Johannes replied to me: > If you are happy with a setting spezific setup, someone might have a > monopoly on FTL drives, and rents them out to everybody else.
In that case, we'd still have non-modular ships owned by that somebody competing with modular ships owned by everybody else. If non-modular ships are more efficient, modular ships are history. > Basically you need a race, an empire or some sort of guild or order, that > is the only source of FTL drives, and they need to be content with > charging acceptable fees and imposing only acceptable political measures > (like for instance no interstellar wars). Wouldn't that lead to the Heighliners of Dune, rather than modules? > If you have modular FTL pods and can fit more then one in a usual lighter, > you could also have the situation that they are prone to failure and there > are only few repairstations. Then the FTL pod doesn't have to be a self-contained unit, it can do without navigation, power systems, etc. Roger wrote: > Well, it depends on the numbers... but if you're looking at drive > masses that scale with the weight they shift, a multi-part ship can > have one drive that never has to haul the other drive > around. When I was working up TL10 starships a few years back, the > LASH-style vessels came out a lot better than the all-in-ones. TL10 is a good chance, because neat STL drives are relatively marginal. Still, a hyperdrive and the power cells are only 2% of Lwt. The docking mechanism will be heavier, but you can leave it in orbit if you have to. > Another decision that's a bit more universe-dependent is what sort of > landing capability you put in. Especially if you ban contragravity at > TL10, a ship that can do rough-field VTOL has a noticeably lower > payload than one that's restricted to runways. No need to ban it -- by default, 3E contragrav is TL12. If you want 1.5 G acceleration, to have some reserve for heavier-than-Earth worlds, a TL10 super reactionless thruster and fusion reactor are 60% of Lwt. That means the minimal hyperdrive is 5% of the remainder, and a jump drive is 26%. That starts to hurt, since you need a hull, avionics, ... Brandon wrote: > The FTL component really needs some STL capability, even if it's just for > minimal maneuvering when docking/undocking with the STL component. If you can dock with unpowered containers, you can dock with non-STL-capable stardrive components. Such a component (a nice label, BTW) would not be a 'starship' by any reasonable definition, but it doesn't have to be. > This does remind me of Traveller's jump shuttle. Theses are intended to > transfer system defense boats (no FTL capacity) from one system to another. > There really isn't a reason the concept can't be applied to a similar > arrangement for commercial ship. Jump shuttles are fully capable starships, and the system is designed to carry STL ships from time to time, not run a FTL transport network. That is, the SDBs are cargo, not components of a FTL transport system. > One issue is how much it costs a STL ship to use a FTL ship. Calculate operating costs according to GURPS ... Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
