One thing that has cropped up over and over in my games (both as GM and as player) is the issue of long-distance travel in Traveller, making many jumps - because the MacGuffin is in the neighbouring subsector, or because the repo men are on your tail, or because you accidentally genocided some member world in the course of wacky PC antics and you need to stay ahead of the news while you leave the 3I forever. The way this is normally done - at least in the Traveller player circles over here; I don't know if we're actually some isolated bubble that does it heretically - is to manually go through each jump: go to 100d limit, plot jump, divert power, make jump, train skills, arrive in new system, make some checks to get to a refueling spot if inaccurate, repeat. Some of this can be abstracted (skipping Pilot and Astrogation checks, for example), but suppose players want to make routine trading done, or there's any sort of complication - then it gets really bloated, and it can totally take a whole session just to make the trip, made up of acrimonious number-crunching. Random encounters don't make it better - instead of taking up one session, you take two, possibly more if encounter results in sidequesting.
Some players tolerate this fairly well; after all, they are playing a game where at least one player needs to be an amateur accountant in order to not run out of fuel in deep space/skip too many mortgage payments in a row/die of CO2 poisoning because you did not remember to do your maintenance/go deeper and deeper into debt as you fail to make a profit on your venture. Other players - not so much. I've had a player leave a game I was in explicitly because of the tedium of space travel. There were probably many more who found this situation intolerable for unarticulated reasons, and simply stopped showing up.
What I am trying to do is to hammer out a hard-and-fast set of rules and guidelines for moving across vast regions of space in a routine manner. I figure that the pertinent numbers here are:
1) the amount of time it takes to get from place A to B,
2) the amount of money they make with some light trading on the way.
I want the results to approximate normal play close enough that my players will not be sorely tempted to try to micromanage their trip in order to achieve substantially better efficiency. Some disparity is acceptable - just not enough that the party broker goes all "if we used the normal rules, we would have made XX million during the trip!", or the party engineer/pilot/astrogator think they could have gotten them there five weeks sooner, and everyone is upset because of perceived nerfing.
I'm starting from a typical set of assumptions:
a) The party can cover all of Piloting, Astrogation, and Jump drive operation with modifiers of at least +0 in standard time.
b) The ship is equipped with fuel processors, fuel scoops and is capable of planetary landing and take-off (meaning: streamlined and 2+ g thrust).
c) Not jumping through a mess of Amber and/or Red worlds, uncharted space, or other kinds of places that will likely yield lots of irregularities.
d) The ship has some cargo space and the party is willing to trade while they are waiting for refueling and/or maintenance to finish.
With regards to 1), I think the easiest way is to start with the amount of jumps plotted by the players (this is easy and enjoyable), allot 8 days per jump, plus 10% for every point of Divert Power modifier below +6*. This allows for inaccurate jumps and time spent doing stuff groundside. Given at least some A and B startports on the route, maintenance time can be abstracted.
* An approximation of the "4d6-8+modifier" probability curve. Used
this tool to calc it.
As for 2), the simplest I've been able to come up with is: profit = (empty space in the cargo hold) x (trading modifier, minimum 1) x (freight rate for parsecs equal ship's jump rating) x (number of jumps, possibly filtered for actual inhabited worlds). MongT1 speculative trading rules are very generous - with a dedicated Broker on board, it is easily possible to make multiple millions in a manner of weeks. Something like 150k per jump on a Far Trader doesn't seem too bad, especially if the players don't have to deal with the acrimony to get it.
Thoughts?