YHF) which is a public non-profit organization. The True Yazira society is a major funder of the YHF, but not as an organizational endeavor. Rather the YHF has many private donors who also happen to be True Yazira members. It’s a happy coincidence. Although not surprising as the goals of the YHF directly align with some of the goals of the True Yazira society and it’s only natural that members of one would donate to the other.

Second, the ship was modified to have a lot more crew that I think Matt was intending. In the end, the ship has a total crew capacity of 24. Actually, there are 24 crew members, the capacity is actually a bit higher but that would require double bunking.

In addition to the ability to launch atmoprobes, I also added in a landing drone and a remote probe, as well as adding in a full-sized (20 being) lifeboat, a small (10-person) lifeboat, a workpod, and small launch. The truth is, a HS 4 ship starting to be pretty large. Designing the ship with my new starship construction system that takes volume into account, and adding in all the systems I needed, created a ship that was within a couple hundred cubic meters of the standard HS4 volume, a difference of just a few percent which is well within the design variation limits given in the rules.

I like how he indicated that it probably had a Deluxe Astrogation suite. That was definitely in the cards for this ship and it would have been upgraded to such if it didn’t already have it. In my game, having the Deluxe Astrogation suite gives a +10% to all astrogation skills. Something definitely needed when charting unknown routes.

While the planetary radar mapper and a planetary scanning system are not standard equipment listed in the rules, I like the description. I did add energy sensors to the ship, so that have that at full capablitily, not just a limited one as described in Matt’s text.

Full Ship’s Stats

Here are the full stats for the ship as I wrote it up:

HS:	4
ADF:	4
MR:	3
DCR:	32
Engines:	2x Class A Atomic
Crew Berths:	24 single occupancy cabins – Journey Class equivalent
Weapons:	LB
Defenses:	RH
Communications Equipment:	videocom radio, subspace radio, Intercom system
Sensor Systems:	deluxe astrogation suite, radar, energy sensors, skin sensors, external camera system
Life Support:	Primary: 600 days for 35 beings Backup: 200 days for 35 beings
Exploration Equipment:	2x atmoprobe, 1x remote probe, 1x landing drone, 1x laboratory
Computer Level:	4
Computer Programs:	Astrogation 4, Atomic Drives 4, Computer Lockout 4, Damage Control 2, Alarm 2, Laser Battery 1, Skin Sensors 1, Guidance/Analysis 3, Anlysis 3, Maintenance 1, Information Storage 6, Communications 3, Language 4, Robot Management 4
Vehicles:	small launch, large lifeboat, small lifeboat, workpod
Other Equipment:	30 spacesuits, laser power torch, 2x engineer’s toolkit, full redundant backup computer, 300 atomic fuel pellets

Deck plans will come in a future post. I have them mostly sketched out but still have a couple decks to go and need to make digital versions of them to share.

The Journey So Far

That’s the ship. Let’s next turn to looking at the crew and their travels up until now.

Crew

The crew is fairly large for this small of a ship, but the truth is, there is plenty of room inside the hull for them all. The crew size, as given in the stat block above, is twenty-four. It breaks down like this:

2 pilots
3 astrogators, one of which is the captain of the expedition
2 engineers
2 energy weapons specialists
2 technicians
1 roboticist
1 computer specialist (in addition to the astrogators)
1 psycho-social specialist
1 doctor
2 environmentalists
4 security personnel
1 linguist
2 archeologists

The first half of the crew are concerned with getting them to their destination or keeping the ship systems and crew running on the journey. The second half are merely passengers for the initial voyage, their skills will be needed if their destination turns out to actually be Yazira.

The Journey

When I first posted about the trip, the ship had left the Frontier and started into the Yazira sector and had made several misjumps. In the intervening months, they have recovered from those early errors, made more, recovered again, and continue to make progress toward their goal. Here is the sector map with the systems they have visited and the jump routes plotted.

The Full map. Click for full sized version.

The route to YS07 is a bit of a spoiler, but only because I’m a bit behind on posting the timeline updates. I should have already posted the successful jump from YS06 to YS07 by now. In fact, today they are beginning their acceleration back to YS06. Those updates will show up in the next few days. At this point, they are about 1/3 of the way across the Yazira Sector to their destination and not quite half way from Scree Fron.

What Does the Future Hold?

The ship is coming up on its one year anniversary since it’s retrofit. That means that they will have to decide if they want to double back to the Frontier for their annual maintenance, or skip it this first year and push on. Even making a high speed transit, it’s on the order of 50 days back to Scree Fron and another week to the nearest SCC. Then 5-15 days of maintenance. And then that same amount of travel time to get back to where they left off. That’s over a quarter of a year of travel. They’ll have to decide if the chance of a system breakdown is worth it.

Also, they were attacked back in YS01. There may still be ships there. And most probably there will be hostile ships in the Frontier itself. They have enough fuel and life support to make it all the way to their destination assuming no major mishaps. But they may have to return for supplies anyway.

The next jump after YS07 is going to be a long one, either 10 or 12 light years. And then some long ones after that, so there is plenty of chance for mishap. There’s a reason this part of space is called the Vast Expanse, the stars are few and far between and the crew is starting to run into that now.

I know what the future holds for the ship in certain areas, but I am actually rolling for all the astrogation skill checks as they come up so I never know if they will succeed in a jump or not. Which means I don’t know how successful they will be or what detours will come up. We’ll have to find out together.

Final Thoughts

That’s it for this post. I’m working on the deck plans and will post them, along with another progress update, once they are done. I’m also planning on a 3D model of the ship once the deck plans are finished. Although that might not be for a couple more months. But those are things you can look forward to.

What thoughts to you have on the travels of the HSS History’s Hope? Are there things about the ship or the expedition you’d like to know more about? Do you have ideas of things they might run into? Let me know in the comments below.

Quality of Spacefleet Enlisted Personnel

This thought has been bouncing around in my head for a long while now so I figured I’d get it out of my head and on (digital) paper so it would quit distracting me. It doesn’t have anything specific to do with any of the projects I’m currently working on but I’m sure it will apply at some point in the future. Regardless, it’s definitely good background/setting material so I’ll label it as such. While the specifics are related to Star Frontiers, the general though process can apply in any setting you are working on.

The “Problem”

In the Knight Hawks Campaign Book (p 48-49), it says:

Although the officers of the Spacefleet represent some of the finest individuals in the Frontier, the same cannot be said for the crews of Spacefleet ships.
The enlisted members of the fleet come from all walks of life. The fleet always is short of crew members. so the requirements for enlistment are not rigorous. No checking is done regarding a crew member’s background or abilities; consequently, a great amount of galactic riffraff has found a home in the crew’s quarters of Spacefleet vessels.
Many of these crews become fine fighting units; the combat record of the Spacefleet is impressive. Occasionally, however, a charismatic bully will win the respect or inspire the fear of his mates to the point of inciting a mutiny. More than one Spacefleet vessel has dumped its officers into space and disappeared to the fringes of the Frontier to embark on a career of piracy and plunder.

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with this idea for a couple of reasons. One, I’m not sure I agree that they are always short of recruits, unless it working for Spacefleet is a really bad job. It doesn’t feel to me that the crew sizes are all that big. The other is the skills required to make off with a ship. Let’s look at those each in turn. Maybe I’ll change my mind by the end of this, or maybe not.

Short Staffed

Let’s start by looking at the staffing issue. There are estimates of crew size for each of Starfleet’s vessels in the opening of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book (KHCB, p. 5) where it describes the different ships. From that we get the following crew estimates:

Fighters: 1
Assault Scout: 4-6
Frigate: 25-30
Destroyer: 40-50
Minelayer: 30-40
Assault Transport: no crew size give but 600-1000 troops, estimate 100 crew
Light Cruiser: 70-100
Heavy Cruiser: no crew size – estimate (based on the battleship) of 300-400
Assault Carrier: 300-400
Battleship: 400

Now I’m going to ignore the Assault Transports in this analysis, at least to start, as they are mentioned nowhere else in the rules and there aren’t even game chits for them. But I’ll probably come back to them later.

If we take the Order of Battle from the Second Sathar War game (KHCB, p. 55) as the baseline size of Spacefleet, we have the following number of ships:

Fighters: 16
Assault Scouts: 14
Frigates: 7
Destroyers: 5
Minelayers: 4
Light Cruisers: 8
Heavy Cruisers: 1
Assault Carriers: 2
Battleships: 3

Now I’d argue that the minelayer in the unattached ships list should be an assault carrier, but it won’t change substantially the argument.

Using that list of ships, what is the total crew size of Spacefleet? We’re going to ignore the fighters, as those are single crew vessels and are going to be manned by officers, not enlisted crew. With their small crew size, the same could probably be said of the Assault Scouts, but we’ll count them anyway. I’ll use the max crew size listed for each ship. This gives us:

Ship Type	# of ships	Crew Size	Total Crew Members
Assault Scout	14	6	84
Frigate	7	30	210
Destroyer	5	50	250
Minelayer	4	40	160
Light Cruiser	8	100	800
Heavy Cruiser	1	400	400
Assault Carrier	2	400	800
Battleship	3	400	1200
Total			3904

If we assume that 10% of the crews are officers, that gives 390 officers and 3514 enlisted. Which to me, doesn’t seem like all that many positions to fill.

The question then becomes, how hard is it to fill those 3514 positions across all these ships? That really depends on what you feel the population of the Frontier is. The game gives population codes (heavy, moderate, light, and outpost) for all the worlds but never really defines what numbers those correspond to.

In a thread on the old starfrontiers.org forums (now defunct) I did a simple analysis of birth and death rates and population growth. Given that some of the worlds of the Frontier have been inhabited for up to 400 years (if you use the Zeb’s Guide timeline), subtle tweaks to those values, would allow you to have basically any population you wanted on a world. (I should resurrect that analysis, I still have the data, and do a new post on it.)

