pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
What about a post-holocaust mall (TNE)?
Cash, Currency, Credit
- Thread starter Mithras
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What about a post-holocaust mall (TNE)?
Plankowner
SOC-13
One (or more) of the Megacorps also deals primarily in Banking. Maybe they are the primary means whereby credit is transfered.
That TL15 credit reader would exist at Starports D or better and in TAS offices as well as Naval and Scout Bases.
You still have a problem with all those E class starports though...
That TL15 credit reader would exist at Starports D or better and in TAS offices as well as Naval and Scout Bases.
You still have a problem with all those E class starports though...
As a GM I really like the idea of making PCs either wait months for credit checks and bank transfers, or set up accounts on multiple worlds. The PC trader trying to bluster his way through a purchase: "No deal? No deal? I'm worth thirty million credits, and you won't front me for a lousy fifty thousand worth of Hurlberry Wine?" The broker: "On Brilgam, you might be worth thirty million or three million or three hundred million. But this is Loompaw IX, and until I get that Bank Letter you are worth the twenty credits in your pocket. On the other hand, I got a friend needs someone to do a couple favors for him, and maybe you could cover a few expenses that way. Or maybe I could sell the wine to the next guy..."
Not really, there isn't all that much to buy at a class E starport world. Some loose change should cover the cost of the pretty beads.
In practicality, the ship might need to withdraw some cash BEFORE jumping to deal with a class E starport or a poor/low pop/low TL world (without the High Tech Teller).
For a large purchase (where cash is impractical) the purchase could require time for the funds to be confirmed on a near-by High Tech world/better starport. You don't load the goods until your check clears.
sounds like a need for a starport concession: http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?p=255397#post255397
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
Ya gotta be careful importing high tech into a world. What if it breaks? What does it cost to ship a new one, or a part, from another world? Where is the closest high tech world anyway?
Let's say you're on the Class C starport on Pysadi, in the Aramis subsector. The world is TL 4. They're still running around with steam ships, bi-planes and early mono-wing planes, and using horse-analogs for transportation in the outlying areas.
Now, the Starport, of course, is a little more high-tech. It'd have to be. DGP says that the minimum starport TL is TL 8.
So, let's say the Pysadi's Class C starport is TL 8 while the world it sits on is TL 4.
And now, we bring this TL 15 piece of equipment to the world. Who can fix it even if spare parts are carried?
There's all sorts of issues that would preclude something like that to be used on a TL 4 world.
I'm not saying it's impossilbe to assume that it's there, it's just there's a lot to think about the viability of placing such a piece of high tech on a world such as Pysadi.
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
And, there is a real problem with using some of those spare parts to hack that vaunted ImpCr card security.......
I agree completely. There are problems and thus places where you won't find be able to validate currency bills, let alone credit cards. I think the starport class is a good indicator of whether or not anyone has bothered to overcome those problems. You should be OK at any Class A and B starport. For other starport classes it would depend on the local tech level.
Hans
I would suggest that a class C starport has invested in facilities to repair Starships (and build small craft in at least one flavor of Traveller) making it a good candidate as well.
"That will be 6.3 MCr for the repairs. In cash, please. We don't take Imperial Credit Cards."
"That's ok, we filled the cargo hold with 1 Cr notes before we left, so we could pay in exact change. Ok, here's one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, ..."
pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
Hehe! Could be more like the line from (the film) "Clear and Present Danger":
(Harrison Ford shows helicopter sales man a CIA blank check)"Will you take a company check?"
Other fiscal options for the Prepared Interstellar Traveller:
1) Is the PC accustomed to returning periodically to a number of worlds - perhaps as a merchant on a route? Set up bank accounts on several worlds, in advance, in agreement with whatever local financial practices are in place. Banks will be more likely to extend credit when they already have you as a customer.
2) Establish contacts with whomever is rich and powerful (commensurate to your means and class) wherever you go. You never know when you'll need to call in a favor if the local loan shark owes you one. Or when you need a sudden windfall of capital, it's nice to have good relations with the Baron before you go proposing he buy a percentage of your current enterprise.
