The TL14 Megatransport seems to work out. At TL10, it looks ever more like shuttle and starship. Neither full landing capability for the starship nor hauling pods with bunks and life support (or freeze capsules) is really an option.
A bunk and full life support are 400 lbs. per person, a bunk and total life support are 600 lbs. and a cryonic capsule is 1,000 lbs. Compared to 400 lbs. for a colonist with a little luggage and perhaps some food, that matters, and the volume difference also matters for atmospheric craft. My current prototypes are a 1,000-ton shuttle for 1,000 colonists and a 100,000-ton starship for 120,000 colonists. With five docking airlocks, it can load or unload in a day if it takes one hour to handle each shuttle. 1,000 isn't far from a large airliner ... For a shuttle, pod and starship combo, perhaps TL11 with reactionless thrusters might be an option. It has enough power to lift pods out of the gravity well, but no contragrav or forcefields to get large ships down with ease. David replied to me: > Stealth is against my hard-science religion. In the real world, hard science is my religion, but I game to get away from it. I play Traveller, which certainly isn't hard science, and I write vehicles when I can't play myself, ranging from TL1 to TL16 and from reasonably hard to pure science fantasy. > Landing capable is against common sense. Depends on your TL, see above. > But look at what the US used for troop transport in WWII. They used a bunch > of converted civilian ships, jamming people in them (15,000 (!) in the queen > mary, which normally carred about 2000 paying passengers), and a number of > purpose built ships, that also held troops in sardine fashion (bunks four > high, as many as 100 people in a cabin). No medical facilities, not much > cargo capacity. limited anti-aircraft armament. Not terribly fast, > either. They also used LSTs in WWII, and the hospital capacity of a modern LHD is 20% of their complement. The difference between wartime and peacetime construction priorities, I guess. Anthony replied to Hal: > > The only thing I'm going to mention in this aspect is the prospect of what > > is known as a single point of failure. If a single megaton ship were to > > "fail" for what ever reason, where is the redundancy to maintain > > transportation needs? > > Megaton ships aren't very big compared to the scale of what needs to be > moved. My initial, very rough calculation was 20 megacolonists per year. But my TL14 Megatransport is more for refugees, which implies a higher urgency (weeks or months, not decades) and lower total numbers (if a colony is not viable, that should become clear before there are billions of colonists. Zan asked: > Out of curiosity, and because some science fiction includes the idea, > what is Vehicles take on converting a planet into a spaceship? Vehicles doesn't, but there are rules for asteroid ships in GT Starships, THS, and the new 4E Spaceships. Earth is just a very large rock, after all. But would you really want to calculate HP and DR for it? > David Weber has Dahak which is not a planet, but the Moon as a ship. Dahak is a very large ship, covered by a thin layer of rock for camouflage. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
