Brandon replied to me: > > - A jury-rigged contraption of a 10-ton ship fused to three > > 30-ton pods, one a habitat, one a hangar, one a workshop to > > keep the whole lot flying. > > Doen't have to be jury-rigged, could be a standard modular design.
That would make it a tug, which is a different ballgame. Small to medium ships (100 to 1,000 tons), grapples or tractor beams, and a very solid look-and-feel. Here I'm aiming for a gossamer web instead. Besides, tugs would be close to the container ships I wrote before. > > - Solar power for a high-TL starship? But how do you keep it > > in hyperspace? Additional power cells might last for a few > > hours, but then it pops out in deep space, an eternity to > > recharge. > > Closed-cycle fuel cells? One kW-hour from a TL9+ fuel cell requires 0.115 H and 0.0575 LOX, roughly 0.62 lbs. plus tanks. The initial power for the hyperdrive requires power cells, which are 0.2 lbs. for one kW-hour. At TL10, a hyperdrive for 0.2 pc/day is 1% of LWt. The power cells for the entry are another 1%, and power cells for one day of hyperdrive power are 24%. So a ship which is half drive and power cells could do 0.4 parsecs per jump. A bit over one lightyear. > >* Trying to get the last bit of speed out of the Fast Couriers > > got me thinking about the most cost-efficient ships, instead. > > My tentative efficiency formula is (cargo plus people) times > > hyperspeed divided by cost. If you increase speed at the > > expense of cargo, the performance should become a parabola > > with a clear maximum. > > > > Those would be boring ships, however. > > It would, however, be a ship the PCs could actually own, rather thsn be > given the use of by a Patron (with the strings attached). Cost efficiency means reasonably large ships, which raises the absolute pricetags. The most efficient ship so far is a TL15 freighter for $575M. So make it smaller, 300 tons or so, and see how efficient they can get? Of course ships for PCs would benefit from many little touches that don't cost much, on the scale of a ship, because players tend to get involved in adventures. Automed or operating room, hidden compartments, a brig, security cameras in the airlocks, an arms locker on the bridge, extra life support capacity, ... And Zan wrote: > I've been reading your ship designs and I was thinking about how > interesting it is that ship sizes come out so differently in different > sci-fi universes. Several factors come together: * Assumptions about habitation space. The 100-cf bunks in GURPS are about the level of an early submarine, and only if there are enough of them to share the toilets and galleys amoung many users. Compare the corridors and walkways in a Firefly. Spaceships is less spartan when it comes to quarters, so it tends to generate larger ships -- 100 tons for a minimum 'real starship', as opposed to 10 tons in 3E Vehicles. * Startup size for things like drives and reactors. In 3E VE, a fusion reactor is one ton plus 0.1 tons per MW. That matters for ships in the 10 to 100 ton range, but not for larger ones. In my Fast Courier designs and especially for the Scout Singleships, I found the ton for artificial gravity and the ton for a grav compensator a real problem. 100-ton ships would have been even faster. * Arms races. One could start with a TL10 space navy, from little corvettes (the smallest effective FTL warships) to big battleships (large enough to stand up to the fire from a cruiser almost indefinitely, and to finish it quickly). The TL11 space navy might call for a TL11 corvette that can defeat a TL10 destroyer, a TL11 destroyer that can outrun anything else in space, and a battleship that can handle both TL11 cruisers and TL10 battleships with ease. Continue that for a couple of TLs, and you have big ships. Compare my TL15 destroyer and my TL11 battleship. > The GURPS system makes these little couriers at just 100 tons. Truly little couriers are 10 tons :-) Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