Let’s go with what I consider low population numbers:

Heavy population – 500 million inhabitants
Medium – 200 million
Light – 50 million
Outpost – 200 thousand

According to the AD rules, there are 7 Heavy populations worlds, 8 with medium populations, 4 with light populations, and 3 outposts. Using those numbers, across the Frontier, there are a total of 5.3 billion inhabitants. That’s less than the current population of the Earth. That means that the 3514 enlisted crew members that we need represents 0.000066% of the population. Or one out of every ~15000. I don’t see that as an impossible number.

I mean just for comparison, the ship’s compliment of a US Nimitz class aircraft carrier is 3532. And that doesn’t include the air wing. The US Navy operates 10 of those carriers, with a total crew size of 10x what we’re looking for, with a population of just 330 million, 16x smaller than the estimated Frontier population. And that’s just the aircraft carriers.

Based on those numbers, I just don’t see that it would be that hard to fill the enlisted berths with high quality, low risk recruits.

More Ships?

Now, how might those numbers vary? The first option is that Spacefleet has more ships. The listed order of battle is, after all, from a strategic and tactical board game, picked for playability game balance. The number of ships could be larger. Although the background material in the rules do say there are only 3 battleships. It’s not unreasonable to think that there might be twice as many ships. But that still doesn’t add that many more crew members, putting us up to only 2 aircraft carriers worth.

Another possibility is that there are lots of those assault transport flying around. If you wanted to transport 30,000 troops, you’d need 30 transports, at 100 crew per transport that’s another ~3000 crew members. So depending on the number of troop transports flying around, You could have an order of magnitude more crew members, which gets us closer to the crew complement of just the US aircraft carriers.

Still the crew numbers are small, filling the berths shouldn’t be too hard.

Smaller Population?

Another option is to make the population of the Frontier smaller. But remember that the US Navy supports a much large crew compliment on a population that is almost 20 times smaller. I think you’d have to make the populations of the Frontier worlds, really small indeed for this to start to be an issue.

In fact, I think the population would actually be larger than the numbers I quoted above, by at least a factor of 2 if not more. These worlds have been settled for a couple of hundred years at least. In the last 200 years on Earth the populations has grown from 1 billion to 7.8 billion. Give the high quality medical care, lots of available space for population growth, and general high level of industry and technology, it would not be unreasonable to have a very high birth rate and low death rate. Especially since the average lifespans are much longer.

Undesirable positions?

Another factor would be that these positions are somehow undesirable. This could be possible. Maybe Spacefleet is strapped for funds and doesn’t pay very well. Or maybe people don’t like being on-board ships for extended tours. Or there is some other factor. While these are all possibilities, I don’t seen them being a big factor.

Crews sizes are relatively small, which means it doesn’t take a lot of credits to make payroll. While it may not pay quite as well as civilian sector jobs, I don’t see it being that much different.

I don’t see the on-board living conditions being that much of an issue either. With the exception of the assault scout, these ships are quite large relative to their crew size. A modern Arleigh Burke destroyer is basically the same size as a Knight Hawks destroyer. But the Arleigh Burke has a crew of 300 while the UPF destroyer has a crew of 40-60, 6-7 times smaller. Now there are differences in equipment and living space, but that still leaves a lot of room to make living accommodations more spacious and comfortable. Living on these ships wouldn’t be too bad. Plus they regularly call on stations around the Frontier giving plenty of opportunity for “shore leave” on a regular basis.

I also don’t see it as a reputation issue. Nothing in the game indicates that Spacefleet is looked down on. Quite the opposite actually, it seems that Spacefleet is held in high regard around the Frontier. So sporting the uniform would seem to be a plus not a negative.

There might be other reasons that I’m not thinking of that might make the job less than desirable. Share your thoughts in the comments. The bottom line is that I don’t think Spacefleet would have a problem filling their limited crew slots with high quality crew members, rather than the “galactic riffraff” as described. There might be some that make it in, but I don’t see it being a high percentage.

Crew Mutinies

Let’s leave that aside for now and assume that for some reason, there is a lot of “galactic riffraff” in the Spacefleet enlisted ranks. Even if that is the case, I don’t see them dumping their officers and sailing off to the fringes of the Frontier to engage in piracy.

And the reason is the way the skills are structured. It takes a very skilled set of individuals to fly a spaceship. I don’t see the “galactic riffraff” have the necessary skills and experience to reach the levels necessary to fly these ships. Even an Assault scout takes a level 2 pilot skill which in turn requires level 2 computers and level 6 technician. And a frigate or destroyer requires a level 3 skill. And then you need at least an astrogator, and preferably an engineer and some gunners, although those latter might be able to be recruited later.

In Spacefleet, those skills are found in the officers, not the enlisted crew. If a crew mutinied and dumped its officers, the ship would just sit there as there would be no one to fly it.

That isn’t to say there couldn’t be mutinies. It would just have to involve some of the officers so that there are enough of the spaceship skills to fly the ship. While that goes counter to the quote from the rules, it’s not unreasonable. In fact, in my campaigns, there is a Spacefleet officer that makes off with one of the light cruisers and one point in the timeline.

There is no reason mutinies can’t happen, I just don’t think they would be quite the way described.

Final Thoughts

So that’s my take. Personally, I don’t see the enlisted personnel of Spacefleet being of any lower caliber than its officer corps. The population is high enough, and the number of berths to fill low enough, that they should be able to screen for the better candidates. And while mutinies may happen, they are going to have to involve the officers to some extent or there will be no one to fly the ships.

What do you think about the status of the Spacefleet personnel? Do you play it as written or modify things to be different? If so, what modifications do you make? Share your ideas in the comment section below.

The original draft of this post (everything up through the end of the initial quote) was saved back in May of 2018, right after I started the blog. It had been bouncing around in my mind for a while then, and that was two years ago. I might have more to say in the future but it’s late and I need some sleep.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY61.112 to FY61.141

This month got a bit busy in the middle with the Dramune Run starting, the first Saurian ark ship headed toward the Frontier departing, the UPFS Eleanor Moraes beginning its fateful trip, and the sathar starting their final push on the Saurian homeworld.

Date (FY)	Events
61.112	After 60 hours of initial jump calculations, the crew of the HSS History’s Hope begin accelerating for a jump back to YS05, eight light years away.
61.113	The investigation by Star Law trace the sabotage that killed the Consolidated Nebula employees back to a worker at Groth Station. Local agents are dispatched to bring him in for questioning.
61.114	The being thought to be the saboteur of the starliner is finally tracked down and while Star Law agents are speaking to him, he is shot by an unknown assailant and killed. After a chase through the station, the assailant is cornered and, unable to get away, turns his gun on himself and fires, dying instantly.
61.115	Initial background checks on both the victim (the saboteur) and the hitman that killed him reveal that they don’t seem to have any connection and are just normal people, neither with any sort of record. More investigation will be needed.
61.116	The UPFS Eleanor Moraes successfully jumps to the FS11 system, dubbed Padda. (SFKH2) They begin deceleration toward the binary star system and start scanning the system for planets.
61.117	The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the YS05 system. Remaining near jump speed, they immediately get to work on engine overhauls and calculations for the jump back to YS03.
61.118	After running all the way across the Frontier from Dramune, the Gullwind arrives at Minotaur station in the Theseus system. The crew start working on engine overhauls and replenishing the ship.
61.119	Repairs compete for the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restoring the starship construction center to full capacity.
61.120	The sathar war fleet arrives at Tischen were it will spend two days before pushing on to the Sauria system.
61.121	The members of the Gullwind crew, all dralasites, are killed by agents hired by Malco on Minotaur station (Theseus). Garalus slips the Gullwind from its berth at the station and departs for White Light alone.
61.122	– Crown princess Leotia Valentine Leotus (Clarion, White Light) celebrates her 34th birthday. – Loading complete, the 7^th Saurian ark ship begins accelerating to leave the Sauria system. This one is headed toward the Frontier. – The Sathar fleet departs the Tischen system enroute to the Sauria system.
61.123	SynthCorp launches a limited trial of the “Muffin Button” on Inner Reach (Dramune). For a monthly subscription of 1 cr, you receive a button that each time you press it, 2 fresh-baked muffins are delivered to your door by robotic courier and 1 cr is charged to your account.
61.124	Garalus Tylappar docks the beleaguered Gullwind at Clarion Station (White Light) and begins looking for a replacement crew. (SFKH1)
61.125	The last ships of SF Nova leave the PGC shipyards at Gran Quivera (Prenglar). They are assigned to patrol the vrusk loop of the Frontier, starting with a trip to the Cassidine System where they will exercise and brief Task Force Cassidine on their trip to the Rim
61.126	Garalus finds a new crew for the Gullwind. While conducting some business in the Spacer’s Lounge, they are attacked but drive off the assailants.
61.127	– The Saurian ark ship successfully jumps out of the Sauria system and arrives in the OFS179 system. They begin scanning for suitable world but don’t have high hopes as the star is only a small M0 dwarf. – The new crew get to work repairing the Gullwind’s hull which was damaged in the flight from Dramune.
61.128	– After completing and double checking their jump calculations, the HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the YS03 system from YS05. They begin decelerating and start the calculations once again to jump back to the YS05 system. – While working on the hull repair, the new crew of the Gullwind is attacked by the leader of the thugs from the Spacer’s Lounge with a new group of toughs. They drive these attackers away as well.
61.129	– After only six days in distribution, SynthCorp has to temporarily suspend orders on the “Muffin Button” as the dralasites of Inner Reach have overloaded the system. – Repairs to the hull complete, the Gullwind immediately departs Clarion station, bound for the Madderly’s Star system. – The sathar battle fleet is detected decelerating toward Kischen, the saurian homeworld in the Sauria system. All of the saurian defense ships are mobilized to intercept the sathar fleet as far from the homeworld as possible.
61.130	– Repairs of the Triad Starship Construction Center complete restoring it to full capacity. – Shortly after leaving Clarion Station, the Gullwind is attacked by another armed freighter, the Nightshade. They manage to drive off the attackers and escape. – The saurian defense fleet engages the sathar ships. Many of the sathar ships are damaged or destroyed but the saurian losses are just as bad. The sathar break off the attack and begin retreating toward Tischen. Two saurian Battle Rays are tasked to tail the retreating sathar while the other ships return for repairs.
61.131	– After 15 days of scanning the Padda system, the crew of the UPF Eleanor Moraes have discovered no planets orbiting the stars. They begin calculating a jump to the next system, dubbed Waller Nexus (FS24) – Health failing, Garlus collapses. When revived, realizing he has only days to live at most, he reveals to his new crew the reason for the flight from Dramune and the recent attacks and charges them to get the chukkahs safely back to Inner Reach. – A second sathar fleet arrives in OFS 184 enroute to the Sessar system.
61.132	After accelerating away for two days, the sathar ships In the Sauria system begin decelerating again looking to stop somewhere in the outer Sauria system. The two trailing Battle Rays radio this information back to Kischen and begin decelerating as well.
61.133	Shortly before the Gullwind makes the jump to Madderly’s Star, Garlus Tylappar passes away leaving his new crew to finish the Dramune Run on their own.
61.134	The Gullwind successfully jumps to the Madderly’s Star system. The crew immediately get to work on engine overhauls which are a jump overdue. Between the three engines, 108 hours of work are needed to get the overhauls completed.
61.135	Strike Force Nova arrives in orbit around Triad (Cassidine). They will spend a week here working with TF Cassidine.
61.136	After a week of changes, updates, and upgrades, SynthCorp re-enables its “Muffin Button” service, but with the price doubled to 1cr a muffin.
61.137	The second sathar battle fleet arrives at the Rock in the Sessar system. They begin a massive orbital bombardment of the planet, completely destroying the saurian population there. The saurians manage to get word out via subspace radio to alert the people of Kischen.
61.138	– Calculations complete, and another 7 days without a planetary detection, the UPF Eleanor Moraes begins acceleration for a jump to the Waller Nexus system. – In their second 100 days of operation, the OE jump route between Cassidine and Truane’s Star yields the company just over 2.5 million in gross profits.
61.139	On their second attempt, the HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps from YS03 to YS05, completing both directions of that jump and fully charting it. The jump data are sent back their supporting foundation but not to the UPF. Work begins to plot the jump back to YS06.
61.140	With the engine overhauls complete, the Gullwind begins accelerating for a jump to the Cassidine system.
61.141	The Gullwind’s radar detects two unidentified ships closing on the freighter. Deciding they don’t want another fight, the crew strap into their acceleration chairs and max out the Gullwind’s engines for several hours, avoiding the encounter.

