Heist the Colours (OOC)

Nice one, Pedrop! :)

As a player: yes. But I think Raf is focused only on getting the ship and having everything that is needed to run it efficiently(fuel, parts), not thinking about anything else to much... So if others also wants that, someone else could suggest it(or Bob?) or... we can leave it for later, as you said.

But... thinking about it now - it could be: many different ship parts that Raf bought some time ago. And when he was buying them, he certainly could think something like: "The more the better, if they won't be needed we will sell them, sooner or later." Especially considering that we are at TL9-10 :)
I agree. Ship parts make the most sense for me and would be bought in advance.
Yes, you are right situation was quite different not long ago.
"You see Bob!? Even GM thinks that about you! I know you are terribly old, but you still should learn to keep your mounth shut at the right moments!"

Yes indeed. The more the game resembles 'real life' the easier it is to make sense of how things will respond/react and what will happen if we do something.
Yeah. We will find the balance. This was two rolls for the same objective, but, as you say, when they are on different paths. They are not part of a Chain, you guys were working towards the same goal, but were not really 'working together'.
Not Bob, he does not know you are taking the ship and leaving the system, so Trade would be quite incongruous in his mind. :)

Abby may have spoken about it, but she has not experience in this regard. It is also ultimately a player decision.
Can be. That makes sense for Raf to have done. Though that will not bring anything near the same sort of profit potential as trying to buy something this system specialises in and that you 'know' will be valuable wherever you are going (presumably the Characters have some idea about where they are going next).

If you (maybe Cat?) suspected there was a war or unrest coming you could make a killing by stockpiling the commodity made here, knowing it will become scarce due to disrupted supply and manufacturing. But the harder you push, the greater the risks, of course.

For instance: You might be able to buy 'Common Electronics' and later sell them as 'Advanced Electronics' due to war-shortages. Such insider Trading can yield vastly better profits than any legit Speculative Trade.
I am not sure I understand that. TL is obviously not an in-universe concept, and there is always a gradient. TL10 stuff is just 'Next-Gen' from the Characters' perspective. The whole universe is at that TL range, so it is 'normal' for you guys.

That was added after the roll to role-play having loused it up so badly. Essentially, Cat lost focus when she saw something shiny.

Ah, I thought I had not read it. Editing a post people have read can get confusing.

How does Cat react to Abby's sudden and unexpected 'attack'?

Somehow I feel that Cat having a lot of contacts at the "elites" - being noble, and with this conspiracy(being involved, yes?) could be the best informed person in the group - about that the war is coming. Not necessarily when it is coming.

But I wonder what @WhtKnt thinks about it? Are you interested in this trading thing?
What I meant by this:
I thought that as we are at TL9-10 right now: space ships, so their parts too are still quite uncommon - and as you underscored it quite a few times(rightfully so) - are at the very high end of what humans were able to achieve in technolog regards.
If that is still true: that would mean that those ship parts are very valuable wherever we will be going, and aseptically if we would go towards the "rim worlds".
So: if we agree to the above(?) that would mean that buying ship parts at the capital of some planet, probably would bring hight profit in most places that are further from the "main roads". Or even in general: in most places:) Plus: war probably means some ships will be damaged, so the parts will be expensive too.

Thats the path I see for Raf to engage him in trading, that seems the most thematic for me. But as I said earlier maybe the other PC will have more/better incentive to buy something in advance that we could sell later? :) Raf - if was informed - would certainly be interested in helping with this:)

Indeed, that is true, but that means they are expensive to buy as well, and there is not all that much demand. You could make some profit by selling anything you thought you might need for your new ship and did not use, but there is no guarantee that you will find a buyer soon. Looking for one would be a roleplay, though.
Yes, but also here. And you don't have all that much money to buy such expensive items. You are welcome to try it though, it just would not be the wisest investment if you were not already looking for parts, or possibly had a use for such parts.
That can be true of most items, and finding buyers will be a challenge the further you get from the central areas that can afford ships.
Though, if you are Jumping away from the war, it may take years for it to affect other systems, not everyone can Jump. If you want to make a quick buck off the nascent war, you may need to do it in-system.
Understood. You are in the market for a ship, so you are thinking about ships. It makes sense to look at those markets, but that does not make them the best markets to dabble in. It could add favour to the story to do so, or the others could have to work to persuade you to look at other goods that might be more immediately profitable.

This is all good RP fodder.

I think that Cat would be aware that the war is about to begin, just not when exactly. As far as benefitting from it, Cat isn't motivated by money, so there would have to be some other hook to get her interest.

She might know well enough to have planned for it while planning the getaway. Even if it was going to take weeks to materialise, she could have been putting things in place.
Fair enough. Running out of money later might change those motivations, but we can deal with that when it happens.
If Cat shared her suspicions about the coming unrest the others might have acted on that information.

She was rather tight-lipped about why she needed to get away so badly, blaming it an ex-lover stalking her. She has not specifically said anything about the war to anyone.

Cool, forget about that angle then. Everyone is still free to engage in Trade if/when we get round to it, but you won't have the advantage of foreknowledge.

How difficult should this be? It could be locked up in a military facility, but that seems a bit too much ;)

My first thought was that Ronny might be doing a temp job somewhere, possibly off the books and that place has gotten their hands on one for research purposes. With the war breaking out, the researchers probably won't have the time to miss it. But it does involve getting the computer out of the building.

Ok, no war profiting. Good by moral POV:) And may simplify our discussion a little?

I looked at the book, and this what I have qualified as ship parts - "Advanced Machine Parts" - is indeed awfully expensive. But I see another arc. Raf and Lio want's to build a cybernetics lab at the ship, don't they? At least some day. Or sooner? As the cybernetics are also very expensive... buying them for sell would be hard too - right now :( BUT! Buying the equipment for the lab could be in reasonable ranges? The same scenerio could be here: we bought some parts and equipment for the lab in excess, to sell it later.

