Hello everybody, I'd like to toss two thoughts into the ring ...
First, it seems to me that the big ships, with several thousand tons and a crew size in the double digits, caused less interest than the little ones up to a hundred tons, with crews the size of a typical gaming group. Is that the right impression? Second, I was wondering why I keep thinking of cargo haulers and not passenger liners when I think of big, commercial ships. Most freighters have a little passenger capacity, in the tradition of the Millenium Falcon and the Serenity, but their primary role is to carry cargo. I can think of several reasons, some good and some bad. * Passengers are individuals, which complicates the task of the players or writers. You can tell stories how the valiant crew deals with an endless succession of guest stars and their foibles, but those would be people-oriented feel-good stories, not hard-hitting action adventure. A load of machine parts or industrial chemicals is less demanding, you can mention them in passing and concentrate on the engine trouble or the pirates. * Even if you do such stories, you need only a few passengers per adventure/episode. You can't turn the cruise ship around for the forgotten teddy bear of a little kid if there are hundreds of other passengers who would rather arrive on time, thank you very much. * Passenger liners go between established destinations. So do most freighters, but you see more freighters on the frontier, where action adventures happen and aliens might strike out of the shadows. There are a couple of bases I could cover with passenger transports. I've written many of them, but not systematically. * A fast transport to get people from A to B. The role of fast transatlantic ships before the airliner. There can be luxury, but not at the expense of speed. * A very fast transport with the look and feel of an airliner. At decent TLs, it can do ten parsec per single day, so you could do five-parsec jumps without real cabins. * A luxury transport for passengers on a holiday. Luxury in the ship is just as important as visiting the planets. * A hardscrabble colonist transport. This could shade into a prisoner transport or a refugee transport, which in turn shades into the ark ship I wrote as a bulk freighter variant. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
