Hello Eric, I'm still thinking about your idea.
* As per 3E Vehicles, flight decks are a TL6 invention. But then, they come with arrestor wires, crash barriers, and the like. A dragon doesn't need a tail hook, right? * The gun decks during the Napoleonic era reached 200' (with the ships slightly longer than that) before hogging got too big to handle. Only a few decades later, ship sizes exploded, due to to the combination of cross beams and iron fittings. Diagonal beams had been known earlier, but they were considered a waste of good ship timber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Weight_Growth_of_RN_First_Rate_Line-of-Battle_Ships_1630-1875.svg * Guns had reached the 42-pounder, but the RN went back to the more practical 32-pounder. A few decades later, shell guns were nominal 68-pounders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68-pounder_gun * AFAIK troopships were mostly worn-out ships of the line, whose decks could no longer take the strain of heavy guns. Later on, steamers would be used, since the vulnerability of the paddle wheels and the loss of broadside firepower were less of an issue in a transport. So it would be possible to write a "0th rate ship of the line", bigger and meaner than a 1st rate and with the payload to carry dragons. But would she be more than an 1840s-era 1st rate with the numbers filed off? A "0th rate troopship" would need heavy timbers to prevent hogging and sagging, so why build it that large if you could build two smaller ones? Besides, two smaller ships could carry more boats. I have no obvious idea, except for a "proper GURPSification" of a ship like HMS Windsor Castle (as originally designed). To do that right, I'd have to spend my Christmas break doing research ... Any comments/ideas/suggestions? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