Here’s the full timeline file:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

The Investors

This is another new organization for the June RPG Blog Carnival which I’m hosting here on the Expanding Frontier. I had originally thought I was going to write about my vision of the Galactic Task Force, Incorporated, which I am using in my current game, but decided that I would rather go with something completely new instead of an already established mega-corp in the setting. So I decided to write about “The Investors” a secret society I created as part of my Detailed Frontier Timeline project.

The Investors

The Investors is a secret society composed of a number of the very, very wealthy citizens of the Frontier. They work behind the scenes on nearly all the worlds of the Frontier. Very few people outside the organization even know of its existence. Star Law has a slim file on the organization, and a few of the large mega-corps have some data, and a few planetary governments have some data, but beyond that, they are very obscure.

The society does not have an official name, the members just refer to themselves as “investors.”

Aims and Goals

The aims and goals of the organization can be summarized by two words, money and power. The organization exists to increase the wealth of its members and increase the power they have in influencing the operation of the Frontier economy.

The members of the society, while sometimes at odd with one another, and always in competition with each other, use their already considerable assets to influence businesses and governments in ways that will increase their personal wealth and make it possible for them to exert greater influence in the future.

An example of this recently in my Detailed Frontier Timeline is their acquisition of the Groth Energy Corporation on Groth in the Fromeltar system, the major power supplier on that world. First, they manipulated the finances of the company to force it into near bankruptcy. They then bought out the previous owners, and finally tripled energy prices on the planet. Since GE was the only power supplier to many portions of the planet, people either had to pay the new prices or go without power. At the same time, they started trying to buy up all the smaller energy producers as well. They were a little too rash, however, and many of the smaller energy providers banded together to form the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group to fight back.

As the society has grown, and due to its decentralized nature, sometimes the members find themselves working at cross purposes with other members. When this is discovered, they meet to discuss the best way forward that provides the greatest benefit to all. If there is ever a business conflict that seemed to be at a compete impasse and then suddenly resolved itself, sometimes in a completely unexpected manner, it may very well have been the investors behind the scenes making deals.

History

The society started at a country club on Triad in the Cassidine system, in 37 p.f. There was a gala event and three of the Frontier’s richest beings, including the then CEO of Pan Galactic Corporation, were commiserating with one another about all the laws and restrictions their respective planetary governments were placing on them. One of them joked that they should create an organization to invest in the right people to sway things in the direction they wanted. The idea stuck with them and by the end of the night, the three had formed a rough outline of how they would operate.

Over the years, the original three members felt out others around the Frontier with similar feelings and desires and the number of investors grew. While they are primarily a self-interested lot, not everything they do is necessarily bad. Fed up with the depredations of the pirate Hatzk Naar, the organization worked to facilitate the organization of the First Common Muster. The sathar invasion in the Truane’s Star system a few years later was definitely bad for business and the organization was instrumental in the speed at which the Second Common Muster happened, which allowed the sathar to be quickly defeated. And with the formation of the UPF, most of the new military contracts for the creation of Spacefleet and equipping Star Law went to businesses owned by members of the society.

Today, members of the society control, or at least exert strong influence over, nearly all the mega-corps and large planetary corporations. They have tendrils into almost all the governments of the Frontier with some of the members serving in those governments.

Membership

There are no more that a few dozen members of the society across the entire Frontier. You must have a net worth of over a billion credits to even be considered for membership and there just are not that many billionaires out there.

No single person within the organization knows all the members, or even the true names of all the members as they only interact through holovid communications and use aliases in their interactions. While a single member might know the true identity of a few other members, possibly the person who recruited them and those they may have recruited, the members are careful about not revealing their identities, even to other members of the society.

That said, due to the limited pool of possible recruits, it is sometimes possible to determine the identity of other members by the agendas that they support. And a few members openly share their identity to other members.

The membership contains representatives from nearly every major industry in the Frontier.

Recruitment is done slowly and carefully. As members interact with the other elite, wealthy citizens, they keep an ear out for those that are discontent with restrictions they are facing or which are limiting their opportunities. These contacts are nurtured and if they are deemed to have the right mindset and ethics, they are approached for membership, sometimes openly and sometimes indirectly.

Organization

There is no real hierarchy or formal organization to the society. In theory all members are equal. When conflicts arise or major decisions have to be made, they form committees consisting of the members affected by the activity to discuss and debate the issues and reach a decision.

Occasionally, some endeavors are so large in scope, that it requires a meeting of the entire society. These events are rare and are usually scheduled around major events on one of the core worlds that all the members would reasonably expect to travel for anyway. Even these major meetings are held remotely so as to preserve the anonymity of the members that wish to do so.

Despite there being no formal organizations, there are definitely clicks and power blocks within the organization. Most members are at least somewhat loyal to the member that recruited them and gave them access to the society. Other power groups form along industry lines or other areas of common interest. Some major decisions can take weeks to resolve as each group tries to influence things most favorably for themselves.

What do you think?

The society’s outline is fairly vague and nebulous. That is intentional. It is partially due to the fact that the society is still taking shape in my game and I haven’t decided exactly how and where I want to use it. But it is also partially to allow others to shape and use it in their games as they wish. This description paints broad strokes over the society’s operations and memberships but leaves the details for individual game masters to implement in ways specific to their campaign.

Let me know your thoughts on the society and how you might use such an organization in your game. And don’t forget to check out the other posts linked in the comments of the kickoff post of this month’s blog carnival to see what others are writing about on this month’s topic.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY61.081 to FY61.111

I really struggled this past month in getting the updates out on a daily basis. They came out eventually, but often in bunches instead of one or two a day. As I’m writing this blog post, I’m a week behind on posting. I’ll try to get those caught up soon. As always, you can follow the @StarFrontiers twitter account for the daily updates, this is just a summary from the past month.

This month, the UPF and some of the militias begin to increase their ship rosters, the first Saurian Ark Ship headed toward the Frontier departs, the Gullwind continues its flight from Dramune, and the HSS History’s Hope gets lost once again via a misjump.

