But, now that we're throwing ideas and nothing has been done yet, I have another idea
.The Consumer Credit (Holy Orders) Act 2978 that outlawed money lending from all but religious organizations also banned gambling with intergalactic credits. To circumvent that casinos started using gems as game chips. And actually credits are worth nothing at the casinos, you can't even buy fuel with it.
But you can gamble fuel for fuel from a fellow space farer...
The original Hoops (tm) game could be used for fuel gambling. The base unit could be 0.1 LY and you could gamble up to half of your reserve (rounded up to the nearest 0.1) in a game of Hoops.
The problem I find with the original Hoops is that it can be heavily exploited. Quite intentionally actually. There are systems in which one of the cups has something like 50% probability. Find that and your credit problems are history. Taking the Hoops away from the casinos and moving it to the shipyard would keep Hoops in game, would take the obvious exploit away and would give a nicely thematic (and quite random) way of acquiring fuel at the witchpoint.
