Brandon replied to me: > > If you can dock with unpowered containers, you can dock > > with non-STL-capable stardrive components. > > Most containers don't carry expensive FTL drives or crew. For safety, if > nothing else, the FTL component needs some thrusters, although a fraction of > a G (say, 0.1G where 1G is common for commercial ships) should be > adequate.
Well, if the drive and crew are so precious, give them a proper ship to protect them :-) > > That is, the SDBs are cargo, not > > components of a FTL transport system. > > What if the jump shuttle was carrying a merchant ship without jump drives > but loaded with cargo and passengers instead of a SDB? Then it would be the LASH concept. Look at the deckplans for Traveller SDBs and their jump shuttles -- the bow of the shuttle encloses the stern of the SDB. The more interesting concept uses the sublight drives of the lighter to move the combined ship, but as mentioned I find it hard to explain. > > Calculate operating costs according to GURPS ... > > Which makes me wonder if the divided ship approach is cheaper than a > single ship design. I don't think so, considering how cheap and light default FTL drives are. Johannes wrote: > Say the monopolists have limited industrial capacity. They produce hardly > anything but FTL drive modules. For reasons of policy, they don't want to > permananetly sell a module to anyone else. They are happy with the status > quo, and have an overall conservative and risk awerse outlook. If they are are so risk averse, won't they put their own people into the stardrive modules, and give them a maneuver-capable ship to make them safe? > > Wouldn't that lead to the Heighliners of Dune, rather than > > modules? > > > > I think it can lead to both. I always assumed that in Dune there is some > technical or ecconomic reason to make FTL ships big. Take that away and > you can have an FTL module setup, with the same basic dynamics of power > and ecconomy. You can have small and large FTL transport. The key thing about those Guild ships is that a FTL ship carries complete STL ships inside, sealed from the FTL crew. > The drive might also be very sensitive towards getting the wrong amount of > power at critical moments. Which does not really make a case for building > a power source right into the unit, but at least for the ship having a > power source soley dedicated for the drive, rather then plugging it into > general ship power. Power cells most likely. Maybe you can argue, that the > drive needs to be calibrated to it's power source at the shop too, so if > the power source is not particulary large, you can build it in too. If the STL drive uses power, too, you have two separate power plants. Doesn't sound economical. Travis replied to Johannes: > What if the FTL component is cheap but very weight inefficient? > Say the FTL must weigh 40-60% of the total mass it could move, but there > is > nothing particularly expensive about it, it just needs some cheap > components and some mass(Like a HS-Dynamo?) it might not even need much > power, just dock, power it up from your cigarette-lighter, and jump. I think one way to go is to have a heavy STL drive, a moderately heavy FTL drive, and a heavy power plant for both. For planetary landing, I need the STL drive and the power plant. Together, they leave very little payload, so the FTL drive goes into a detachable unit. For interstellar flight, I need the FTL drive and a power plant, so why not use the same one as the STL unit? That would leave the FTL unit without independent power plant. * TL10 vectored super reactionless thruster, 300 tons thrust, for 90 tons. * TL10 fusion reactor, 300 MW, 31 tons. That leaves 79 tons for a 200-ton shuttle with 1.5 G accel. * TL10 warpdrive, 3,000 WTF, for 152 tons. Eight tons for the hull and coupling, and the total ship is 360 tons, with a warp speed multiplier of 8.33. Had the shuttle mounted a 20-ton warpdrive (over a quarter of the remaining mass), it would get 360 WTF, for a multiplier of just 1.8. Now this concept has to compete with warp ships and STL shuttles. The combination has 0.83 G accel, which beats any "traditional" warp ship. So how make sublight accel matter for starships? No warp in the inner system? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