Date (FY)	Events
61.081	Construction of the CMS Swallow complete at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. The ship begins its maiden voyage to its home system of White Light.
61.082	– Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the Streel shipyards (Pale, Truane’s Star). – The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the YS02 system completing the YS02-YS03 jump route. They begin decelerating and plotting the jump back to YS03 to begin the next leg of their journey.
61.083	The seventh Saurian ark ship is completed and begins its shakedown cruise.
61.084	Garulus Tylappar discovers Chukkas, a protected and beloved species of Inner Reach (Dramune), in shipping crates marked as “Foodstuffs” he was contracted to deliver to Malco Enterprises on Darkworld Station (Outer Reach, Dramune). (SFKH1)
61.085	Worried about being discovered with the new knowledge and unwilling to turn the lovable chukkas over to the Malthar, Garulus takes his ship, the Gullwind, and makes a fast jump to the Cassidine system.
61.086	The UPFS Eleanor Moraes completes its shakedown cruise. With its crew fully assembled, it is tasked with exploring the region beyond Theseus. With over 20 days until the exploration module is complete, the ship will jump to White Light and back to verify that everything is in working order. Calculations begin for a jump to the White Light system.
61.087	The CMS Flitter arrives at Clarion Station (White Light). After a final inspection, it is added to the Clarion Royal Marine roster and enters official service.
61.088	Initial calculations complete, the UPFS Elanor Moraes begins accelerating for the jump to the White Light system.
61.089	After a couple of weeks of discussions the CDC delegates reach an agreement with the new Consolidated Nebula Energy Group to supply resources to the new company’s power plants.
61.090	The Gullwind, having not slowed down upon entering the Cassidine system, completes its astrogation calculations and makes the jump to the Madderly’s Star system. It doesn’t slow down here either.
61.091	The CMS Swallow arrives at Clarion Station (White Light). After a final inspection, it is added to the Clarion Royal Marine roster and enters official service.
61.092	The HSS History’s Hope successfully returns to the YS03. While the engineers work on the drives, the astrogators begin plotting the jump to the next system, a white dwarf-M star binary 11 ly away. This will be the longest uncharted jump yet of the trip.
61.093	A Flight patrol in the outer Kazak system stumble upon the patrolling sathar cutters. One of the cutters is destroyed but the other escapes. One of the Flight assault scouts was also destroyed.
61.094	With reports from agents in the Frontier that Strike Force Nova has recently left Truane’s Star to return to Prenglar, the sathar decided to stand down in OFS019 and start preparing for a major push on the Frontier.
61.095	The newest Saurian ark ship completes its shakedown cruise and begins loading passengers and supplies for its journey into the unknown.
61.096	Having left the remains of Patrol Group Virgo in Truane’s Star, Strike Force Nova arrives back at Morgaine’s World (Prenglar).
61.097	– The UPFS Eleanor Moraes arrives safely at Clarion Station (White Light). After a full checkup of the ship, they begin the jump back to Minotaur (Theseus). – The surviving sathar cutter in the Kazak system makes the jump back to the OFS019 system.
61.098	After double checking the jump calculations, the HSS History’s Hope begins acceleration to jump speed. Their destination is designated YS05.
61.099	After an extensive debrief of the crews, Strike Force Nova stands down for maintenance. Almost all of the ships enter the PGC SCC at the same time. Several civilian ships are removed from the shipyard to make room, upsetting their owners.
61.100	– After completing overhauls on the ship’s engines, the Gullwind departs the Madderly’s Star system for White Light. – Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 95%.
61.101	Owners of ships ejected from the PGC shipyards lodge a formal complaint with Starfleet and the Council of Worlds. However, the UPF charter grants Spacefleet this power during “times of crisis” which the CoW has invoked after receiving the reports of SF Nova and the sathar buildup in OFS019.
61.102	Encouraged by their reception by CDC, the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group (Groth, Fromeltar) send delegates to Terledrom (Fromeltar) and Inner Reach (Dramune) to meet with energy suppliers there.
61.103	– The HSS History Hope attempts to jump to YS05. Unfortunately, the calculations were off and the ship misjumps to an unknown star system with a small M dwarf instead of the binary system they were aiming for. – They designate the system YS06 and start working on figuring out where they are at.
61.104	The ship bearing the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group delegates headed to Terledrom (Fromeltar) suffers an in-flight explosion, three of the four delegates are killed. No other passengers are injured but the ship is disabled. Rescue ships from Terledrom dispatched immediately.
61.105	Repairs of the Triad Starship Construction Center (Cassidine) bring it up to 95% capacity.
61.106	Sathar begin what they expect to be a final push on the Sauria system. A massive fleet, dwarfing anything seen since the attack on Truane’s Star 60+ years ago, leaves the SCC at OFS228 and heads to Tischen via OFS177.
61.107	The UPFS Eleanor Moraes arrives back at Minotaur Station (Theseus). All systems working flawlessly. The crew takes three days of leave while waiting for the exploration module to be completed.
61.108	Investigation of the damaged starliner reveals that the damage was deliberate sabotage and not an accident. Star Law takes over the investigation.
61.109	– The Gullwind departs the White Light system for it’s final destination at Minotaur Station (Theseus) – After six days of around the clock work, the astrogators on the HSS History’s Hope determine their location. They overshot their target by nearly 8 light years. The good news is that this system was to be the next one on their trip. The bad news is that they have two uncharted jumps back to a known system.
61.110	The UPFS Eleanor Moraes’s extended exploration module is complete at the Minotaur starship construction center (Theseus). The ship’s crew docks with the exploration module and pull it into a holding orbit as they begin final preparations for their first jump.

Here’s the full timeline file:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

RPG Blog Carnival – Organizations – True Yaziria Society

Welcome to June! Regular readers my have noticed that this post is a day early as I usually post on Tuesdays. That’s because this month, I’m hosting the RPG Blog Carnival and we need to get this month’s topic, Organizations, kicked off. This post will replace tomorrow’s regular post as the first post of the month. But don’t worry, the next installment of the Detailed Frontier Timeline will be up next week.

If you’re new to the Expanding Frontier, welcome. After you’ve read today’s post, maybe you’ll stick around and take a stroll through the archive and hopefully find something else of interest as well.

The Topic – Organizations

When I volunteered to host a month of the blog carnival, I had already had in my mind to do some development of new and existing organizations in my game. I had already done a few posts on the topic and thought it would be a great topic to get input from other creator on how they handle different organizations in their settings. Plus it would give me the motivation to flesh out a few more of my own.

I’m using the term “organization” here very loosely. It could be anything from a megacorp, like I detailed in my post about the Streel Corporation, a small private company (e.g. Obar Enterprises), a religion, a governing body of a planet or city, or a band of adventurers. It could be a single business, a sports team, or a knitting club. Guilds, cults, and secret societies are other examples. Anything that has two or more people involved and some sort of order or hierarchy counts. The sky is really the limit.

Maybe like me, you want to flesh out one or more organizations in your setting an share them as part of the carnival. What makes the organization unique? How does it stand out in your world? How do the player characters interact with the organization, if at all?

I remember a business from a fantasy game I played in when I was in high school. It had been created by a retired character in an earlier campaign run by the GM, he wasn’t part of our game. It was a chain of establishments that were a combination of high-end tavern, inn, casino, and other attractions. You could find them in almost every major city. But they only accepted silver coins. You could not pay in gold, copper, nickel, or brass (the various other coins of the world). Only silver. Apparently, the retired PC who set up the original inn, which he created as a safe house, had something happen to him that made him leery of every other coin type. It was a great, safe place to stay, you just had to have a lot of silver on hand to pay your bills.

Or maybe you have a unique set of rules for handling the way various organizations interact with one another. I remember when I read Stars Without Number, the faction rules were so interesting I almost wrote a little mini game based just around that set of rules.

Another topic that comes to mind is how you keep track of all the organizations in your game and what they are up to. Do you have lists of all the projects they are working on? Or maybe you just have short descriptions of their aims and goals and when something happens, you attribute it to the organization most likely to have done it.

Those are just some ideas I’ve had of things to write about as I’ve contemplated this topic the last little while. I’m sure you’ll have others. Share your ideas by linking to this post in yours, and posting a comment here once your post is up. At the end of the month, I’ll gather up all the posts from the comments and consolidate them in to an organized list to provide a handy reference.

And with the kickoff out of the way, it’s time to turn our attention to a semi-secret society in my game universe, the True Yazira Society.

The True Yazira Society

True Yazira Society Logo, a stylized tree shaped like the leaf of the major tree species from Yaziria with the society’s initials forming the branches.

I teased this organization back in my posts for the February Blog Carnival, whose topic was Legends and Lore. As part of that month’s posts, I did two posts on the legends and lore of the yazirian species in my Star Frontiers game universe. The first, Yazirian History, I covered the background of how the yazirian race came to be in the Frontier. Most of this is general knowledge to yazirian characters. In the second, Legends & Lore – Yazirians, I covered more less known information including things the characters may not know. It was in this post that I introduced the True Yaziria society.

Creation

The True Yazira society was formed about ten years before the first sathar attack. It was created by surviving members of the old Warhon’s guard, supporters, and retinue.

When news reached the yazirian colonies that the only ship to be lost in the exodus was the one carrying the royal family, many believed that foul play by the Family of One was involved and that they didn’t want to give up control of yazirian society on the new worlds. This was most strongly vocalized by members of the royal court and the Warhon’s personal guard that were already in the Frontier.

It was at this point that the “accidents” and disappearances started happening. Many of the most vocal dissidents died or simply vanished. Fearing for their lives, many of the royal court and royal guard took the opportunity to emigrate to the Prenglar, Cassidine, and Truane’s Star systems were there were multi-species worlds and where they would be out of the direct influence of the Family of One.

As part of this second exodus, these yazirians formed the True Yazira society. The members initially consisted of those fleeing the yazirian worlds but that would change over time.

Aims and Goals

The initial aims of the society were really just mutual protection and support. Coupled with a desire to preserve as many of the traditions of their homeworld as they could in their new environment. First and foremost in the beginning, the members of the society worked to keep track of each other in order to keep them safe from the Family of One and alert one another if someone went missing. The other major aim was to support one another as they settled in these new worlds among aliens species. Contact with the humans, vrusk, and dralasites had started only a few years before and the society provided a social outlet for yazirians to meet and just be themselves.

As word reached the members of the actions being taken by the Family of one on Hentz, as well as the other yazirian colony worlds, the True Yaziria society’s goals expanding to opposing the actions of the Family of One. Many members returned to the yazirian worlds, either permanently, or as regular business visitors, to both monitor and actively work against what they felt were encroachments by the Family of One on the true yarziran way of life. These early efforts were quite fruitful, and the society was gaining momentum, most rapidly on the worlds other than Hentz where the Family of One was centered.

And then the sathar attacked. While the actual devastation was confined to the Truane’s Star system, the repercussions would be felt all over the Frontier. Most of the membership of the society living on Pale were killed in the sathar attack, as whole cities and towns were obliterated in single strikes from space. In the decade after the attack, when everyone thought a fresh attack could occur at any moment, the focus of the entire Frontier shifted and the concerns of the True Yazira society were far from the concerns of the average yazirian citizen. The Family of One worked efficiently and effectively during the crisis and people just came to accept their leadership.

In the intervening decades the aims of the society have shifted somewhat. They still oppose the Family of One, but their efforts are much more behind the scenes. Openly, they focus on cultural preservation and teaching about traditional yazirian values from their homeworld. But behind the scenes, many members still work to limit the power of the Family of One and to get equal treatment for yazirians everywhere regardless of world or clan. These efforts have been much more effective on the worlds other than Hentz. They have given up on completely ousting the Family of One from its position in yazirian society but rather now focus on neutralizing its influence as much as possible.

