Rules Only: J-Drive with rating of 1 for 100 ton hull?

[Grav_Moped]

IMTU the 100T Type S hull is no longer made as it is very inefficient unless someone attacks you with a meson weapons. The Standard 100DT hull is now cylindrical capped by hemispheres on each end. In SRD/Cepheus parlance a standard hull config rather than a lifting body.

Back when I was playing regularly in the early '80s, the ref house-ruled that all unstreamlined hulls were spheres, streamlined starship and non-starship hulls were tail-sitter prolate spheroids* with the long axis twice the short axis, and streamlined smallcraft hulls were through-deck oblate spheriods** with thickness half the diameter.

Deck plans were slightly math-intensive, what with needing to calculate the volumes of spheroid slices. There weren't online calculators for that back then...

Of course, that meant that most of the published deck plans were useless, but the ref was running an ATU where the deck plans wouldn't have matched the variant build rules anyhow.



*US football
*Squished sphere

 

[kilemall]

That's a funny loophole.

US diesel locomotive builders, particularly GE, had a 44-ton product line that existed solely because the rules at the time allowed for one crewman if the engine was 44 tons or below. So it 'rings true' to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_44-ton_switcher


As for HG vs. CT, I always kept them separate, and the fuel rules set for each. The letter drives are one sort of engineering tradeoffs and the HG custom drives souped up for another.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

That's a funny loophole.

I wouldn't even call it a loophole. The crew requirements are very clearly and specifically worded to say exactly that.

Works with LBB5 too.

 

[Proneutron]

US diesel locomotive builders, particularly GE, had a 44-ton product line that existed solely because the rules at the time allowed for one crewman if the engine was 44 tons or below. So it 'rings true' to me.






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_44-ton_switcher

very interesting.

 

[Proneutron]

Back when I was playing regularly in the early '80s, the ref house-ruled that all unstreamlined hulls were spheres, streamlined starship and non-starship hulls were tail-sitter prolate spheroids* with the long axis twice the short axis, and streamlined smallcraft hulls were through-deck oblate spheriods** with thickness half the diameter.

Deck plans were slightly math-intensive, what with needing to calculate the volumes of spheroid slices. There weren't online calculators for that back then...

Of course, that meant that most of the published deck plans were useless, but the ref was running an ATU where the deck plans wouldn't have matched the variant build rules anyhow.



*US football
*Squished sphere

Someone in our group wrote a program ~1979 or 80 for ship design. Worked well for figuring flattened spheres and the like.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Someone in out group wrote a program ~1979 or 80 for ship design. Worked well for figuring flattened spheres and the like.

Nice. All I had was a calculator.

 

[Proneutron]

Nice. All I had was a calculator.

They wrote it on a programmable calc. A big T.I. one I think. It printed on its own roll of paper.

BTW here is the J1 100 Ton ship. http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=41588

 

[Grav_Moped]

Use CT 81 crew rules and build your ship with a hull of 199t.

You will need a custom hull, and your drives will be rated for a 200t ship as per the rules, but you can get away with only a pilot for crew.

Build it as 200Td with two hardpoints and two turrets. Remove one turret. Done.

 

[boomslang]

Use CT 81 crew rules and build your ship with a hull of 199t.

You will need a custom hull, and your drives will be rated for a 200t ship as per the rules, but you can get away with only a pilot for crew.

I tend towards a 180dt or a 190dt hull size when using this trick (195dt if absolutely necessary), because it makes the fuel requirements come out to integers (and at worst, half-integers) and I can avoid fractional dtonage wastage.

Which makes me personally feel like I am not bending the rules all that egregiously. Elegant math = thoughtful engineering design.

YMMVIYTU, naturally...

 

[Grav_Moped]

I tend towards a 180dt or a 190dt hull size when using this trick (195dt if absolutely necessary), because it makes the fuel requirements come out to integers (and at worst, half-integers) and I can avoid fractional dtonage wastage.

Which makes me personally feel like I am not bending the rules all that egregiously. Elegant math = thoughtful engineering design.

YMMVIYTU, naturally...

Good paradigm for ship design. Wish there was something useful you could do with half a ton besides a single low berth. Cargo doesn't come in half-ton increments...

 

[BRover]

I wouldn't even call it a loophole. The crew requirements are very clearly and specifically worded to say exactly that.

Works with LBB5 too.

Other industries use similar regulatory "loopholes" too--such as banking (and organized crime) . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

 

[BRover]

Good paradigm for ship design. Wish there was something useful you could do with half a ton besides a single low berth. Cargo doesn't come in half-ton increments...

Unless you have middle (or low) passengers? (mids have 0.1 ton baggage allowed each; lows get 0.01 ton.)

 

[boomslang]

Unless you have middle (or low) passengers? (mids have 0.1 ton baggage allowed each; lows get 0.01 ton.)

