TFL/Commerce

# Density of Trade

The typical star system sees around a half-dozen freighters arrive and depart through its T-K point every 24 hours. The freighters are usually a mix of high volume, slow bulk freighters on regular routes and smaller, faster freighters handling priority or irregular freight. Some of the larger and more prosperous systems see twice this much traffic; a few systems such as Rosetta or Zrivlu see nearly ten times as much traffic. Many systems see half the normal traffic or less, and a few such Haven or Hayek Star rarely see more than one new freighter a week.

Most systems see a data courier arrive every day, transmitting the news from a nearby system and receiving the news from the system. Systems with high amounts of commercial traffic also see high amounts of data couriers. A few systems, such as Seelluggue and Bruzvliz, have even more visits by data couriers because of their importance in the banking systems.

## Passenger Trade

Most systems see a single fast passenger liner, capable of transporting 1250 people between systems in a month of two, arrive and depart daily. The larger, cheaper, and much slower Cityships carry around 25,000 people at 1/3rd the cost, but take nearly three months to get to adjacent systems and up to five months to get to distant systems. Most systems see a Cityship arrive or depart once a month; it can take several years to get to a particular destination via Cityship, and much of that time is spent waiting for the appropriate Cityship to leave. Travelers in a hurry with can often book passage with a freighter going in the same direction. It's much more expensive and uncertain, but requires much less waiting for a shorter transit.

As with data couriers, passenger trade increases in systems with extra commerce, and decreases in systems without less commerce. Some systems, such as TFL/Lenin's Star, are never visited by liners or cityships at all, and the only travelers come on freighters.

In general, there is very little interstellar tourism in the Fringe: the cheapest ticket between two neighboring stars can run most of a year's salary for a typical worker for the privilege of sleeping in a bunkroom with three strangers for three months, plus the cost of the return trip. The filthy rich can afford to own and operate a fast courier and tour the stars, but they are by far the exception.

# Commodities

The following broad categories of goods are traded across interstellar distances. On the table below, nominal value is the selling price to a reseller at a trading depot system; commodities in high demand can sell for up to 50% more and efficient producers sell them at the point of origin for 70-90% of this price. Freight companies can sometimes charge as much as 60% of the typical valuee when shipping from efficient production systems to heavy consumption systems, but less than half of that is more common.

Typical prices can vary substantially depending on the specifics of the good. Thorium, unrefined uranium yellowcake, and weapons grade uranium are all technically rare earth metals, but yellowcake is valued around $25K/ton and weapons grade uranium is valued at nearly $500K/ton.

Other commodities, such as raw chemicals (petroleum and other feedstocks), food (alcohol, grains, meat), or industrial metals (aluminum, iron, and titanium) are not valuable enough to justify the cost of interstellar shipping. Some Star Systems such as Lenin's Star or Haven make special arrangements for shipping these goods but those are exceptions. Exceptionally valuable instances of these commodities are sometimes shipped over short distances.

Some goods, such as military weapons and armor (armaments), nanofabricators and matter-anti-matter annihilation power plants (industrial equipment), narcotic drugs (medical supplies), highly enriched radioactive metals (rare earth metals), and any luxury good or precious metal are attractive targets for pirate, and are generally preferentially shipped on small, fast freighters with enough armament to deter pirates. These freighters are expensive, but the goods are high value and can afford to be shipped via expensive methods.

Some items are also illegal or have high tariffs. Smugglers prefer to take these cargoes and get them past the authorities without having them seized or needing to pay the tariff. The TFL/Continuance Protective Concordance is notable for having exceedingly high tariffs but relatively porous border control, and blockade runners will travel to CPC systems, land directly on the planets in remote locations, and transfer goods while avoiding the tariff.

## Non-Exported Commodities

Raw chemicals, food, industrial metals, and simple plastics are non-exported commodities. In general, the value of these goods is not sufficient to justify shipping them across interstellar distances. For most of them, it's rarely economically value to ship them a few AU inside a single star system. However, these commodities are necessary to life, so most systems are self-sufficient in them and often have a surplus to sell.

Like all commodities, non-export commodities are subject the concerns of supply and demand, and typical prices can vary from nominal values.

# Supply and Demand

Each commodity is cheaply available in systems that produces an excess of it and sells for more than its nominal value in systems that consume a great deal of it. Precursors of a commodity, such as precious metals for luxury goods, sell for more in systems that produce that commodity. A commodity that is neither notably consumed or produced in a system is usually available from the local, internal market for a slight increase in nominal value, but usually sells for less than nominal value when it is being imported into the system.