Membership and Organization

Initially, members of the True Yazira society were all members of the royal court or royal guard and refugees from the yazirian colony worlds living on the mixed-species worlds or the worlds of other species. With the return of some of these yazirians to the colony worlds, the society began to grow there as well. Anyone who expressed displeasure with the operations and ideals of the Family of One would often find their way to True Yazira. On the non-yazirian worlds, many joined simply for the comradarie of fellow yazirians in their new alien homes.

Today most of the membership of the society is fairly old and consists of first generation colonists who still remember Yazira itself. While there are new recruits of the younger generations, their numbers are relatively few but growing. Some of these younger members are truly interested in preserving and sometimes restoring practices from Yazira, most are there for the opposition of the Family of One and its policies and practices. The old world doesn’t mean as much to this younger generation as they have never seen it.

The society is organized in to chapters and councils. The chapters are the local organizing body and typically cover a single town or small region. Although in the larger metropolitan areas such as Port Loren, or Point True, there might be multiple chapters each covering a part of the city.

Councils are the higher level organizations. Each world has a single council that coordinates activities across all the chapters of the world. Each chapter has a representative that attends council meetings and votes for the interests of the chapter. This representative also has the responsibility to make sure that the chapter members adhere to any decisions of the council. Typically, the council representative is the head of the local chapter.

There is also a Frontier wide council consisting of two representatives from each of the world councils. This is the governing body of the society. All current members of this council are former members of the royal guard or royal court.

Activities

In the early days of the society, the members openly opposed the actions of the Family of One although they did so as individuals or groups and never in the name of the True Yazira society. And in return, the Family of One actively hunted down these members of the society, although that was done clandestinely as much as possible.

Openly, and in the name of the society, the early members organized activities and cultural events for yazirians on all the worlds of the Frontier where chapters were organized. They also welcomed any visitors of the other species in the Frontier to the events as a way of teaching them about yazirian culture.

After the sathar attack, the opposition to the Family of One became much more clandestine and behind the scenes. They supported organizations that opposed the practices of the Family of One with money and manpower but took much more of a supporting role than active involvement. They have worked extensively, especially on the worlds in the Athor, Gruna Garu, and Scree Fron systems, to get equal treatment from GODCo on those worlds and limit the control the Family of One exerts on the govenments of those systems.

At the same time, the society has actively stepped up the cultural and historical activities on worlds all around the Frontier, working hard to preserve the cultural heritage of the species and the histories of their homeworld. In the last decade they have launched a major effort to interview and record all surviving members of the species who actually lived on Yazira and participated in the Great Exodus. All of these stories are available for anyone to listen to.

As the society is slowly recruiting younger members, many dissatisfied with the actions and policies of the Family of One, the opposition is becoming more vocal and open once again.

Once recent activity which the society is indirectly a major supporter of, is the voyage of the HSS History’s Hope, a small exploration craft currently trying to chart a way back to the system that they believe to be Yazria. The Family of One suppressed the location of Yaziria shortly after the yazirans arrived in the Frontier claiming a computer crash wiped all details of the location and routes there. With the recent discovery of a system that might by Yazira in the right direction from the Frontier, many members of the society were quite excited. The support for the mission was quite spontaneous and not an organized event. However, most of the crew of the ship are members of the society and much of the mission’s funding comes from members as well. While unintended, this means that the mission has the ability to call on the society for assistance if needed. You can expect to hear more about this relationship in an upcoming post and in upcoming events in the Detailed Frontier Timeline.

Closing Thoughts

That’s my first organization for this month’s carnival. I intend to do at least one more later in the month and have new organizations be a regular feature on the blog. I created the True Yazira organization as part of the Legends and Lore blog carnival entry and have since tied it in to several events in my setting. It hasn’t come up with any games I’ve ever run but that is sure to change in the future.

I can’t wait to see what other organizations my fellow bloggers come up with and other aspects of using organizations in games they discuss. Be sure to check back regularly to see what new posts have been added to the comments and come back at the end of the month for the wrap up and summary post.

What do you think of the True Yazira society? How would you use an organization like this in your game? What more would you like to know about this society? Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section.

Economics of Spaceflight – part 1b – Starliners

Last week we looked a bit at the logistics of running a passenger transport system between the various worlds and saw that if you wanted daily flights between all the worlds, you’d need over 600 ships. And that would only give you 250 people moving between each world each day.

Now you can change that a bit by making the ships a bit larger or increase the passenger density. But it gave us a feel of what assumptions or changes you need to make to your setting if you want a certain level of interaction between the worlds. Or if you limit the number of ships and passengers, some ideas of what impacts that has on the culture and setting.

In this article, I am going to look at the financial side of the passenger transport business. We’ll start by actually designing our starliner to get an idea of costs and expenses, look at ticket prices, and decided if it is even worth it. Then we can talk a bit about other changes that we need to make, if any, to make this all make sense. Let’s get started. You might want to settle in. This one is a bit long.

Our Ship

If we’re going to look at economics, we’re going to need details on the ship. In the last article, I based everything on a HS 10 starliner. We’ll detail that ship out and look at its cost.

Hull and Engines

As a HS 10 ship, it will have three engines, which from the discussion last week, are atomic. I realize now that as a passenger liner, maybe we don’t need the power of the atomic engines and can get by with ion engines. Surprisingly, in the discussion that the previous post generated, no one mentioned that. It would also save on the overhaul time as ion engines don’t need that so the ship could be turned around in port more quickly. But for now, we’ll stick with the atomic engines.

Cabins

The next major question is how many of the various passenger berths we have of each class. We have a total of 250 berths. Journey class are the standard. Interestingly, the only safety requirement listed in the rules is that a spacesuit has to be provided. You don’t actually have to have lifeboats for everyone. First class berths are more expensive and require more cabin space, cargo space, and facilities for the passengers. And do need access to a lifeboat. Storage class cabins are cheaper for the passenger and have minimal storage space, but are more expensive to install in the ship, costing as much as a First Class cabin. With the standard starship construction rules, these tradeoffs really don’t affect the design of the ship other than the final cost as the system doesn’t really account for the space and facilities needed. So for this analysis, I’m going to roughly base these ships on our modern airlines, with most of the cabins of the base Journey Class category with a few First Class and some Storage Class. The breakdown will be 40 First class, 180 Journey Class, and 30 Storage Class.

Crew

The other major decision is the size of the crew. We will need to purchase cabins and life support for them as well. The rules give no guidance on this. Looking at cruise ships, it is about a 1-to-5 ratio, crew to passengers. Some of that, such as janitorial and maintenance work, will get automated away to robots on our star liner, but then we’ll need people to look after the robots as well. We’ll design the ship around a crew of 50. We’ll talk about the breakdown later when we have to figure out what they are paid.

Ship Vehicles

While we only need lifeboats for the First Class passengers, we’re going to have lifeboats for all of the passengers (except Storage Class, that’s just one of the hazards of the cheap fare, you are frozen and can’t get to a lifeboat) and the crew. And we will toss in 10 escape pods so not everyone has to make it to a lifeboat. As the final vehicles, we’ll add in 5 large (10 being) launches for shuttling people around between the station and ship, 2 small (4 being) launches for the crew’s use, and 2 workpods for ship maintenance.

Spacesuits

We are required to have spacesuits for all of our non-Storage Class passengers. Plus we’ll have them for the crew as well. Technically, each species has its own style of spacesuits adapted to their physiology. The rules, however, only distinguish between vrusk and non-vrusk as they are only really concerned with cost and the standard spacesuit is 1000 cr. while the vrusk suit is 1,500 as they require more material. If we assume that vrusk make up one quarter of the crew and passengers, and we build in a bit of buffer in the numbers to account for varying numbers of the different species, we’ll get 80 vrusk spacesuits and 220 non-vrusk ones. This is 300 total, which is exactly our crew and passenger count but remember that the 30 Storage Class passengers won’t be using one so we actually have 30 extra.

Robots

There will be a number of robots on board to handle things like cleaning, maintenance, some food production, etc. We’ll design the ship to have 50 robots, basically doubling the crew size. These will be a mix of level 3 and 4 service and maintenance robots, will possibly a small number of security robots. Overall the average cost of each robot will be 4,000 cr.

Other items

There are a number of other items that go into building the starship such as radios, intercoms, computers, portholes, Velcro boots for crew and passengers, toolkits, etc. We’ll add those in as appropriate and list the details in the final stats when presented in the next section:

PGCSS Prenglar Glory

Here are the full KH stats for the ship along with its price tag, fully fueled.

HS: 10
HP: 50
ADF: 3
MR: 3
DCR: 50
Engines: 3 Class B Atomic, 6 fuel pellets each

Communications Equipment: Videocom radio w/ 4 extra panels, Intercom system: 5 master panels, 400 standard panels, Subspace Radio
Sensors: 400 Portholes, radar, camera system, starship astrogation suite
Weapons: None
Defenses: Reflective Hull
Life support capacity: 500 beings, 200 days with full backup
Passenger Accommodations: 40 First Class cabins, 180 Journey Class Cabins, 30 Storage Class cabins
Crew Accommodations: 50 Journey class cabins
Vehicles: 10 escape pods, 14 lifeboats, 2 workpods, 5 large launches, 2 small launches
Computer Level: 4 (175 FP)
Computer Program: Drive 5 (64), Life Support 1 (4), Alarm 3 (4), Computer Lockout 4 (8), Damage Control 3 (8), Astrogation 4 (24), Cameras 1 (1), Robot Management 4 (16), Information Storage 3 (8), Communications 2 (6), Installation Security 3 (12), Computer Security 4 (16), Maintenance 2 (4)
Backup life support computer: Level 1 (4), Programs: Life support 1 (4)
Robots: 50 level 3-4 maintenance, security, and service robots
Other equipment: 220 non-vrusk spacesuits, 80 vrusk spacesuits, 300 velcro boots sets, 5 Engineer’s toolboxes, 10 sets of Magnetic shoes
Cost: 5,658,000 Cr.

