I got the Crystaliron and Superdense (or bonded superdense, as Mong-Trav only has the one)..
CT? Classic Traveller? I assume this is a reference to the original little black books... of which I have 'Book 2, starships'... gained, in all places, from Bagram.
MT? Megatraveller? I played in that eons ago, and I once owned Fire, Fusion and Steel for it (which, in my foolish youth I mostly used to design guns and ignored spaceships)
And I thought I WAS in The Fleet section?!?
o:
On to other things of interest.
For reasons baffling to me, Mong-Trav does not list displacement tons for grav-tanks, though they are in main book. I gather a grav tank masses around 20-30 tons, but from the Aslan book their displacement is comparable to the ATV (4 tons), but I'd have to double check that. My best source, so far, is the Gurps Traveller Ground Forces book, which lists a lot of technical detail alongside the rules details.
Obviously, I'm focusing highly on technical aspects here more than rules aspects. Also: If the LBB is correct (14m3 for a displacement ton), I'm reasonably certain that I could fit my entire HOUSE inside a single Dton... unless I'm missing some element to cubic measurements. This puts a very wonky spin on the 'size' of the average stateroom, and would render moot every measurement given so far. Either people in space grow to very large sizes or someone (maybe me) screwed something up when measuring stuff...
Some notes/questions that I have generated for myself:
Armories are listed as 2 tons and supporting 10 marines or 50 crew. I am fine with that number for small arms and ammuntion (for the moment lets ignore my question regarding the 14m3 measurment of a single Dton). This is a single bunkroom 'half' of a stateroom, enough space for a couple racks of weapons, some ammunition and a few other things. This may be a bit on the large size, actually, leaving almost enough room for some poor bastard to work inside the thing, handing the stuff out.
On the other hand, it seems way too small for ten battledress marines. I'm not sure I would allow more than 2 marines to dress and arm in Battledress in such a space (and I'm guessing they would require a technician to help them get fully kitted up).
Bathroom/showers: At a guess, a single man stateroom (officer quarters) probably has a private facility. Two man staterooms (for petty officers) probably have one facility for two people. Quarters for ratings and grunt marines would probably use a shared facility... I'm guessing 1 'stall' for every ten bunks in an area. This wouldn't really change tonnage for quarters (well... it probably should, actually but...)... but it does. Strangely, while private lavatories would actually reduce floorspace available, they increase the 'comfort' of the quarters considerably. For 'luxury' passenger quarters, additional floorspace from 'luxury tonnage' or Gurps Traveller style 'Luxury Staterooms' (missing in Mong Trav, but I think easy enough to port in...) would naturally have more expansive facilities. The arrangement of public facilities in this fashion would actually serve to increase floorspace for the group, reducing crowding on the cheap (and would make building the ship's quarters cheaper in theory...) Have I missed a glaringly obvious problem? I assume that water recycling is simple and efficient enough that washing is not a problem.
Mess sections: Ship designs, as near as I can tell, universally do not address eating. Food costs appear to be absorbed into a generic 'life support budget'... though with a fuel processor on board I assume oxygen is pretty cheap (since ships are burning through tons and tons of hydrogen at an appalling rate...and a good chunk of that seems to come from water cracking). On the small ships this doesn't particularly bother me... people eat prepacked whatever in their cabins or workstations... whatever. On a large ship with a crew measurable in thousands, this is simply not a functional design. I'm willing to assume that mess halls then are 'placed' in the Command Tonnage (a 100k battleship has 3k tons of command area.. thats bigger than most Traveller ships to include supercargos.). I believe I've worked out a good ratio of sorts for messes: 1 ton per person who can be fed at one time, which should not be more than 1/3rd the total crew (and can be a lot less), obviously cooks come from the service section, and this tonnage includes the kitchen areas. For actual foodstuffs, I have worked out a very very long series of notes, but we can assume that a ship carries enough frozen foodstuffs for a month in some unspecified area (easier on big ships with the 'dead tonnage' mentioned above. For longer term use, I postulated a SCOP tank (Single Celled Organic Protein), fed by the ships sewage system, after processing. Assuming even a 1 ton tank (I worked with 5 tons, removing 1 ton for hardware), and assuming that the SCOP was 50% water and no more than 5% fiber by volume, I could feed an insane number of people per day from such a tank (adjusting for growth rates, a single kilogram of SCOP provided something like 3500 calories. Even if only half of the tank is the SCOP mass, that's 450 people from a single ton. Growth rates would be high (up to double its mass daily at the high end, but even 10% of mass allows 45 people to be fed indefinitely on a single ton... though not pleasantly). Assuming multiple 'breeds' of SCOP with slightly different protein properties, when properly prepared (dried, flavored, cooked) the SCOP could replace flour, eggs and even sugars in the cooking process, though having multiple tanks for this is only practical on very large ships. Again, tanks would be generally 'hidden' in the Command tonnage, but then filling that with real systems is part of the goal.
Something I can't figure to hide in the command tonnage would be 'hydroponics'. These would be luxury tonnage at best. What I can't do is determine off hand how many people/tons is best. I estimated that you'd need 1 ton per person, but only when dealing with them on a larger scale, and this would only provide a tiny amount of 'fresh greens', mostly in the form of legumes and other higher food density crops... not much fruit I suspect. Most ships, even luxury liners and yachts would do without.
I did figure you could stack chickens that lay eggs into 1 dton spaces fairly easily. It'd be inhumane, but 10 chickens is easy, giving you an appropriate quantity of eggs per person per ton (I've collected farm eggs, but sadly I failed to pay attention. I'm guessing that 9 chickens and a cock could still provide 10 eggs a day average). At the high end, you could fit a LOT more chickens in the same space. Also, I figured you could estimate ounces of meat per person per day with sustainable 'chicken removal', if you have enough chickens to allow for growth... say 90 chickens, giving you 1 to eat per day. Call these extra big/meaty space chickens with 10 pounds of meat... high, but doable. Again: Luxury tonnage probably.
I also estimated you could get a 400 pound 'veal' cow, two per ton... in lots of 200 tons, you can slaughter a cow every day all year round, giving your cows a one year life cycle. To prevent inbreeding you'd use stored semen and probably swap 'batches' at stations, but then I don't imagine anyone would pay that much attention given that these food animals are essentially locked in a small box with life support tubes going in both ends. The extra mass/space accounts for life support specifically for the cows (and yes, they would need to be paid for... seriously: If you want to be a space rancher, you better be prepared to pay for it! On the other hand, you're getting 200+ pounds of tender beef a day... in space. Screw SCOP!)
A lot of these sorts of 'food systems' would be found primarily in long established, very large, space stations rather than on board regular ships, which would make do with frozen and/or dried foods (excepting the SCOP, which could be scaled down to much smaller tanks and still feed normal ship crews for 'free tonnage'. Also: Never eat the stuff fresh out of the tank... wash it first!).
Strangely, aside from SCOP, none of those notes had any value in my planning/design processes. Once I started thinking about the logistics of food in space, I couldn't stop until I'd burned through several pages of notes.
