On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 2:32 AM CDT Onno Meyer wrote:
>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. I was thinking more along the lines of the modular cutter from Traveller, where the modules functioning as part of the cutter, can also be linked together to form stations in space and on the ground. GURPS Travellrr also introduced FTL-capable ships that could carry cutter modules (and not just ss cargo). There was also a modular ship, which was an open frame you attached cutter modules to (along with bridge and drive modules). >> > - 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. Without a fission, fusion, or antimatter plant, I'm not sure what you could use for the long duration in hyperdrive. >> >* 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. Efficiency per ton, perhaps, but for a given tonnage there is still a more or less efficient component mix. Also, an "inefficient" design might be profitable on certain routes where eithef cargo or passengers predominate. >So make it smaller, 300 tons or so, and see how efficient they >can get? IIRC, the two most common "PC" merchant ships in Traveller come in at 550-600 tons loaded, so 300 might work. Brandon _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