The Ship’s Crew

Now that we know the design of the ship, we need to decide on crew makeup. This will determine the wages owed as we operate the ship in the space lanes. This is going to be an approximate mix. The exact details may vary ship to ship but will give us a starting point to figuring out the operating costs when we get to that stage. The crew makeup I settled on, allowing for round-the-clock operations is:

2 Pilots – level 5 – necessary to operate a HS 10 vessel
2 Astrogators – level 3 – It’s an established route so these could be even lower level
2 Engineers – level 4 – as discussed last week for effecting the engine overhauls
4 Technicians – level 4 – assistants to the engineers and helping with on-board maintenance
4 Roboticists – level 4 – maintain the ship’s robots
2 Computer technicians – level 2 – basic computer operations and maintenance
10 Safety and Security staff – level 3 (beam) – assisting passengers and keeping everyone in line
3 Doctors – level 4 – for maintaining the health of crew and passengers
10 Food Services staff – level 3 – cooking, maintaining hydroponics, servers, etc
11 other staff – level 2 – any other duties, entertainment, etc.

Now some of those, such as security, food services, and other could slosh around a bit depending on exactly want you want on the ship and what roles all those robots play, but this mix give us a starting point.

The Economics

Okay, with the ship squared away, let’s look at the income and expenses of running this ship.

For this analysis, we will be looking at a single jump. This means that we’ll be covering the 14 days from departure from one station until the ship is ready to depart the other one. The Knight Hawks rules are based around yearly or 40-day “months”. So we’ll often be scaling the values from the rules to cover just the 14 day period.

Let’s dive in.

Income

There is really only one source of income on a starliner, paying passengers. The KH Campaign Book, page 44, covers the operations of a starliner. We’ll start with the Spaceliner Bookings Table.

This table tells you how many of your berths a ship will fill traveling between different population worlds. Now to be honest, I believe that this table really represents the situation if there were lots and lots of travel available. If there is only a single ship flying between the two worlds each day, it will probably fill every berth every trip. And depending on the route, it might be higher than that given by the table. For example, traveling from Prenglar (high population) to Dixon’s Star (outpost) gives only a low fill percentage but in truth, most of those people are actually going to Truane’s Star (medium population) and so the ship would be fuller. But I’m going to leave those details as an exercise for you to do for your version of the Frontier. I’m going to take the table at face value here.

This ship is flying between Gran Quivera (Prenglar) and Triad (Cassidine), which are both high population worlds. According to the table the ship will fill 80+2d10 percent of its berths on any give trip. We’ll just deal with the average which is 91%. That means on an average trip we will fill 36 of our 40 First Class cabins, 164 of our 180 Journey Class cabins, and 27 of the 30 Storage Class berths. Sometimes it will be more, sometimes it will be less but that’s the number we’re going to use.

The jump from Prenglar to Cassidine is 7 light years. That means that a First Class ticket costs 1400 cr. A Journey Class ticket costs 700 cr. And a Storage Class ticket costs 210 cr. Given the number of berths being filled, that means that our income for any single jump is 170,870 cr.

That’s our gross ticket sales. We need to fit all of our expenses for a trip into that number. So let’s look at our expenses.

Expenses

First up is fuel. We have three atomic engines and each jump uses a fuel pellet in each engine. Since each fuel pellet costs 10,000 cr., each jump costs us 30,000 cr. in fuel.

The next obvious cost is the crew salaries. Daily wages for characters with spacecraft skills are given on page 54 of the KH Campaign book. Daily wages for characters with AD skills are given on page 60 of the AD Expanded Rules book. For the “other crew” line I just uses 10 cr. x level as their pay rate and for the food services crew I use 10 cr. x level+1. I’ve also ignored the fact that characters may have multiple skills and the pay rate is just based on their primary skill level. With the crew as detailed earlier, the daily cost for the entire crew is 3,690 credits. Which means for the 14 days of our trip, the crew wages come to 51,660 cr.

After those two, the next largest cost is maintenance. The ship has to spend 15-16 days in maintenance each 400-day year at the cost of 1,000 cr. per day. In 400 days, a ship can make 400/14= 28 trips 8 days left over. That means that we can make 27 trips a year. So each trip needs to save away 16000/27 = 593 credits to cover that expense at the end of the year. To be safe, and cover other unexpected maintenance costs, we’ll stash away 1500 cr. each trip.

We’ll also need to pay the crew during those 16 days as well so we need to save away a total of 59040 credits to cover wages. That means each trip needs to save 59040/27 = 2187 credits which we’ll round up to 2200.

Each trip consumes life support. According to the rules, refilling the life support system on the ship costs 15000 credits every 200 days or 75 credits a day. Thus our 14 days of operation use up 1050 credits worth of life support.

Another expense is an office at each end of the line where passengers can come to buy tickets. The rules state that this costs 500 credits per 40 days at each station or 12.5 credits a day. With two end points that’s 25 credits a day or 350 credits of expenses for the 14-day period. We need to squirrel way a bit of funds to cover the 16 days in maintenance but it’s not that much and we can assume it’s covered by the extra maintenance money we saved.

Finally, there are docking fees. Here we are going to use the number given on page 32 of the module SFKH1: The Dramune Run, where it says that the standard rate for docking fees is 2000 credits a month. Assuming that is the 40 day “month” we’ve been using, that works out to 50 credits a day or 250 credits for the 5 days in port during each run.

Tallying that all up, we get that the operating expenses for the ship total 86,810 credits for each leg of our run between Gran Quivera and Triad.

That seems pretty good. We’ve got just over 170,000 credits in income and just under 87,000 in expenses. Which is all well and good if there aren’t any taxes, and if the ship is paid for.

Now the rules don’t explicitly give rates for taxes, tariffs, and other fees associated with interstellar travel although they do talk about varying the rates for wages, docking fees, ticket prices, etc. that can affect the income or expenses for our ship. And in the AD rules, when talking about PC and NPC character wages, it says to assume half of all their income goes towards living expenses and talks about raising/lowering taxes to adjust the amount of money the PCs have. And local governments and the UPF need to get income from somewhere. I’m going to leave the taxes issue up to you for your campaign. But a corporate tax of say 5-10 percent of gross sales might not be unreasonable.

Paying for the ship

But now we come to the biggest expense, at least during the early years of operating the spaceliner. How did we pay for that ship in the first place? Maybe this is a mega-corp and they had a huge budget and could just pay for it outright. They still need to recoup the cost of the ship but at least don’t need to take out a loan. If it’s a smaller organization, they may have to get a loan for the cost of the ship, either in part or in full. Let’s look at those two scenarios. And we’re going to ignore taxes. Subtracting our expenses from our income, that leaves us with 84060 credits after each trip.

First, the mega-corp, paid in full option. Assuming every one of those net credits earned goes into paying back the cost of the ship (which from above is 5,658,000 credits), it would take 68 trips to pay off the value of the ship. At 27 trips a year, that’s two and a half years to recoup the cost of the ship. If there are unexpected costs, it will take longer.

Let’s look at a smaller organization that has to take a loan. Pager 42 of the KH Campaign book gives the monthly payment on a 10,000 credit loan amortized over a number of years from 1 to 20. Now, the game was written in late 70’s to early 80’s and the interest rates back then were high, on the order of 10-15% for low risk ventures. So the interest rates for starship loans, which are considered high risk, are set at 4% every 40 days or, over the 400 day year, an APR of 48%! That may seem a bit high, even by late 70’s standards and especially today, but we’ll go with it as that is what is in the rules. If you want to do the math and come up with a different interest rate for your setting, go for it.

We’ll start by looking at a 10-year loan. Using the table on page 42 and the cost of the ship from above, and assuming we finance the whole thing. The cost of the loan is 230,903 credits every 40 days or 80,816 credits every trip. We had 84060 credits left so that’s good, the net difference is still in the black at 3,244 credits. But we have to account for that 16-day maintenance period where we still have to pay the loan but aren’t making any income. The loan cost for that 16 days is 92,362 credits. Spread over the 27 trips in the year that comes to 3421 credits that need to be saved. Which puts us in the red by 177 credits. Considering we had a bit of buffer in our maintenance budget, to the tune of about 850 credits, we can cover that small deficit from that.

So that means, if we have a 10-year loan for the entire value of the ship, we can just break even if the ship operates continuously and don’t have any problems for a decade. It can be done, but it will be tight. But if we run into unexpected problems, we’re going to be in trouble. We could look at a longer loan, but beyond 10 years, it doesn’t really help. Even a 20-year loan only puts us at 1454 credits in the black each year but takes twice as long to pay off and we end up paying twice as much for the ship.

That’s just to break even, there are no profits beyond the wages for the crew so hopefully the owner is part of the crew or they get no money for the first decade. And that is the economics for a run between two high population worlds were we basically fill the entire ship each trip. On a run with fewer berths sold, there would issues on the scenario where the ship was financed. Also, if there are any taxes, we would really be in trouble. It looks like any fraction of the ship that can be paid for up front will make the operation be more financially stable.

Some Variations

This article gives you a baseline for operating your starliner. I will leave most of the variations up to you but look at one. Some of those variations include, but are not limited to, changing ticket prices, changing the mix of berths, shortening the time in port so you make an extra run or three each year, selling more (or less) of the berths, different crew expenses, and using ion engines instead of atomic engines. I’m just going to briefly look at the variation where we fill the ship completely every trip. Which may very well be the case if there is only a single flight each day between worlds.

In this case, the only real change is that have 13 more paying customers across all three berth classes. That means that our income goes up to 188,300 credits an increase of 17,430 credits. Since our expenses don’t actually depend on the number of passengers (the life support costs probably would, but we ignored that), that is all extra profit. In this case, we are now 17,253 credits in the black after each trip, assuming we keep the 10-year loan.