Supply and demand are always linked and opposite: high demand for a commodity necessarily means low supply, and very high supply necessarily means very low demand.

 Very low supplyVery high demand | x1.4 | x1.5

Prices of commodities can vary by +/- 10% (+/- x0.1) depending on the local market, and cunning negotiators can buy or sell things for more or less than normal.

## Trade Depot Systems

Some star systems are known for being trading depots, where anything can be bought or sold. While the supply and demand for many commodities in a trade depot are governed by what the system produces and consumes, the supply and demand of all other commodities is highly volatile, changing from month to month depending on what has been been brought in most recently.

Some tramp freighter companies prefer to trade through trade depots, as there is often a potential for outside profit by buying things for less than they're normally sold for or selling them for more than they're worth. But more often, there's a potential for outside loss. The larger freight companies that can afford fleets of data couriers to keep informed on local market conditions and that have enough fast freighters to take advantage of the market conditions get more reliable profits out of trade depots, but the additional costs of the courier fleet eat into the profits.

# Production of Commodities

All commodities have to produced. Mines produce ores that are refined into metals. Agriculture operations produce food and some of the feedstock for basic chemicals. Other base chemicals are mined or scooped from gas giants. Base chemicals are refined into refined chemicals and plastics, and refined chemicals, plastics, and metals are manufactured into armaments, consumer goods, industrial equipment, luxury goods, and medical supplies. Many of these operations require specialized equipment.

## Mining

Specialized equipment (the Mining and Refinery spacecraft systems) is used to mine ore from asteroids or from the surface of moons and sometimes habitable planets. Asteroid miners also usually carry smelters on board, as it generally regarded as more efficient to smelt the final metal out of the rock onsite than carry the extra mass of the worthless dross back. Asteroid mining is a highly specialized trade, and most systems aggressively control who is allowed to mine from any given asteroid. A lot of people consider this control to be a waste of resources: there are hundreds of thousands of minor asteroids, even in systems without actual asteroid belts, and tens of thousands of asteroids that orbit near any inhabited planet, so even the most aggressive asteroid mining operation is unlikely to exhaust the mineral wealth of a single system. However, although there are tens of thousands of readily accessible asteroids for mining operations, only a few of them have recoverable amounts of precious metals, and most authorities prefer to limit claim jumping.

A powered mining system attached to a metallic asteroid will produce metal ore at the system's stated mining rate, and the same for base chemical precursors for a system attached to a carbonaceous asteroid. A separate refinery system can refine that ore into industrial metals (and sometimes rare earth or precious metals) or or those precursors in base chemicals at the stated rate of refining. The rate is input rate of the refinery - the output rate depends on the concentration of the desired material in the input rate.

*Example*: The mining ship *Jupiter III* is an SM +10M ship with 3 mining systems and 1 refinery. Attached to a metallic asteroid with 20% purity and trace amounts of rare earth and precious metals (a rare and valuable find), it can mine 150 tons ore per hour and refine that ore into 20 tons of industrial metals, a half ton of rare earth metals, and 1 lb of precious metals.
## Chemical Refining

Base chemicals can be refined by a specialized robofac (roborefs) into plastics and refined chemicals. Roborefs dedicated to producing a specific plastic or refined chemical require base chemicals with a nominal value of 25% of the final output; more flexible roborefs that can produce any plastic or refined chemical require 40% of the nominal value of the final produce as input. Spacecraft robofacs perform this produce at their stated rate in $s of nominal value of output good per hour.

## Manufacturing

Robofacs convert parts into goods. Again, dedicated production robofacs that can only produce one thing are more efficient than flexible robofacs that can be reconfigured to make just about anything: dedicated robofacs require input goods with a nominal value 25% of the final product's nominal value while flexible robofacs require 40%. Input parts are not generic, and depend on the desired output:

 Luxury Goods | 1500 | 65% Precious Metals, 25% Electronics, 10% Plastics

Luxury goods can theoretically be made on any robofac by inputting the proper parts into robofac and running the correct template. However, luxury goods are often valued on intangible qualities like aesthetics, brand, and fashion. Blindly copying a valuable work of art makes a counterfeit, not an equally valuable copy of the original. Similarly, a valuable purse might be valuable because it is imprecisely hand-stitched by a master artisan, and a robofac copy does not have the same cachet. Even completely identical copies of a factory produced luxury good may not have the same value as the authentic good if the seller doesn't have the right connections: Sinzil Platinum aircraft have to be sold through Sinzil, and unauthorized but identical copies to do not have the same value.

