Dear List, I've been wondering about interstellar passenger liners, and one obvious question are lifeboats or pods. I'd like to brainstorm a bit.
* A starship can't sink, so why abandon ship? If required, find a way to eject the reactor core, not the passengers. The damaged ship is easier to find than a bunch of little pods. * Abandoning the ship can be a great roleplaying opportunity. A 'random' collection of characters in a life or death situation, but without the usual chain of command. Who will take the lead? Wo will panic? * The starship could have passenger shuttles, anyway. But shuttles won't have seats for 100% of the passengers and crew. Nice drama, of course. * There is a difference between lifeboats and shuttles, too. I wrote a TL15 lifeboat (back in February 2011) to explore the upper end of the scale -- hyperdrives, cryosleep chambers, nanofactories in the hold. * ISTR that real-world ships require lifeboats for 125% of their maximum capacity, in case some are blocked/disabled by the accident. * Just eyeballing the numbers, a passenger liner could be 10 tons per person -- 1,000 passengers and crew in a 10,000-ton starship. Roughly. Can I get a lifeboat with less than 1 ton per person? That would mean 10% of the liner for escape mechanisms. Too much? * Of course it would be possible to build a TL11+ escape pod with less than 0.1 tons per person, but that again raises the question if the survivors are better off in a pod than in the wreck. * Default assumption that survivors stay in/with the ship, but escape capsules only for the specific case that the ship is going to crash really soon. No long endurance, just a safe reentry and soft landing. * But then, why not space suits with grav belts/manned maneuvering units? They could be used for comet sightseeing, too. What do you think? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
