Hunger in the year 3058: Feeding Sarna from Kaifeng

Someone challenged me to justify low JumpShip counts in BattleTech. 
I believe I've done so. 
(These other threads are also relevant.)
Warning! This is like my other "bean counting" posts except EVEN MORESO.

random cargos

Back in February, someone asked what the rough cost per ton would be to ship bulk cargo in BattleTech, and requested suggestions for semi-interesting cargoes to inflict on player characters.

As a quick rule, DropShips and JumpShips (hereafter DS&JS) suggests that a commercial ship makes about 2d6x10% of its usual revenue per mission.

Based on the revenues-per-mission and the cargo capacities listed in FASA's TR:3057, shipping should cost about 105 to 111 C-Bills per ton of cargo. (The per-mission revenues look like they were taken from a chart in DS&JS, which has a more complex system, and I suspect uses a base cost of 100 per ton). That matches up well with MW1e's comments that transportation can cost from 500 C-Bills for a single person (which is about five tons worth of cargo - I wonder if that's where BattleSpace got the mass of steerage quarters?) up to "several thousand" C-Bills to ship a BattleMech. And of course, transport into a combat zone can cost up to 10x higher.

The price should be per jump, which means any DropShip which can find customers for 500 tons of cargo space can make enough to pay for passage on a jump collar.

Here's all the cargoes I came up with:

• a herd of cattle
• whatever Han Solo was hauling in Episode 7
• one deadly and unpredictable midget (the man loves fire)
• enormous hallucinogenic fungi
• industrial sand
• petroleum sludge
• soylent (capellan) green
• quadrotriticale and/or tribbles
• agrimechs or mining mechs
• aquaculture farms
• computer chips and/or fiberoptic components
• fiberoptic cable too large to have any known use
• a stack of enormous polished mirrors
• antique weaponry or wines (for Kurita space)
• copies of the most recent season of Solaris VII bouts
• high art filled with drug stashes
• drugs stashes filled with corporate espionage
• corporate espionage team with several ten-ton cargo containers they refuse to explain or open
• metal nets filled with mysteriously irradiated space debris
• a smaller dropship
• a thruster or engine part for a larger dropship
• precursor metals or components for weapon manufacture
• a rare isotope of water
• a library of Vogon poetry
• refugees
• spare filters for a water filtration plant
• medical and/or disaster relief supplies

The 1987 House Sourcebooks all have sections discussing what they trade with other states, and some of their corporate and planetary profiles mention imports and exports too.

FWL 3025: Shipyards

The FWL has eight manufacturers of DropShips & JumpShips (DS&JS page 15) operating ten active production sites (HM:FWL page 114). As best I can tell:

• Star Lords built at Clipperton, Loyalty and Tamarind (by SelaSys Inc.)
• Scouts, Leopards, Leopard CVs and Unions built at Oceana (by Irian Technologies, under supervision of the League's Chief Armorer)
• Furies, Buccaneers, Monarchs and Behemoths built at Stewart (by Brigadier Corporation)
• Gazelles and Mammoths built at Oriente (by "Deller, Bingham, and Fouts" or "Keller, Bingham, and Fouts")
• Invaders built at Angell (by Technicron)
• Intruders built at Ryerson (by Andurien AeroTech, a division of Free Worlds Defense Industries)
• Vengeances built at Dieudonne (by Kallon Industries)
• Condors built at Tematagi (by Nimakachi Fusion Products Ltd.)

My reasoning is below the cut. 

The FWL doesn't build big troop transports anymore, which plays to the fractiousness of FWL forces and their reluctance to mount an offense; lack of Mule production helps characterize FWL merchants as versatile traders who prefer Buccaneers; and Intruders plus extra fighter carriers may make up for a lack of small assault ships.

DropShip Engines

In FASA's 1980s DropShips and JumpShips sourcebook, the engines on the Triumph, Condor, Fortress, Overlord and Excalibur all equal [ship mass]*[thrust]/15 - 50, and the engines on the Seeker, Monarch and Behemoth are close to that.

The Avenger, Buccaneer and Union are at [mass]*[thrust]/15 - 75, while the smallest ships, the Leopard, Fury and Gazelle are right around [mass]*[thrust]/15 - 100. The curve

[mass*thrust]/15 - [(14494*mass*thrust - 11150000) / (311*mass*thrust - 1279000)]

fits most of those engines. I don't expect to fit them all perfectly--when I worked through the JumpShip construction data I found typos, copy errors, and weirder inconsistencies which make that impossible. I'm pretty confident that the Mule and Mammoth engines have a digit wrong, and that the Vengeance's engine was calculated from a thrust of 3, instead of the thrust 4 its listed at. (I'm not the first to notice this about the Vengeance, but danged if I can remember who I've heard it from before.)

I'd feel pretty good about my equation, except that the ships which don't fit are all fast- the Achilles at thrust 8, the Seeker at thrust 5, and the Intruder at thrust 4 (in a band dominated by thrust 3 ships). So I don't think I'm accounting for thrust correctly.

I'd hoped to solve this by Thanksgiving, but que sera sera.