On Sun, 29 Jun 2014, Onno Meyer wrote:
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.
I haven't yet seen Crusade, therefore i can't say much about it. Babylon 5
gave the overall expression, that some other designparameters (like
propably spin gravity) dictated the overall size, and therefore they had
space to spare.
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.
It's really hard to come up with hard rules for that. A sailing trip with
people you like can be very relaxing. Working in the same amount of space
with people you usually can easily tolerate, can be stressfull.
So i consider this a matter, that should be handled by the GM on ad hoc
basis, propably with some rules that define what stats change in
stressfully situations, but only guidelines for what situations are how
stressfull.
BTW i would primarily reduce Will under that circumstance, not Fatigue.
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?
Hard to say. With 30 people there is more chance, that you really can't
stand. But with more people it's easier to avoid a specific person.
If the group is larger, it is less likely that someone gets completly
excluded from everyone, as there would be clique building and you can get
somewhere with the enemy of my enemy. But i can't really say if that is
better or worse.
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.
On the other hand, if you have to concentrate less on the job, you might
pay more attention to group dynamics and that might overall mean more
escalations.
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.)
Still if you design a passanger ship, you still don't have a "a passanger
needs that amount of volume" rule, that is independent of soft factors.
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.
I meant breeding out loosely. But we do not have established a
timeframe, immigration in such colonies will preselect people without
crowding issues, people born there with severe crowding issues will end in
lynatic assylums or emigrate or get emigrated. Children will be raised by
people without crowding issues, so cultural, learing, conditioning and
other factors, that are technically not breeding, will be replicated.
So for practical purposes you can soon have a population that is very much
like a breeded out population
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.
There is the question of how much percentage they spend on the ship and on
the actual mission and how much the missions feel like leaving the ship.
If you swap the ship with an even more cramped exploration vehicle and
one or two cremembers get to go out in vacc suits, it propably does not
help much.
If the ship goes from a base to the mission planet, you either have long
travel times, compared to the time on the mission, or you have to answer,
why there are unexplored planets, with good conditions close to your base.
Or if it is a long term mission, where you scout many planets in a row,
you either will have many planets, where the crew will stay in the ship
and shuttles save for short vacc suit tours, or you need a cinematic
amount of "M-class" planets.
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