Bringing the Book-2 ships into a Book-5 milieu

[Condottiere]

Default currency.

 

[Madmax]

Default currency.

In most places it is a coffee outlet. Or am I thinking of Covfefe??

 

[Condottiere]

It is what it is.

I actually can spell, and starbux is the end result of a protracted evolution of when I got sick of reusing the word credit, that started of with the French Crédit Impériale, got simplified to bucks, contracted to bux, and when I was looking at a split tailed mermaid and remembering the Revisisioned Series, came up with starbux.

 

[Carlobrand]

It is what it is.

I actually can spell, and starbux is the end result of a protracted evolution of when I got sick of reusing the word credit, that started of with the French Crédit Impériale, got simplified to bucks, contracted to bux, and when I was looking at a split tailed mermaid and remembering the Revisisioned Series, came up with starbux.

It's clever. I'd wondered perhaps if T5 was using a new word for the moolah.

 

[Vile]

Generally speaking, an entrepreneur will open up a factory locally, if demand is large enough and transport costs prohibitive.

That's usually a function of labour costs, and those are generally cheaper away from the market for the product. You can of course get situations where a factory is established when labour is cheap, and as living standards rise it remains profitable to keep the manufacturing local for a while. But eventually consumers will push out manufacturing.

A local factory also needs a supporting high-tech industry within a reasonable distance to provide the parts. If you're shipping the parts, you can still have local assembly.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Considered that one once. Triggered a discussion where people pointed out that new tech was often less expensive than older tech, this computer I'm typing on being an example.



Damn, forgot to mention that detail. That was an important point. Yes, we're also using the reduced cost standard hull where needed to reduce costs further. Thanks for reminding me.

I'm of two minds there. Option one is simplest: we rationalize it by saying we're recycling old hulls, pulling out all the innards and build the new ship inside of them. Ships whose designs are old enough and common enough that they show up in significant numbers for recycle serve as the basis for cut-rate hulls. I figured when Striker threw tank-armor hulls at me, I could make a bit of lemonade out of it by riding that for the standard hull rule.

Option 2 is a bit more complicated in that I'd need to adjust the Book-5 combat rules a bit, but it allows me to integrate Book 2 features a bit more effectively: the so-called "standard" hull is a seriously cheap hull adequate for space flight but not intended for combat. Canon descriptions of entry through the hull have you cutting through a hull of the same thickness as the inner bulkheads. I think we argued at one time for that to be equivalent to something like an inch thick steel. Book 2 combat made this the stuff that missiles could do multiple hits to, thin enough that power plant and jump drive hits are a possibility. So, the hull is a metal plate faced with ceramic heat tiles, mounted on a structure of girdering and backed with a thick section of a lightweight radiation-absorbing plastic, atop another metal plate, the whole sufficient to stop radiation and most micrometeor hits but no more difficult to penetrate than the typical bulkhead when attacked with personal energy weapons. Space combat weapons striking a ship equipped with a "standard" hull do not receive the +6 damage DM when using the High Guard combat rules and, in the unlikely event a "standard hull" comes under fire by a weapon with a rating of A+ (i.e. spinal mounts), that weapon receives a -6 to the damage roll (which means more than half the time the result will be a critical). And, no, they are not as hardy as the ships described in Adventure 12, Secret of the Ancients; they aren't intended for operations in deep water or deep in a gas giant atmosphere.

From what I can tell, there couldn't possibly have been any LBB2:'81 ships that used the standard hulls by default other than the Type S and Free Trader.

Aside from those two hulls, none of the standard hulls' drive bays exactly match any viable combination of LBB2 starship drives. (The 400Td one exactly fits for a 5G non-starship, but that's about it.)

 

[mike wightman]

Law of unintended consequence.

When they changed the power plant requirement to match the jump drive or m-drive whichever is larger the 400t standard hull no longer has a drive bay compatible with the drive tonnages that used to fit - eg 77 edition you can have a m1 jump 3 400t or a m3 jump 1.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Law of unintended consequence.

When they changed the power plant requirement to match the jump drive or m-drive whichever is larger the 400t standard hull no longer has a drive bay compatible with the drive tonnages that used to fit - eg 77 edition you can have a m1 jump 3 400t or a m3 jump 1.

Ok, so it was valid in first edition but they didn't change it at all between editions?
I don't have a copy of '77 but the drive bays for 100 to 1000 are sized as follows in '81:
15,15,50,85,165,165. Is this the same as in '77?

 

[Vile]

I don't have a copy of '77 but the drive bays for 100 to 1000 are sized as follows in '81:
15,15,50,85,165,165. Is this the same as in '77?

The '77 LBB2 has 15, 15, 50, 80, 165, 165, so one change for the 600-ton hull.

BTW, if you have the older CT-CD ROM without the '77 LBBs, you can ask Marc to send you an updated one. That's how I got mine.

 

[Grav_Moped]

The '77 LBB2 has 15, 15, 50, 80, 165, 165, so one change for the 600-ton hull.

BTW, if you have the older CT-CD ROM without the '77 LBBs, you can ask Marc to send you an updated one. That's how I got mine.

Got the classic pdfs (2nd ed) with the T5 hardcopy kickstarter on a thumbdrive. No 1st ed. Might ask about it, but no real hurry on that.