Because of the absence of rules to address this, I have always considered this the maximum "in-stateroom" allowance before passengers are required to ship the excess of their belongings as freight (typically as "incidental cargo").

And yes, that means High Passengers can have (literally) a ton of their personal baggage in the stateroom with them, so I designed some .125dt stackable Trunks (1.5m by 1.5m by .75m) for such situations. Although four is a practical limit (since the passenger is likely to want to have two or more open at any given time), if you keep most of the built-in room fittings stowed, you can cram eight clunky Trunks into 1dt (1.5m by 3m by 3m), and still have room to move around the stateroom.

Note that at 1.5m by 1.5m by .75m, a Trunk will just barely fit through a normal iris valve or hatchway, making for an appropriately-cumbersome and awkward task, even with the gravity temporarily turned off to facilitate the handling.

Thus, I have another way to avoid fractional dtonnage.

 

[boomslang]

Also, I think it unlikely that there will be all that many High Passengers booking a J-1, 100-dton ship anyway...

 

[Proneutron]

Also, I think it unlikely that there will be all that many High Passengers booking a J-1, 100-dton ship anyway...

In the boondocks one takes what there is. But in reality there wouldn't be a steward to take care of a HP properly. Mid Passage would probably be the only thing you could sell

 

[aramis]

Also, I think it unlikely that there will be all that many High Passengers booking a J-1, 100-dton ship anyway...

About the same number of bush flights leave Anchorage as major airlines...

You don't book a bushplane for seattle... but you can book a bush plane to Iggagik or Eek, from Anchorage International. You can't even land a C119 safely at Iggagik, but yo can land a DHC2.

You can actually book a bush pilot to go to fairbanks from Anchorage, or viice versa. Or a commercial liner. Same for Kenai. Tho' commercial from kenai to Fairbanks goes via anchorage.

The rich guys book private flights from Anchorage to Kenai or Fairbanks to go through screening at Merrill (where it's much more lax, and contracted civilians), versus at Anchorage International where it's TSA, long lines, and multi-hassle. For departures from ANC, expect 0.5 to 2 hours to get to the gate. At Merrill, expect 15 to 45 minutes from show to on board.

There will be people willing to pay for extra attention. They do it by selecting a better carrier in the bush pilot scene... but they still choose to pay for upgrades.
Just because there is a big liner going doesn't mean you can't find people going smaller. And vice versa. You can get a 707 or 727, even a 757 into Kenai.

Likewise, Eugene is a regional airport with one lobby for (IIRC) 6 gates. TSA is 10 minutes to get through, unless something's suspicious.
Portland, however, is at times well over an hour to get through TSA and to the gate (counting checking bags first, and getting the boarding pass).

 

[boomslang]

Just because there is a big liner going doesn't mean you can't find people going smaller. And vice versa. You can get a 707 or 727, even a 757 into Kenai.

It depends a lot on whether a starship is running a regular route, or wandering, I figure. And whether the vessel is hitting High-Pop and High-Tech worlds.

It is hard to fill a dozen staterooms with High Passengers on a regular basis if you are relying on Free Trading in the hinterlands.

The basic J-1, 100-dton starship (with a crew of 1 pilot and 2 stewards already figured in) will have around 50dt of payload space, which translates into perhaps 12 passenger staterooms. A ship that is filling all of those with High Passengers every fortnight will be leaving money on the tarmac, however -- it would be more profitable to build a larger ship and not ignore all the associated Middle and Low Passengers that will accompany large numbers of High Passengers when rolling randomly for availability.

Bearing in mind that each Steward typically costs the ship at least KCr15/month in revenue by displacing a potential Middle Passenger, while Middle and Low Passengers themselves are much more profitable than freight, I claim that you can really never have too many passengers in Second or Third Class. Otherwise, exclusively-High-Passage ships are going to have to be prepared to have slow weeks and months on occasion.

But there are probably more people with ample disposable income jaunting around modern-day Alaska than between any hypothetical pair of POP-6, TL-7 worlds, I would think.

For the ship in question, I would typically lose the second Steward by default and thereby indirectly cap High Passage slots at 8, leaving the rest of the non-crew staterooms available for Middle Passage, as well as adding in half a dozen dtons of Low Berths to make sure to grab that easy money as well. That way, the ship can still maximize its revenue for any situation when fewer than 8 High Passengers are aboard.

 

[Proneutron]

Likewise, Eugene is a regional airport with one lobby for (IIRC) 6 gates. TSA is 10 minutes to get through, unless something's suspicious.
Portland, however, is at times well over an hour to get through TSA and to the gate (counting checking bags first, and getting the boarding pass).

Early on in the TSA boarding game when I was flying for business all the time the CIO TSA told me how to book flights so I would get flagged and a code printed on my boarding pass. This code got me pulled out of line when you first show your boarding pass so you can head to the screening lines. I got pulled to suspicious person screening and I didn't have to wait in the long lines. Took 5 minutes instead 1 hour. Worked every time for a couple of years.