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

[BRover]

. . .
The original Battletech brought this home to me, with the descriptions of mechs and other vehicles replete with quirks and idiosyncracies - which unfortunately had no impact on their game stats. So I went through the whole book and added modifiers based on the descriptions. Sure, that meant some mechs were better than others, but that's how things are in the real world - take any two cars of the same spec and one is certain to be better than the other, sometimes by a considerable margin.
. . .

Also applies to, say, military vehicles. Like Tanks. In fact, when it comes to things like ships, especially capital ships, virtually none of them--even in the same class--are exactly the same. And from one nation to another, the differences between, say, battle cruisers can be huge.

Why I said, once upon a time in a thread far, far away,

I thought about this--but we already have at least two standard hulls in each size class: streamlined vs. unstreamlined. True, as far as I recall, the standard ships given, apart from possibly Type S vs. X-boat, use only one or the other--and is the 1000 ton used at all? (X-tender?)--but the possibility is there. So, it seems likely that various shaped standard hulls are possible, and even "tweaked" hulls for carried ship boats. (Which, BTW, makes the whole question of why the standard hull main vs. engineering sections exceedingly strange, but there it is.)

(emphasis added)

 

[Grav_Moped]

Taking the calculation out of the rulebook and into the Traveller Universe for a moment, I envisage standard hulls as being around for a much longer time than standard drives - in fact, I could see a lot of different companies producing slightly different versions of standard drives for every company that makes standard hulls.

I like to introduce tweaks to ships based on "fluff" like the infamous Type-S air recyclers. So some standard drives might leave more space in the engineering section than others, some might be slightly cheaper, more reliable, whatever. Makes "standard" less boring.

The original Battletech brought this home to me, with the descriptions of mechs and other vehicles replete with quirks and idiosyncracies - which unfortunately had no impact on their game stats. So I went through the whole book and added modifiers based on the descriptions. Sure, that meant some mechs were better than others, but that's how things are in the real world - take any two cars of the same spec and one is certain to be better than the other, sometimes by a considerable margin.

Getting back to standard hulls themselves, I see them as being standard for a slew of reasons - easy to build, versatile volume, cheap material, etc. So, different manufacturers might have their own take on what is otherwise exactly the same standard hull design, from minor dimensional differences to internal bulkheads that are easy to move and thus allow the engineering section to be expanded or shrunk at little cost - think of Norman Foster's HSBC building in Hong Kong, which has whole floors that can be reconfigured.

This is definitely a case where the setting materials don't match the rules as written. And in practice, they can't. Every player or ref who drew up their own deck plans for a Scout/Courier or Free Trader came up with their own versions, which are definitive in their game universes -- and they're each supposed to be the standard hull for that size.

The problem here is that if there are multiple "standard" hulls for each tonnage, then why do all those standard hulls have exactly the same drive bay size -- often one that doesn't match any combination of known drives? [Edit: BRover, I hadn't seen your post when I posted this.]

I don't see standard drives varying at all in their tonnage requirements. After all, in the OTU as of 1105, most of the standard drives have been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years -- and even the TL-15 drives W-Z have been possible for at least 20 years (since the 4th Frontier War). In all that time, they would have wrung every possible efficiency and optimization from them.

The only "nonstandard" drives are from LBB5, and they weren't an option when standard hulls were first used in the '77 edition.
I'm not sure I want to go to the trouble of seeing which LBB5 drives fit in the standard hulls, but I might. The math is easier than for LBB2, but you have to do each combination at each of the tech level steps for power plants (7-8, 9-12, 13-14, 15).

 

[Grav_Moped]

Ok, here's what fits in the standard hulls by TL from LBB5:

Lower G ratings than best per Jn not listed due to redundancy.
Number following lowercase "w" is number of tons of drive bay space wasted.
If no J-0 result for Gs listed, Gs at J-0 are same as Gs at J-1.

Example result: J2-2Gw1 is Jump 2, 2G, 1Td of drive bay space wasted.

[Edit: missed several J-1 options. Fixed. Conclusions still valid.]
TL-7,8 (no Jump possible at this TL, 3G not possible until TL-8)
100: 2Gw2
200: 1Gw3
400: 1Gw26
600: 2Gw7
800: 3Gw5
1000:2Gw35

TL-9,10,11,12 (J-2 from TL-11+, J-3 from TL-12+, J-4+ not possible)
100: J3-1G exact, J2-2Gw1, J1-2Gw2
200: J1-1Gw1
400: J2-1Gw6, J1-1Gw22, J0-2Gw6
600: J3-0Gw7, J2-2Gw1, J1-2Gw7
800: J3-2Gw21, J2-3GW5, J1-3Gw13
1000: J3-1Gw15, J2-2Gw25, J1-2Gw35

TL-13,14 (J-5 from TL-14+, J-6 not possible)
100: J4-1G exact, J3-2G exact, J2-2Gw3, J1-2Gw4
200: J1-1Gw3
400: J3-1Gw2, J2-2Gw2, J1-2Gw6
600: J4-1Gw7, J3-1Gw13, J2-2Gw13, J1-2Gw19
800: J5-1Gw21, J4-2Gw21, J3-3Gw21, J2-3Gw29, J1-3Gw37
1000: J5-0Gw5, J4-1Gw15, J3-2Gw15, J2-2Gw45, J1-3Gw5

TL-15
100: J6-1G exact*, J5-1Gw2, J4-2Gw1, J3-3G exact, J2-3Gw1, J1-3Gw2
200: J3-0Gw1, J2-1Gw1, J1-1Gw5
400: J5-0Gw6, J4-1Gw6, J3-2Gw2, J2-2Gw10, J1-2Gw14
600: J6-0Gw7, J5-1Gw7, J4-2Gw1, J3-2Gw13, J2-3Gw1, J1-3Gw7
800: J6-2Gw21, J5-3Gw13, J4-4Gw5, J3-4Gw13, J3-3Gw45, J2-4Gw21, J1-4Gw29
1000: J6-1Gw15, J5-2Gw5, J4-2Gw25, J3-3Gw15, J2-3Gw25, J1-3Gw35

Observations: The only exact matches happen for the 100Td hull, suggesting some interesting possible variants of the Type S Scout/Courier.

Also, this is a mess to read. I wish I could think of a better way to lay out this information.



*Not valid without drop tanks.

 

[Straybow]

That means your engineers are dead. :rofl:

Yeah, that would be a problem.

 

[ady]

One of the main points that prevent low tech ships being profitable in Book 5 is the massive (and therefore more expensive) powerplants. At 3MCR a ton, having a double, triple or quadruple sized powerplant at lower TLs makes most low tech ships overly expensive and unable to compete with the TL15 smaller powerplant competitors. One way to get round this though is the 'low tech is cheaper' rule from Mercenary Book 4 p43 in the 'Notes on Prices and tech Levels' section. It suggests that "prices will tend to drop by 5-15% at each tech level after the level of introduction of an item". If you apply this to starship prices, you could have TL10 J1 1G free traders being on the market with a 50-75% price reduction on a TL15 word, when compared to the more efficient TL15 versions, leading to much lower mortgages and yearly maintenance costs. This would allow buyers to choose either between cheap low tech models vs high tech expensive ones.