Freelance Traveller

#1: Port Logbook

by Jeff Zeitlin

This is a computer- (but not “AI-”) generated puzzle. The editor has added the Traveller “paint job”.

The Portmaster at the Class D port had a busy week this week, and forgot to fill out his logs. Now he has to reconstruct them to send them to the SPA at the subsector capital. Between what he remembered, and what the locals could tell him about their dealings with the ships and their captains, he was able to satisfy the SPA. These are the facts that he used for the reconstruction:

• The fifth-arriving ship was in berth 3 (of five berths).
• The third-arriving ship was in berth 4, and carried industrial solvents.
• The second-arriving ship (Captain El-Nadi’s Fifth Dimension) was in berth 5, and carried survey equipment.
• The Sweet Potato was in a lower-numbered berth than the fourth-arriving ship.
• Captain Davis’s ship, the Four-Flusher, was in berth 2.
• The first ship to arrive carried mining tools.
• Captain Corribant’s ship was berthed adjacent to the Thankless Child.
• Captain Alexandra’s ship was berthed adjacent to the ship that carried the portable shelters.
• The Fifth Dimension was berthed adjacent to Captain Alexandra’s ship.
• The five ships were the Thankless Child, the Boxcars, the Sweet Potato, the Four-Flusher, and the Fifth Dimension.
• The five captains’ names were Alexandra, Corribant, Davis, El-Nadi, and nobody could actually pronounce the Bwap’s name.
• The five cargos were Mining Tools, an Automated Forge, Portable Shelters, Industrial Solvents, and Survey Equipment.

Can you reconstruct the logs? The portmaster has to log the order in which the ships arrived, the berth that they were assigned, the ship’s name, the captain’s name, and the cargo they were carrying.