Oh, that change for the 600Td hull makes the Type M Subsidized Liner work at its J3 1G, where it wouldn't have under the '77 size. It is, contrary to what I said before (table lookup mistake), an exact fit.

Which makes the failure to change the 400Td hull to align with the Type R Subsidized Merchant somewhat surprising.

 

[BRover]

Got the classic pdfs (2nd ed) with the T5 hardcopy kickstarter on a thumbdrive. No 1st ed. Might ask about it, but no real hurry on that.

Oh, that change for the 600Td hull makes the Type M Subsidized Liner work at its J3 1G, where it wouldn't have under the '77 size. It is, contrary to what I said before (table lookup mistake), an exact fit.

Which makes the failure to change the 400Td hull to align with the Type R Subsidized Merchant somewhat surprising.

I may well be wrong, but doesn't the Type R 50t engineering come close to a J2 2G set of drives (45t)? To go to J1 1G, as with the R, you'd need 35t ('77 ed. table) or 25t ('81). Which is a more substantial change--3.75% or 6.25% of a 400t ship, vs 5t (under 1%) on the 600t hull.

 

[Proneutron]

I may well be wrong, but doesn't the Type R 50t engineering come close to a J2 2G set of drives (45t)?

Book 2: "Using a 400-ton hull, the subsidized merchant is a trading vessel intended to meet the commercial needs of clusters of worlds. It has jump drive-C, maneuver drive-C, and power plant-C,"

 

[kilemall]

I don't have this issue.



Keep the LBB2 ships separate from the LBB5 ships.


LBB2 ships are made with mass-produced standardized drives that hook up together and work across TLs and are everywhere on A & B starports.


LBB5 ships are more custom make/models and may not have all parts on tap, requiring shipping them in or possibly having them made at an A port only.


LBB2 engineering is built more for frontier and rough reliability, hence the differing sizes and fuel use. Remember the scouts and military craft can operate with unrefined fuel, I'd make it so civilian ones can be converted to that standard too, but not the LBB5 ships, hence the focus on the onboard refinery.


I wouldn't allow mixing the two without several issues cropping up due to differing principles in their construction- not without significant quirks popping up, anyway.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Book 2: "Using a 400-ton hull, the subsidized merchant is a trading vessel intended to meet the commercial needs of clusters of worlds. It has jump drive-C, maneuver drive-C, and power plant-C,"

That's 1 size higher than necessary for J1,1G, Pn1. Were the overbuilt drives intended to be "armor" (damage-soaks)? Or were these the drives needed in the '77 edition?

If it has the Size B drives it should have (in the '81 edition), there's 25Td going to waste. Size C drives waste only 15Td, but add MCr22 to the cost over Size B ones.

Then again, the standard hull saves 24MCr compared to a custom hull, so maybe it's a fair tradeoff to get the only kind of "armor" present in the LBB2 rules?


And yes, the 50Td drive bay would enable upgrading a Type R to J2, 2G, Pn2 (Size D drives) with 5Td to spare.

Still, it's really weird that the canonical ship using the standard hull doesn't have drives that fit that hull's drive bay.
Maybe they meant to give PCs fortunate enough to be able to afford it, the option of upgrading their Type R?

It also implies that the standard ship for which the hull was designed was a "far fat trader" (J2, 2G, Pn2) that is not mentioned in canon. And they still got the drive bay size wrong.

 

[boomslang]

That's 1 size higher than necessary for J1,1G, Pn1. Were the overbuilt drives intended to be "armor" (damage-soaks)?

This, I always assumed.

And the characters may need it from time to time in, for example, TTA.

 

[mike wightman]

77 edition you needed C drives to get j1/m1 in a 400t hull.

 

[Proneutron]

That's 1 size higher than necessary for J1,1G, Pn1.

That is a size that delivers "1" performance for a 400 dt hull per the same LBB that I quoted the Subby details from. BUT, size B also delivers that. Most of the hull sizes have many different sizes that only deliver a "1" rating. Kinda weird really

 

[mike wightman]

The drive potential table is different between 77 edition and 81 edition.

77 the minimum sized drive that would move a 400t ship are the C drives, the B drive is a dashed line showing it will not function in that size of hull.

In 81 edition the B drive will now produce performance 1 in a 400t hull, as will the C drives. Why a bargain basement ship would use anything but the B drive to cut costs is a bit of a mystery.

 

[Proneutron]

Why a bargain basement ship would use anything but the B drive to cut costs is a bit of a mystery.

Not only bargain basement ships. High end ships don't install larger drives than needed either. Even in mil ships one doesn't install more than needed to obtain the designed performance figures. Makes one wonder if the "2nd edition" LBB2 had those leading 1's as a typo in place of the dashes.

 

[boomslang]

Not only bargain basement ships. High end ships don't install larger drives than needed either. Even in mil ships one doesn't install more than needed to obtain the designed performance figures. Makes one wonder if the "2nd edition" LBB2 had those leading 1's as a typo in place of the dashes.

There is the special case of deliberately oversizing the power plant so that the ship's lasers can use the Double Fire program, but that is almost more trouble than it's worth in terms of the cost not only of the power plant, but also of the relatively large computer needed to run DF alongside all the other programs involved in using lasers effectively.