Wow, that went deep fairly quick!

I was wanting to rethink how trade works a bit to understand: Should freight have a standard price? I think not.

Given varied currencies with different conversions into standard exchange units (Imp Credit for example), given relative economic 'value' of planets based on pop, gov't, law level, amount of crime/risk (could factor in amber/red zones), tech level, resources), given that you have to consider your neighbours, plus the differing costs for fuel (which should also not be standardized, but local), different customs/tariffs/permits/bribes/fees/supply and demand, plus varying costs of the types of ships that might have to ply an area (for example no J-1, no J-2, etc), stuff like shortages of available good ports with good fuel (upping maintenance costs or requiring onboard purification and maybe scooping), and things like how hard is it to get maintenance and spare parts for ships (esp higher tech ships from elsewhere) and so on.... (we can add how easy it is to recruit and keep crew, how risky the area is and thus how much padding any risk model needs for insurance and thus insurance fees, how particular the area is about having the right papers for crews, insurance, how badly you need to arm your ship, rig anti hijack, and maintain all of that, etc... and the list goes on). Traveller jump fuel usage would factor in as that's a substantive cost.

Fuel costs should be local.

Freight costs between A and B should be local.

They may well vary by ship.

In some cases, some ship designs would allow you to charge a price for freight that could make a profit, others not.

Speculative trade values would be influenced by similar costs.

----

Having said that, to the trade maps:

There was some mention of 330 parsec trade routes. I submit that there is no good or commodity (exception perhaps Ancient artifacts or a Star Trigger) that could justify that sort of trade distance. (I'm realizing you don't mean that necessarily, but I want to put that out there).

In fact, a lot of potential trade off-planet may be *not profitable* on many worlds which would mean what does go has to be high value and not too huge. Most planets won't be able to afford to bring in vastly overpriced basic resources or simple goods.

I would be skeptical if much trade went further than J-6. Most might never be economical beyond J1-J3 (of the list that is economical at all).

The diminishing % of trade and its aggregate value as a function of distance must have a sharp drop off. That would mean you could likely ignore a lot of other systems above J6 or maybe even J3.

Sure, that won't cover 'how far away am I likely to find a shipyard' because you might be able to order a new ship from across the sector so you don't need many shipyards to crank them out. But that's a rare and small % of a total economy (that and other trade that does make sense over 10, 20 or 30 parsecs. MOST trade would fall within 3 parsecs in many cases.

Does that not reduce the scope of calculation?

I don't have my GT handy so I could be off in left field. It seems like 24 hours of compute time seems... overdone. I think there must be a lot of very minimal contributions being calculated that could be wiped out and not too much change the overall value of the result. I'm thinking an 80/20 sort of scenario here.

Or am I really missing something?

You could write it in something like Java where you could setup worker threads, but you don't want to tie up an internet server with other people's work. I agree that a lot of the compute power for doing big spaces should come from a user's computer. That's a good argument for either a stand alone tool - JS may not be the best tool - maybe someone has to run a tool in something else (C/Java/Ruby/I dunno) on the map data, get an output file and if they want that mapped, submit that map to the map tool with the sector data.

I'd try to separate the map presentation (like Traveller Map) and generation of data so that you have a tool chain and you can rehome various parts of the tool chain for performance reasons or so you could sub in/out different variations of parts of tool chain.

Of course, nobody is paying us for this stuff... maybe we need a Patreon or Kickstarter .... lol.

Tom B