It could be one of the way Lio and Raf were planing to make some money after leaving Ruby? Building some cybernetics staff and sell.

Different approach would be to barrow some mony from some corrupted government official - with no intention to pay him off... But I'm not sure we want to introduce this in the current events - also?

Whatever way we will choose, I think it( buying some staff to sell later ) could take place like 2 months ago from now. It could be a parallel thread with those events? But I don't know who else is interesting in checking those trading subsystems of Traveller?

Side note: apart about the trading arc - this cybernetic lab, could be Lio's and Raf's "pet project, getting back to younger years, leaving the harsh world for the benefit of science, and changing it for the better" - whether it is possible with their skills or not:) And making some money on it, will not hurt too... especially that this "some" in the case of cybernetics could be quite a lot... What you think @Airshark ?

There is a world of difference between 'war profiting' and 'war profiteering'. Since you did not know that an actual war was coming (even if you expected some civil upheaval), making some money is not all that morally dubious.
Yeah, and even those don't quite fit 'ship parts' Ships can only really be made or repaired in a Shipyard in a High-Tech Spaceport (page 188), and it does not make much sense to build one of those where the parts are not available. So finding a buyer who can use the parts and does not already have access to the parts will be a whole big thing. We can make a mission out of it, possibly say that Raf thinks he knows of a buyer, and then you have to get to them.

'Ship parts' are not an easily-tradable good, so going with them for RP reasons will have RP complications.
We can engage the mechanics to get you a better price, both here (Industrial and High Tech) and again where you sell (hopefully Non-Industrial and maybe Asteroid? (based on the (faulty) assumption that 'Ship parts' are 'Advanced Machine Parts', which makes selling them on an Asteroid nonsensical)). But we will need to see how much money you have at the end of your heist, we can then pretend you already spent that on Trade.

You have 81 Tons of Cargo Space, Trading 1 Ton of goods will not pay the fuel bills.
That is, of course, an option. It has big risks, and might not work.

If you do this, do you discuss it with the rest of your team? Are they involved?
More than that, they are so rare as to be virtually unavailable at your TL. You might need to be entrepreneurs and start that enterprise from scratch, which could have great rewards if you can find the market. That sounds like a thing for later, and your lab might instead lead to missions where people have/need Cybernetics.
That might be better left till you know what the ship is like... and till you have the money to build it. You can work on that in your spare time as we play. Spending all your 'spare change' on starting a lab could leave you broke if you can't immediately turn that into profit.
That is a possibility, but carries high risks of being stuck with speciality goods you don't need and can't sell. All your plans to 'sell off your excess' are not ideal plans to make money fast. Looking at the markets you are in and going to and then buying and selling the right thing for both is the Traders' Way.
That sound like an excellent end-goal, but I fear it will take a lot more time and money than you have right now?
If you just want to say you did some Trading last month we can start a new thread for it, but it is probably only a handful of posts.

You can either focus on the mechanics of the Trade system or focus on the RP of trading (guided by the mechanics), or mix and match as and when you feel one approach is more appropriate.
We can leave it till we have dealt with the current mission, then decide. We can say it happened in the past.

If only some players are interested in this, and the ones that are have the spare bandwidth, we can get in the habit of running Speculative Trade threads in parallel with our missions.
That was more how I saw it coming into play. Maybe once you have a Ship you two will find you really want one, and start to build one in the RP. A 'lab' sounds all fancy, but you can just start to accumulate the gear you use in a Stateroom or part of the Hold and call that your 'Lab'.

Cybernetics are rare enough that you will have to work to get any gear, and it will bring outside interest in your capabilities. Like the Jump Drive, having this will make you special and lead to missions/stories.
You might (eventually?) need to get some levels in Profession (Cybernetics) and/or Profession (Medic) to fully capitalise on those as ways to make steady money.

Probably somewhere between 'locked up in a military facility' and 'walk it out of a building you have access to' in terms of difficulty?

Though, the amount of effort needed will say something about the value of the prize, so if it was quite easy, it will just be a slightly better computer, if it was really (militarily) hard then it will be a very special computer indeed. Abby will appreciate both, but... you know, it is not just the thought that counts.
We can nest another heist within your current heist. The group can decide how big a job they want it to be.

Do we do another big job? Is Ronny doing this alone?

@pedrop

Don't forget that building the medical infrastructure is just an excuse. We don't actually have anything to do that with us. The stuff we brought are personal belongings...

At first I didn't understand what you are talking about:) Now I know. I was talking about the lab inside our ship. Not at the depot. So we will be taking it with us.

I also assume you are pretending to be installing a Medical Bay inside the Ship. The Depot is an area of space with very little infrastructure or buildings, this also explains why you are going to a ship.

Yes.
My first idea was to (pretend to) install the bay inside the ''office building '' but that was before you made clear that the depot is just a bunch of ships parked in space.
So that was a bit confusing on my behalf.

Just as with going to Abby's place. I think it is something that Ronny would do alone or maybe with one other person. But I don't want to keep the other players waiting while that happens. So I'd say either we all go or we split up and each do a thing. Splitting up has the risk of spinning out of control though.

So in the interest of the game, I'd opt for everyone going.

As for the idea of where it is. How about it's in the building were Ronny did some work, but not his department or maybe even a different floor where another company operates. So he'd have access to the building, but not to the room with the computer in it. That makes it a bit more difficult.
I'm also still open to the black market deal. If we can just make it happen by spending money, that might be less side-tracking.

Any preference from the other players?