Within the world of PlutoCrat you will journey to both starports and spaceports. Starports and spaceports differ in their legal status and in the services they provide.

A starport is a spaceport subject to the laws of extraterritoriality established by the Interstellar Trade Treaty. The starport zone is managed by the bureaucracy of the Interstellar Trade Consortium. All starports provide refueling and basic repair services, and basic facilities for cargo storage and human accomodation. Passengers and goods within the starport zone are immune from local law so long as they remain within the starport zone.

A spaceport is a facility serving space travel that is not subject to the terms of the Interstellar Trade Treaty. A spaceport may provide facilities comparable to or even superior to many starports, but it is not governed by the laws of extraterritoriality that govern starports. Passengers and goods arriving at a spaceport are subject to the laws of the local government, including all taxes and tarriffs, and import and export restrictions. Some systems may voluntarily waive enforcement of local law at the spaceport for passengers and goods merely transitting the system in order to encourage local space travel.

All ports, whether starport or spaceport, will have a Port Master's office of some sort. The Port Master's office is the central location for spaceport activities. At the Port Master's office you can research neighboring star systems, bid on or purchase interstellar shipping, contract to perform assignments for the Interstellar Trade Consortium (if at a starport), and perform customs enforcement for the local star system.

Star System Research

The Port Master's office maintains information about all known star systems in the local neighborhood. The information available may include astrophysical and geophysical data on the stars and their satellites, biosphere data for habitable worlds, societal and market data for worlds with human populations, and facilities available at neighboring spaceports.

Societal and market data for inhabited worlds includes information on the types of goods most in demand, the types of goods the world produces, specialty goods available at the world, and import and export restrictions for the world. It is extremely important for merchants to regularly check the import and export restrictions of a world as they change periodically and as violation will result in siezure of the goods and may also result in fines or incarceration.

Spaceport data includes information about the facilites and services available at the spaceport. Of especial interest is the information about fuel and repair facilities (critical to starship owners as they may find themselves stranded for a long time at a spaceport without these capabilities), and scheduled merchant service (critical to space travelers, as they may find themselves stranded for a long time in a system which is only rarely served by star traffic).

It may not be possible to access all data for every star system or world as much knowledge was lost during the Long Darkness. The Port Master's office may occassionally offer contracts for explorers willing to journey to other star systems to perform surveys to gather more data.

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Shipping

The Port Master's office maintains a register of currently available scheduled shipping charter vessels. This register allows you to bid for or purchase shipping capacity on scheduled routes or charters. Shipping on scheduled routes is always available; charters may not always be available. A charter vessel is the only way to get to a star system not served by a scheduled route.

Save for certain kinds of liquids and gases, and certain unprocessed solid raw materials (such as ores), all goods shipped via interstellar transport are containerized before shipment. The cargo capacity of interstellar transports is expressed in Container Equivalency Units (or CEUs). One CEU is the volume occupied by a single size 1 standard container, a cube measuring 3 meters along each edge. Other container sizes currently in use are the size 2 container, with a length of 6 meters, and the size 4 container, with a length of 12 meters (there is no size 3 container).

Container sizes are standardized; however, there are a number of different specialized containers for particular purposes, including for example refrigerated containers, livestock containers, and aquatic livestock containers. The shipping industry does not currently differentiate these containers by price, as there is currently sufficient excess container capacity to satisfy everyone's demands. However, the ITC has hinted that they may add surcharges for specialized containers sometime in the intermediate future.

When bidding for or purchasing shipping capacity on a route, you must also specify the commodity which you are shipping; the ITC has imposed this regulation to prevent unscrupulous parties from buying up the shipping capacity to a particular destination in order to manipulate market prices at the destination. In addition, the price paid to ship goods is adjusted by the cost of accomodations, as ITC regulations currently require merchants to accompany their goods to the market worlds where they will be sold. The approximate cost for accomodations is 1000 PlutoCrats per day of travel.

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Interstellar Trade Consortium Contracts

The Interstellar Trade Consortium is a treaty organization of star systems who have agreed to certain stndards and practices to encourage the regrowth of interstellar trade and travel. All ITC member states maintain at least one starport in their system (a starport is a spaceport providing fuel and basic maintenance services).

The Port Master's office is part of the ITC bureaucracy, and as such may occassionally offer contracts to perform assignments for the ITC. Some contracts (planetary surveys, for example) are available to all, others might be available only to people with particular skills, and still others might be available only to the person who bids to complete the job at the lowest cost or in the shortest period of time. Occassionally the ITC may explicitly offer secret contracts to a single person.

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Customs Enforcement

All ITC starports are extraterritorial zones immune from local taxes and tarriffs. However, local worlds do still maintain their own import and export duties and restrictions. Some goods, legal for trade in a general sense, are restricted on particular worlds. The Customs Officer enforces these local import and export restrictions.

Any person with at least Novice skill level in Law may perform the duties of a Customs Officer. The Customs Officer performs spot inspections of incoming or outgoing shipping, looking for goods that are in violation of local import or export restrictions. If such goods are found, the Officer flags them for seizure (the goods must actually be entering or exitting the local system's markets; goods which are merely transitting through the spaceport or being stored temporarily at a spaceport's warehouses are immune). The Custom's Officer receives prize money for the seizure of the goods; the buyer or seller of the goods loses both the goods and the money.