1) Is the PC accustomed to returning periodically to a number of worlds - perhaps as a merchant on a route? Set up bank accounts on several worlds, in advance, in agreement with whatever local financial practices are in place. Banks will be more likely to extend credit when they already have you as a customer.
2) Establish contacts with whomever is rich and powerful (commensurate to your means and class) wherever you go. You never know when you'll need to call in a favor if the local loan shark owes you one. Or when you need a sudden windfall of capital, it's nice to have good relations with the Baron before you go proposing he buy a percentage of your current enterprise.
What about a credit card that goes both ways...in addition to having biometric scanners to determine that the identity of the user matches with the owner...the card also implants a genetic marker the debt incurred by the user into the DNA of the holder. This debt can be eased by any financial institution but those with longer debts might get certain things like lessions that resemble tatoos to alert the police of the debter's presence.
"the card also implants a genetic marker the debt incurred by the user into the DNA of the holder. This debt can be eased by any financial institution but those with longer debts might get certain things like lessions that resemble tatoos to alert the police of the debter's presence."
Ew.
If you go that far, why not have the debt marker block the reception of the brain's natural opiates when payments are late. "Don't like making your card payments on time? Fine. Go cold turkey. See if we care. You'll be back." The banks would love it if they could get away with it - debtors making their payments with the fixed intensity of junkies trying to score, and crawling on their bellies begging them to accept their payments when they're a day late.
Ew.
If you go that far, why not have the debt marker block the reception of the brain's natural opiates when payments are late. "Don't like making your card payments on time? Fine. Go cold turkey. See if we care. You'll be back." The banks would love it if they could get away with it - debtors making their payments with the fixed intensity of junkies trying to score, and crawling on their bellies begging them to accept their payments when they're a day late.
Renaissance Man
SOC-12
Now that's an interesting idea. Since X-boat traffic can't predict where a debt ridden traveller goes next, it's possible to outrun your debts, at least for awhile. But it's pretty hard to outrun "you." That's why the J-TAS article makes a lot of sense.
Problem is that the data can be altered in the DNA as much as it could in the card. If you want to break the system you can. Why not just have the incurred debits and credits stored in the card, rather than mess with the possibility of credit induced cancer due to genetic damage from a bad encode?
Another interesting side effect of carrying your bank teller with you is that it contains an indelible record of everywhere you've been and every transaction you've made, which can be extremely inconvenient for criminal purposes...
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Renaissance Man
SOC-12
I'm pretty sure any planet at all interested in interstellar commerce will have petitioned for and received a well-maintained Imperial financial institution, regardless of TL. A C class starport sounds about right.
Captain Midnight
SOC-12
The short answer is "have spares on hand". You ought to be able to assess how often you can get supplies from some source of high-tech electronics (if you don't know whether you're getting fifty ships per year or two, then you don't have enough information to set up a business; you need to set up reliable supply first), and there ought to be a reliable estimate of "mean time between failure (MTBF)" for these pieces of gear. MTBF might be expressed in time, or it might be expressed in number of uses; either way, you can figure out just how often you're likely to need a replacement. Keep enough on hand to get you through five times the expected supply cycle, to deal with occasional glitches or faulty replacements. This piece of equipment is a point-failure source for your business; if you lose card reader capability, you're going to watch the revenue side of your balance sheet drop to nothing, while the liabilities (like salaries and rent) just keep on coming, and that's a sure-fire recipe for bankruptcy. Yes, keeping spares on hand is going to cost money. That's known as "cost of doing business".
It's going to be pricey to bring replacement equipment in. You pass those costs along to your customers. If the customer base won't support the level of trade needed for you to cover your expenses, then you have just discovered another way for investors to go broke by backing you. Go seek out subsidies from various levels of government, or from someone who stands to benefit by having you provide this service. If nobody benefits by having you provide this service... then maybe you shouldn't be doing it.
It's important for the GM to keep in mind the difference between "what is plausible?" and "what sort of thing do I want in my game?". The exact degree of difference is going to depend on what sort of game you intend to run. If you want games where people have to worry about how they're going to pay for things, and who issued their money, and is money any good, then you're going to have a radically different game from someone who wants to set a story in a well-developed background area.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
This could be a good device for a crafty-minded GM.
