Johannes replied to me: > Brainstorming methods to make tramp freighters ecconomical: > > They might be subventioned for some greater good. Like if you have no FTL > communication other then sending ships, and you want a certain frequency > of contacts with colonies or outposts, that trade little.
In 3E, a FTL radio with 0.1 parsec range is $12.5M. Few systems are that close to each other. 10 parsec are $150M. Compare that to $10M for a little freighter, which links multiple worlds. > Like the military replaces it's jump drives long before they become > useless for the use in civilian freighters. Most military surplus > jumpdrives do have the right dimensions for tramp freighters. Depending on the stardrive assumptions, you get battleships or fighters. A destroyer navy could be tricky. - If the FTL drive is used for interstellar flights, not local ones, the 3E rules give us battleships. Large ships outrange small ones, and sending a starfighter against a starship is about as effective as sending a rowboat against a battleship. - If hyperdrive missiles are possible, it becomes thinkable to knock out any big ship from any little ship, with no defense. That means large ships are just larger targets. - If the FTL speed is low enough, maybe there is an effective minimum size for interstellar ships, while hyperdrive torps are still possible. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
