Best Ship Design Rules?

[robject]

...if we instead set it to 100km smallest dimension... 95,238,095,238,095.23... 95 trillion tons. 95 Teratons

That would fit the definition of a "Size 0" planetoid world.

100 trillion tons is therefore a "world". And a one million ton freighter is still a "starship". I think Marc has suggested that 10^10 tons can still be a starship, although I'm not sure if that's practical. I know Marc has an Orbital Fort (=base) in the Regina System that displaces 20 billion tons, and Greg Lee's Rhylanor Old Station is 200 million tons.

Can someone guesstimate the volume of that gargantuan orbital base thing in the Traveller5 Core Rules that makes Tigresses look like tiny pompoms? Each arm is easily larger than 10 x 10 x 10 Tigresses, so the whole thing is more than 10^10 tons (and probably is much much much larger).

Tons  Ship Base World
----- ---- ---- -----
10^5   |                 Tigress
10^6   |                 Megacorp Freighter
10^7   |   ---  
10^8  ---   |            Large Highports
10^9        |            
10^10       |            Orbital Fort; Loeskalth 'Ship'
10^11       |            
10^12      ---     
10^13            ---
10^14             |      Size 0 World
10^15             |
10^16             |

Surely a small O'Neil Cylinder or Stanford Torus can be rather compact.

 

[Spartan159]

That would fit the definition of a "Size 0" planetoid world.

100 trillion tons is therefore a "world". And a one million ton freighter is still a "starship".

Can someone guesstimate the volume of that gargantuan orbital base thing in the Traveller5 Core Rules that makes Tigresses look like tiny pompoms?

I'm fairly certain that is supposed to be Regina Highport, I'll have to go digging around for it.

 

[GypsyComet]

100 trillion tons is therefore a "world". And a one million ton freighter is still a "starship".

And not even a particularly large starship, if you look at broader SF.

Still that's a five order of magnitude gap to work with. The big orbitals have always been in that gap. The station in T5's color section looks to be bigger than two orders of magnitude above the docked Tigress but smaller than three, so 50-500 million dtons would be my starting point.

I'm fairly certain that is supposed to be Regina Highport, I'll have to go digging around for it.

It is Regina Highport, per the caption. Would it be in GT:Starports?

 

[mike wightman]

It's in the print copy of T5 and the original pdf; it was removed from the updated pdf for some reason.

 

[Spartan159]

I had seen it or a different picture of the same scene somewhere prior to T5, I'll eventually find it.