Let's say the GM wants to lure the PCs out of the starport, into the domain of the world govt.
"Oh, sorry, our TL 14 Super-Duper Card Reader is out of service. We're waiting on a replacement. Sorry. Since we normally use the Card Reader, we don't have a local currency exchanger within the complex. The nearest money changer is in Startown, but that's local jurisdiction. Still...you'll need to be able to play for your berthing fees, maintenance, re-supply, and fuel...we take local currency too..."
What is the TL of this card? What is the local TL?
RE: Counterfeiting.
Of course Imperial currency can be counterfeited. Forgery at the very least is canonical, and counterfeiting appears in some quasi-canon. The trick is to make it difficult and punish transgressors. The main way to makle counterfeiting difficult is to use production processes that are expensive. If you can afford the 5 million credit printing press required to counterfeit, why bother to counterfeit in the first place?
Imperial money needs to be very difficult to copy, but also usable at every tech level. Electronic money won't get you far on a low tech world.
Commodity based currency sounds like a great idea until you realize that commodity values are going to vary widely between worlds. A gold coin won't have much value on a world where gold is common. And shipping commodity currency between worlds is going to be a pain - particularly in large sums.
Imperial currency is probably fiat money, with distribution controlled by Imperial edict, probably through certain MegaCorp banks in much the ame way that the Federal Reserve (a private corporation) controls the supply of money in the US. There is probably a local branch on each world of any reasonable size, which controls the amount of currency in circulation - unless you use Imperial currency only for inter-world transaction, and allow local currency on each planet. In the case of the latter, you will have to deal with exchange and exchange rates.
When you start to delve into this, you find the economics of Traveller aren't very well thought out - but then again it isn't a game by and for economists.
INTU, I assume that the Imperial credit, much like the dollar of old, is welcomed everywhere as 'real money'. It is often preferred to the local stuff, and any trader or black-marketeer will know the price in credits of anything bought or sold in the local market.
Most planets won't even bother with printing their own money, but just adopt the Imperial Credit. In this case, the roll of the central banks will be critical, with the availability of credits on world strictly controlled so that the Credit has similar purchase power throughout the Imperium to prevent speculation by shipping tons of imperial notes between planets.
As far as the currency itself, I did a write up a while ago at the request of my players. It can be found here:
http://travellercentral.com/rules/money.html
Of course Imperial currency can be counterfeited. Forgery at the very least is canonical, and counterfeiting appears in some quasi-canon. The trick is to make it difficult and punish transgressors. The main way to makle counterfeiting difficult is to use production processes that are expensive. If you can afford the 5 million credit printing press required to counterfeit, why bother to counterfeit in the first place?
Imperial money needs to be very difficult to copy, but also usable at every tech level. Electronic money won't get you far on a low tech world.
Commodity based currency sounds like a great idea until you realize that commodity values are going to vary widely between worlds. A gold coin won't have much value on a world where gold is common. And shipping commodity currency between worlds is going to be a pain - particularly in large sums.
Imperial currency is probably fiat money, with distribution controlled by Imperial edict, probably through certain MegaCorp banks in much the ame way that the Federal Reserve (a private corporation) controls the supply of money in the US. There is probably a local branch on each world of any reasonable size, which controls the amount of currency in circulation - unless you use Imperial currency only for inter-world transaction, and allow local currency on each planet. In the case of the latter, you will have to deal with exchange and exchange rates.
When you start to delve into this, you find the economics of Traveller aren't very well thought out - but then again it isn't a game by and for economists.
INTU, I assume that the Imperial credit, much like the dollar of old, is welcomed everywhere as 'real money'. It is often preferred to the local stuff, and any trader or black-marketeer will know the price in credits of anything bought or sold in the local market.
Most planets won't even bother with printing their own money, but just adopt the Imperial Credit. In this case, the roll of the central banks will be critical, with the availability of credits on world strictly controlled so that the Credit has similar purchase power throughout the Imperium to prevent speculation by shipping tons of imperial notes between planets.
As far as the currency itself, I did a write up a while ago at the request of my players. It can be found here:
http://travellercentral.com/rules/money.html
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