On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 5:53 PM, Johannes Trimmel <[email protected]> wrote: > > I had first understood the question as, what reasons would there exist for > making small ships, independent of what ships exist as well. > > Do you want small ships or small crews? > > As long as you simply scale down the maintanace requirements you can have > arbitrarily large ships running completly automated. Maybe you only have > crews on ships at all, if the mission of the ship is to transport the crew > to a place where the crew has something to do. Or to have someone on board > to make strategic or political decisions.
Yeah, the maintenance requirements of vehicles are stupidly high. My setting has large ships because the economics of the ftl tech demands that (the drives are big, require lots of power, and very expensive. A ship that's built as small as possible, which is still big by traveller standards, costs 60 or 70% of the cost of a ship that's built to the maximum size of one field generator, and has roughly zero usable volume. A freighter built to that size has a capacity of about 16,000 dtons of cargo and a crew of less than a dozen. Exact make up depends on the operator; it can be as small as three, on ships operating between major centers, where they just need to drive the ship, and freight is loaded and unloaded by others, and maintenance is done in depots. Bigger crews are needed if the ship is operating to smaller stations, where there aren't automated loading systems, and fix what breaks without having to call the tow ship. Ships carrying passengers tend to have additional crew to keep them in line. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
