Hello Johannes, I recently watched Babylon 5 and the short-lived spinoff Crusade on DVD. The station had something like 100k cubic feet per person, but it had very large open volumes. Impossible to tell how much floor space everybody had. The Excalibur from Crusade is even less clear.
Unlike Star Trek, Babylon 5 has a 'gritty' feeling, but the Excalibur seems larger than the Enterprise. Johannes replied to me: > There is the matter of psychology. Crowding people creates tensions. Games tend to ignore these soft factors. GURPS Vehicles has fatigue for people in cramped seats, but not for bunkrooms. > For exceptional missions, such as the Apollo mission, the crew can be > specially selected. And they have plenty of time between missions. Will it help that the crew is relatively small? Three people in 300 cf vs. thirty people in 3,000 cf? > Once astronaut becomes just an other job, and you stay on the ship a > larger percentage of your time, adding more space might become > neccessary to keep your crew functioning. It could also be less risky and hence less stressful. Less stress from the work means you can have other stress factors before the crew flips out. > Once you have passangers you almost completly loose your ability to > screen who goes on board for psychological criteria. Passengers also decide how much they want to pay for their ticket, and they can blame themselves if they didn't pay for first class. (A gross simplification, of course, they might have to pay their life savings for a steerage ticket.) > On the other hand if you have cramped moon base style colonies, you > might have a large pool of population, where crowding issues have > been bred out. I don't believe in breeding that fast, but cultural expectations and training might matter. > So you need to know, what sort of people crew the ship, what is > their mission, and how often do they get out. > > You can have the submarine model, a ship that saves space and has > a specially selected crew. (I suppose navies do psychological > screen who gets on a submarine, though for me sofar thats only > something figured out by common sense) > > You can have the Star Treck model, where the ship is designed to > keep the crew psychological healthy, so they are at peek > performance when they are on mission. There is also the question what the trade-offs are. Giving each crewmember on the Enterprise a few hundred square feet of floor space will only fill a small percentage of the hull. Doing the same in a real-world sub would probably be impossible even if there is no other payload. > You can propably base a scout ship or similiar on a winebago model, > where the crew often spends time outside the ship. Tough i don't > know a non cinematic explaination, why there should be so many "M > class planets" to explore in the (short enough) reach of the ship, > at the moment. Almost by definition, scouts will spend much of their time on alien planets. > You can have the commercial freighter, that fullfills the minimum > requirements laid down by employment and safety laws, but not an > inch more. And one where the owner-crew uses part of the space > originally assigned to them as extra cargo or passanger space to > make some extra bucks. And one, that spends some space to make the > crew happier, under the assumption, that on the long run, a better > motivated crew pays off. The owner could also ask the crew if they'd rather have a basketball court or a share of the bigger profits. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