And that means we either have some profit for the owners and can save a bit for other unexpected expenses, or we can shorten the loan term a little bit. We were right at the bleeding edge as far as the loan went and were already in the point of diminishing returns with respect to lengthening the loan. With a full ship every trip, we could shorten the loan period from 10 years to 5 years and still have a 5,400 credit surplus. And reduce that actual amount we pay for the ship (principal and interest) by 57%, a savings of 9,921,303 credits, which is enough to buy almost 2 more ships! The total cost of the 10-year loan was just over 23 million credits, four times the cost of the ship. That interest rate is very expensive.

Conclusions

So, running a passenger liner between two high population worlds is doable. It might be tight for a few years (up to a decade) if you can’t pay for at least part of the ship up front and have to finance it, but it can be done. Runs between smaller worlds might not be possible using the table from the rules to determine the number of berths filled.

This also gives you as a setting designer some ideas of knobs to turn to tune things in your setting or describe what PCs see as passengers on one of these ships.

What did I miss? What other variations might we look at? Have you ever had PCs try to run a passenger liner? What happened? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Economics of Spaceflight – part 1a – Starliners

My Starship Construction in the Frontier post generated a lot of discussion in the Star Frontiers group on Facebook. In some of the discussion, the commenters seemed to be making the assumption that I wanted to increase the number of ships flying around and that my post was advocating for ways to do that. I actually don’t have a strong feeling one way or another. In fact, I’m much more in the camp of small numbers of ships.

What I’m really looking at, and am interested in figuring out, are the implications those small numbers have and whether or not it makes sense to increase the numbers. Or if you don’t, what that implies for the realities of life in the Frontier and how that impacts the player characters.

I’m interested in questions like, if you only have a small number of ships across the Frontier, what does that mean for interstellar commerce? What impacts does that have on interstellar travel? Who owns the ships? What do they cost? And questions like that.

Since that starship construction article came out, and the ensuing discussion, I’ve been thinking more and more about this and have decided to do a series of articles on the topic. They will all have the Economics of Spaceflight title and a similar tag. In this first article, I’m going to look at interstellar passenger travel.

From the Rules

Let’s start by looking at what the rules say about these ships, which it calls starliners, and interstellar travel. We’ll begin with the description given on page 6 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book:

Spaceliners. HULL SIZE = 6-15. Spaceliners (passenger transports) are built in a wide variety of sizes. Modern spaceliners are fast, quiet ships, capable of providing the wealthy passenger with any conceivable luxury. Many of the older liners are smaller, somewhat decrepit vessels that promise only the fundamental requirements of life support. The number of passengers carried by a spaceliner is about 25 times the ship’s hull size. For example, a spaceliner with a hull size of 10 can carry 250 passengers. Engine durability varies as much as size on spaceliners. Some will require an overhaul after three jumps, while others will be able to make 8 or 10 interstellar trips without maintenance.
KH Campaign Book, p. 6

This gives us a bit of information right off the bat. First, we have the range of hull sizes for these types of ships and the number of passengers per hull size. I’ll have more to say on that latter concept later. It also seems to imply that there are a bunch of these flying around as it describes various generations of ships. Other bits, such as the comments on engine overhauls, tell us that they typically sport atomic engines (as ion drives don’t need overhauls) and indicate some of the properties of the Class B and C atomic engines which the rules haven’t covered yet if you’re just reading through the book.

In the original Alpha Dawn Expanded Rules book, pages 49 and 50 talk about they modes and costs of interstellar travel. It lists three “classes” of travel accommodations and their costs:

First Class – luxurious accommodations with the best rooms, food, and and best access to survival gear in the case of an emergency. 200 Credits per light year traveled.
Journey Class – This is the standard accommodations. 100 Credits per light year traveled.
Storage Class – In this class, you travel as frozen cargo. 30 Credits per light year traveled.

More details on the accommodation types are given on page 21 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book.

Travel time is one of the areas where the Alpha Dawn (AD) and Knight Hawks (KH) rule sets conflict with one another. The AD rules say that interstellar travel occurs at the rate of one day per light year, while the KH rules, require 10 hours (one day’s work) per light year to plot out the jump, but actually making the jump takes 8.7 days regardless of the distance. Reconciling and clearing that up is a whole article in and of itself. We’ll save that for a future date. For this article, we’re going to assume that it takes 9 days to make a jump, regardless of the distance.

Of course that probably means the cost of a ticket should be fixed as the same number of resources go into making a jump regardless of the distance but for now we’ll go with the AD rules ticket costs.

If the PCs come into possession of a starliner, either via salvage, original constructions, or some other means, the KH Campaign Book (p. 44) provides guidance on what it costs to operate such a ship, how much of the ship is full on any given trip, and the risks involved. We’ll come back to those numbers later as well.

How Many Passengers – revisited

For this article, we’re going to be looking at a HS 10 passenger liner which falls in the middle of the range specified in the KH rules. According to the rules, this ship can carry 250 passengers. The question is, does this make sense?

A modern cruise ship, roughly the size of a HS 10 starliner.

Let’s look at some sources. A HS 10 ship is roughly the size of a modern, large cruise ship here on Earth. These ships typically hold up to 2800 passengers and 1200 crew, for a total of 4000 people, or 400 per hull size. But that’s the maximum capacity and typically means 4 people to a cabin. If you’ve ever been on a cruise ship, you know those cabins are small, typically 15-22 square meters. Now this is roughly the size of a Journey Class cabin on our starliner (16-24 square meters), the difference being that that size on our starliner is for a single being, not a group of four. That immediately means we need to cut our passenger estimate down by a factor of four putting us at about 700 passengers.

The other thing our starliner has to deal with, that a cruise ship doesn’t, it life support. On a cruise ship, air is free. And while there is probably some recycling of water, it’s not a closed loop with full filtering needed. And cruise ships tend to stop and replenish supplies every couple of days unless it’s a long trans-oceanic cruise. So they don’t carry a lot of food on board. In the Frontier, ships are typically designed to carry half a year of food and the systems to process the air, water, and waste onboard which eats up more space on the ship.

Then you have all the lifeboats, spacesuits, and other ship’s vehicles that our starliner has to have. Cruise ships have lifeboats but the passenger density on them is going to be higher than the ones on our starliner and the some of the lifeboats on cruise ships are inflatable. That’s not going to happen on a starship. Those eat up space as well.

Finally, a cruise ship has a lot of the upper decks exposed to air. That doesn’t count against it’s volume but provides a lot of communal space for the passengers. That space needs to exist on starliners as well but has to be enclosed within the hull.

Between the extra life support machinery, the communal space, and the ship’s vehicles, that could easily reduce the capacity of the ship by 30 to 70 percent depending on how you figure it. 250 passengers is just 36% of the 700 passenger number we had left above. It’s possibly at the low end, but reasonable.

Another point of comparison is the volume based rules I created for starship generation. In that system, which accounts for passageway, cabin space, and storage space, I designed a ship the same size as a HS 10 ship in the KH rules. It had a total of 100 First Class cabins, 1250 Journey class cabins, and 200 Storage class cabins. And that includes the cabins for the crew, the size of which the rules don’t address. For this I’ll assumed 50 of the Journey class cabins are for the (lots of robots on Frontier ships). So the total capacity is 1500 passengers, which is a little large. However, this system doesn’t currently account for communal space which could easily be as much or more than the space taken up by the cabins. So if we cut that number in half we’re back to 750 passengers, similar to our initial estimate from the cruise ship.

The bottom line is that while 250 is probably a bit low, it’s not unreasonable and the actual number might be only a factor of 2 or 3 higher. So we’ll go with 250 passengers for our analysis.

A Typical Journey

The Starliner

Okay, we have our ship, it carries 250 passengers. What does a typical journey look like? For this example, we’re going say this ship makes the run between Gran Quivera in the Prenglar system and Triad in the Cassidine system, a jump of 7 light years. We’ll look at the finances later, right now we are going to just look at logistics.

We’ll start the journey at the point when the ship is all loaded and ready to depart Gran Quivera for Triad. The first step is the jump to the Cassidine system. It takes just under 4.5 days to get to jump speed and the same amount of time to slow down. We’ll assume the total travel time is 9 days. In truth it could be up to 11 days depending on the orbital dynamics of the two systems and how accurate the jump is but we’ll go with 9 days.

After docking at the station around Triad, the ship has to do a number of housekeeping activities. First, the passengers have to disembark, then the interior of the ship needs to be cleaned. And new provisions need to be taken aboard. Then the passengers and the luggage for the next trip need to board.

Since this is a HS 10 ship, it has three Class B atomic engines. These engines require an overhaul after every three jumps. Since there are three engines, it makes sense to stagger the overhauls so that you do one after each jump. You’re always doing an overhaul each time in port, but you are only doing one and that make it reasonable. We’ll also top off the fuel pellets in the engine we’re doing the overhaul on. We’ll assume that the ship has two level 4 engineers on board that work alternating shifts so that maintenance and overhaul work can proceed around the clock to be as efficient as possible.

Let’s look at time scales. If a cruise ship can load or unload it’s 2800 passengers in a single day, I think it’s safe to assume that our 250 passengers can be loaded and unloaded in a single day as well. So that requires two days in port for those two operations. Refueling one engine takes on average 7 hours. The engine overhaul takes on average 38 hours. That’s a total of 45 hours of work. Assuming it is split between the two engineers, either working together on 10 hour shifts or around the clock on alternating shifts, that takes two and a quarter days. We’ll call it three to account for any variations and potential issues that come up. The provisioning and cleaning can occur while the engine work is happening. So our ship spends 5 days in port and then is ready for the return journey to Gran Quivera. So far we’re up to 14 days.

The trip back is exactly the same. It takes 9 days to make the jump, and another 5 days in port before it’s ready to leave. That is a total round trip time of 28 days.

The Shuttle

That’s the main part of the journey. You also need some way to get the passengers from the surface of the planet up to the station to board the starliner. That means you’re going to need a shuttle. For comparison, a Boeing 737 is about the size of a HS 2 ship. And it carries 175 people and their luggage. A Boeing 747 is about the size of a HS 3 ship and it carries 416 people plus luggage.