# Trade Routes

Trade routes occur when a freighter can reliably move between three or more systems, unloading cargo from the first system at the second system and picking up cargo for the third system. Trade loops are trade routes that return to their starting point and can be performed more or less endlessly, at least in theory. Trade routes and trade loops tend to be dominated by the larger, bulk freight carriers, but the smaller tramp freighters can sometimes find work carrying risky cargo or dealing with emergency disruptions of the regular trade.

## Route Components

Electronics Factory -> Factory -> Armory
Electronics Factory or Factory -> Manufactory -> Habitat, Luxury Habitat
Factory -> Armory -> Military Depot
Factory -> Electronics Factory -> Habitat, Luxury Habitat, Manufactory, or Shipyard
Mine -> Armory -> Military Depot
Mine -> Artisan Craft -> Luxury Habitat
Mine -> Electronics Factory -> Habitat, Luxury Habitat, Manufactory, or Shipyard
Mine -> Factory -> Armory, Electronics Factory, Manufactory, Pharmacy, Refinery, or Shipyard
Refinery -> Luxury Farm -> Luxury Habitat
Refinery -> Pharmacy -> Habitat, Luxury Habit, or Military Depot
## Loop Components

Mine -> Factory -> Mine
Mine -> Electronics Factory -> Factory -> Mine
## Known Routes

All these routes have legs of 12 light years or less. Not all of these routes are viable for all freighters, as jumping back and forth between the CDE and CPC is difficult for non-smugglers. There are also routes with longer legs.

Algolthor -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Blaog-delt -> Breep Bert-> Bruzvliz
Breep Bert -> Daze -> Rand Star
Burke Star -> Daze -> Rand Star
Bruzvliz -> Kazekaz -> Korsigar, Zlraazaz
Bruzvliz -> Rosetta -> New Panama, Osedi, Zrivlu
Bruzvliz -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Cassidine -> Dixon's Star -> Theseus -> Haven
Cassidine -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Cheub-bap -> Cassidine -> Cats-Eye, Dixon's Star
Cheub-bap -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Cheub-bap -> Dixon's Star -> Thesues -> Haven
Cheub-bap -> Gruna-garu -> Cats-Eye, Daze, New Panama
Cheub-bap -> Kazekaz -> Korsigar
Dixon's Star -> Thesues -> Haven
Fromeltar -> Thesues -> Haven
Gruna-garu -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Hampton Tides -> Cassidine -> Cats-Eye, Dixon's Star, New Panama
Hampton Tides -> Cats-Eye or Keyio -> New Panama
Hampton Tides -> Tianguo -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Hayek Star -> Zrilzluz -> Zrivlu
Ishau-brud -> Kizkur -> Osedi, Rosetta, Zrivlu
Ishau-brud -> Rosetta-> New Panam, Osedi, Zrivlu
Kaze-oku -> Tianguo -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Kazekaz -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Keiyo -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Kizkur -> Rosetta -> New Panama, Osedi, Zrivlu
Madderly's Star -> Bruzvliz -> Kazekaz, Korsigar, Rosetta, Timeon, Zlaraaza, Zrivlu
Madderly's Star -> Cassidine -> Cats-Eye, Dixon's Star
Madderly's Star -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Madderly's Star -> Cheub-bap -> Cassidine, Cats-Eye, Dixon's Star, Gruna-garu, Kazekaz
Madderly's Star -> Gruna-garu -> Cats-Eye, Daze
Madderly's Star -> Kazekaz -> Korsigar, Zlraazaz
Madderly's Star -> Neu Aachens -> Cassidine, Cats-eye, Cheup-bap, Kazekaz, New Panama, Timeon
Madderly's Star -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Madderly's Star -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Neu Aachens -> Cassidine -> Cats-Eye, Dixon's Star
Neu Aachens -> Cats-Eye -> New Panama
Neu Aachens -> Cheub-bap -> Cassidine, Cats-Eye, Dixon's Star, Gruna-garu, Kazekaz
Neu Aachens -> Kazekaz -> Korsigar, Zlraazaz
Neu Aachens -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
New Menlo -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
New Menlo -> Starvail -> Tianguo
Starvail -> Tianguo -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Tianguo -> Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu
Timeon -> Zlraazaz -> Zrivlu