Hello everybody, in recent weeks and months, I posted very large starships. Thanks to high tech levels, they had relatively small crews -- twenty for a destroyer, thirty for a cruiser, plus scientists, troops, or passengers. But that is still more than any gaming group.
So I'd like to write starships with a crew of three for a patrol craft, four for a destroyer, five or six for a cruiser, perhaps eight for a battleship or battlecruiser. No NPCs in the crew. 4E has no nuts-and-bolts design system yet, so I'm talking 3E here. The look and feel would be that of an aircraft crew, not a ship crew. Most of the activity would be in the cockpit, even if the flight engineer might find an occasion to crawl back into the machinery spaces. Some problems: * Starships are expected to operate for weeks or months, not hours or days. I could change that, of course, by adjusting the FTL speed multiplier, but having cabins and especially a galley with a big table for planning sessions helps with the typical space traveler adventures. * If there is significant trade between high-population worlds, who is going to carry the required megatons of cargo? If freighters are in the kiloton or megaton range, why would warships be any smaller? Yet if battleships are that large, why not carry a backup crew, and a company of marines, etc.? * As written, the scale effects in the rules favor relatively large ships. The square root in the maintenance requirement, cube-root-squared for hulls, while engines are linear. Small ships only have an advantage if large ships run half empty on the route. For warships, perhaps strengthening offense over defense will help, so it pays to put your eggs into many baskets, but that has negative consequences for adventures. Any comments? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