Now the trip up to the ship isn’t that long. As the Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels commented about his 1985 trip on the Space Shuttle Challenger:

Space is so close: It took only eight minutes to get there and twenty to get back.

That was at 3g and we probably want to be a little gentler on our passenger but it shouldn’t take more than a half hour to get into orbit and an hour back. They will need acceleration couches regardless and those take up a bit more room than a typical airline seat but not by much. It’s completely reasonable that a HS 3 shuttle can carry the 250 passengers for our space liner.

That means that we’ll need one shuttle at each system. If we let our spaceliner carry more than the 250 passengers, we’ll need more shuttles as well.

How Many Ships Do We Need?

With one ship, every 28 days we can move 250 beings from Gran Quivera to Triad and another 250 beings in the reverse direction. If this is the only ship running the route, there will only be a single trip once a month between the worlds. If you miss your flight, you’ll have to wait 28 days for the ship to be back. And if you want a round trip then you will spend at least 5 days in the destination system assuming you fly back out immediately when the ship leaves, otherwise it will be 33 days (or longer) after you arrive before you can catch a ship back.

Of course we can increase the frequency by adding more ships on the route. Let’s say we want a flight leaving every day. That’s easy enough. It’s a 28 day round trip for a single ship, you just need 28 ships and means you have a departure and arrival every day. And that allows you to move 250×28 or 7000 beings each way between the two systems in that same 28 day time period.

Regardless of how often you have interstellar departures (as long as it’s not more than once a day), your one shuttle can supply all of those ships. So even though you have 28 starliners, you only need a single shuttle at each system to handle the passenger traffic.

But that’s not the whole story. Each of those ships needs to have annual maintenance performed and that will take on average 15-16 days per ship. Which means once a year, each ships needs to be pulled out of rotation for one cycle to have it’s maintenance done. That means we need a spare ship to fill in while it’s out of commission. If you’re running a ship every day, you’ll actually need two spare ships to cover the gaps as the repair time on 28 ships is longer than a year and there will be some times when two ships are in maintenance. The shuttle needs annual maintenance as well, but that only takes on average 8-9 days as it is a smaller ship. If you only have 1-3 flights in that 28 day period, you can get away with a single shuttle and squeeze in its maintenance between runs, otherwise, you’ll need two of them to cover the maintenance periods.

My rendition of the AD star system map. Click for full size version.

That’s the numbers for a single system. There are 17 inhabited star systems on the AD map (not counting the Zebulon system) for a total of 19 jump routes. If there is a single flight along each route, once a month, you need a starliner for each leg plus a spare. And a shuttle in each system. That’s 55 ships. Of course that ignores the fact that some of the systems have two inhabited worlds (23 in all) and you’ll need more shuttles at those worlds and some ships to move passengers between the two planets in the system.

Now 55 ships (or 67 to account for the two world systems), isn’t too bad, but that is only a single trip every 28 days. If you want a daily trip between systems, you need 30×19 starliners (570 ships) plus 2×17 shuttles for a total of 604 ships. Again, accounting for the two planet systems, that’s another 6-12 shuttles and anywhere from 6 to 168 interplanetary starliners depending on how frequent you make the trips (6 shuttles and 6 ships for once every 28 days and 12 shuttles and 168 ships for daily trips).

With the starship construction centers only capable of supporting about 1500-2300 ships, we’re now looking at about one quarter to one half of the total ship capacity of the Frontier just to connect the worlds for a few hundred people moving between each system each day.

If you want more people moving between the worlds, you have several choices. First, you can make the passenger density higher and make each ship carry more. But that’s only realisticaly a factor of 2 or 3. As another option, you can make the starliners bigger. But remember, if the average ship size increases, the total number of ships the Frontier can support goes down. The final option is to increase the number of ships that the Frontier can support.

Implications

What this all means is that you have to make a decision about interstellar travel. If you have few ships, then trips are few and far between and not a lot of people will be traveling between worlds. Your characters should expect to spend months or years on a single world with all their adventures there, as getting tickets to move between worlds could be relatively rare depending exactly on how you structure it. It also probably means they won’t have their own ship as they are too rare.

Additionally, unless there are daily (or every other day) flights between each world, then it will take a long time to travel across the Frontier with layovers of several days to weeks in each system depending on the frequency and scheduling. If they are traveling between worlds, then there will be even longer spans of time (above the already long base travel times) between adventures and your plots need to account for those long time scales.

This article was focused simply on the logistics of travel and the number of ships it would take to support that. I didn’t even address the costs and economics of each individual flight. That will be part 1b at a future date.

What are your thoughts on the number and size of passenger liners? How do you handle it in your game? What other implications have you thought of that I didn’t cover? Let me know in the comments below.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY61.051 to FY61.080

This month sees the final leg of the trip for the remaining ships of the Discovery Squadron and it’s final disbanding, the HSS History’s Hope gets back on track on it’s exploration mission, avoiding it’s assailants in the YS01 system, and a new ship emerges from the Minotaur shipyards that will play a pivotal role in the history of the Frontier. Spacefleet also begins construction on the ships for Strike Force Meteor.

As always, you can follow along daily on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed if you don’t want to wait for the monthly summary. I’m a few days behind at the moment with my Twitter posting but I should get caught up in the next day or so.

Date (FY)	Events
61.051	– The Sathar starship construction center in the Liberty system completes 2 destroyers. – Strike Force Nova jumps into the Zebulon system. They begin decelerating toward Volturnus. – After much deliberation, the sathar high command decides to send two of its new cutter ships to the Kazak system to scout out the UPF and Rim forces there.
61.052	Construction begins on a new UPF assault carrier at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar). This is the first of the new ships commissioned for the new Strike Force Meteor group to be built around the battleship already under construction.
61.053	– Shakedown cruise complete, passengers begin loading onto the newest saurian Ark Ship. – The HSS History’s Hope detects emissions from another ship in the YS01 system, assumed the be their previous assailant. However, the ship is far away on the other side of the system. They believe that they will be able to get out of the system before it could catch them, even if they were already detected.
61.054	Construction begins on a new Spacefleet light cruiser, part of the new Strike Force Meteor, at the CDC shipyards (Triad, Cassidine).
61.055	Strike Force Nova arrives at Volturnus (Zebulon). The two Truane’s Star militia assault scouts are released to return to their home system. They begin accelerating toward jump speed.
61.056	– Construction begins on two destroyers for Spacefleet’s new Strike Force Meteor at the Hentz (Araks) shipyards. – Deceleration, plotting, and engine repairs complete, the HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for their jump back to YS02. Signals from the other ship in the system change and it seems to be accelerating toward them. However, its distance makes an intercept nearly impossible.
61.057	– Construction begins on two frigates for Spacefleet’s new Strike Force Meteor at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. – Sathar cutters arrive in the outer reaches of the Kazak system and begin a slow deceleration as they gather data on the system.
61.058	Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 85%.
61.059	After several weeks of short intra system runs, the CDCSS Mystic embarks on its first interstellar journey shuttling several CDC managers to Fromeltar to meet with members of the new Groth Energy Corporation.
61.060	– The HSS History’s Hope makes the jump to YS02 without encountering the other ship which was still 1.3 AU away when the jump was made. They begin decelerating and plotting their next jump, which after more study of the astrographic data, will be back to YS03, a jump of 6 ly. – Upon arrival in YS02, the HSS History’s Hope sends a subspace message back to Histran informing their organization of the presence of the hostile ship still in the YS01 system and their plans to continue onward. They YS01-YS02 jump data is not transmitted.
61.061	Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar)
61.062	Sathar starship construction center in OFS019 completes a cutter.
61.063	Sathar cutters in the outer Kazak system complete their deceleration and continue to collect data on the Rim forces in the system. They relay that Strike Force Nova seems to have departed the system.
61.064	The two Truane’s Star militia assault scouts arrive back at Pale station. The crews are given a three week leave while the ships are overhauled and repaired in the shipyard before rejoining regular patrol duties.
61.065	Memorial Services held in Valencia City (Clarion, White Light) for the crew of the Clarion Royal Marines frigate lost battling the sathar in the Zebulon system.
61.066	Sathar begin mobilization for final push into the Saurian system.
61.067	After 100 days all of the newly hatched Eorna infants are still alive and growing healthily.
61.068	CDCSS Mystic arrives at Groth Station (Fromeltar) without incident. Its maiden interstellar voyage went off without a hitch.
61.069	After months of data collection and analysis, scientists believe they have cracked the structure of the signals from OFS200. Some of them are voice transmissions in an unknown tongue that sounds similar to recordings of sathar voices.
61.070	The HSS History’s Hope successfully makes the jump from YS02 to YS03 and begin their deceleration and plotting of a jump back to YS02.
61.071	– Summer ends on Alcazzar. CDC begins pulling staff in preparation for the long winter. – Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the CDC shipyards (Triad, Cassidine)
61.072	With the release of the findings about the signals from OFS200, the Anti-Satharian League stage demonstrations outside the Council of Worlds and Spacefleet headquarters demanding an immediate attack on the system to eradicate the worms.
61.073	Loading complete, the sixth saurian Ark Ship departs the Sauria system in search of a new world away from the sathar.
61.074	After over a year of rebuilding and new ship construction, the sathar begin gearing up for final push on the Sauria system.
61.075	Sathar starship construction center in OFS138 completes a heavy cruiser.
61.076	Repairs of Triad Starship Construction Center bring it up to 90% capacity.
61.077	Construction of the CMS Flitter complete at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. The ship begins its maiden voyage to its home system of White Light.
61.078	After spending ten days in port, the CDCSS Mystic loads passengers for a return trip to Triad (Cassidine). The CDC delegation remains on Groth (Fromeltar) to continue negotiations with the Groth Energy Corporation.
61.079	The UPFS Eleanor Moraes emerges from the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyard and begins a shakedown cruise as the final members of the crew begin to arrive in the system.
61.080	Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 90%.

Here’s the full timeline file:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download