Not so much as how ships are designed directly, but on how ships operating in a high law level environment are designed. ...
That's fine for an IMTU setting and for ships landing outside of the starport extrality, but I was given to understand that ships in the starport proper were under Imperial regulation, not local regulation. However, I'm not 100% versed on canon related to the subject, especially with all the other Traveller variants. The locals can enforce requirements on what goes in or comes out of the starport, but is there some bit that gives the locals authority to require the starport authorities to impose such regulations within the starport itself?
...Required safety equipment will include an emergency rescue ball for every BERTH on the ship, not just crew and passengers, to include low berths if carried. ...
That's an interesting requirement. I've been requiring rescue balls as a means of dealing with decompression emergencies, but I treat the low berths as airtight and link them to a source of backup power (RTGs, said hot little beasties located in the engine room with all the other big heat sources), so they don't become an additional burden in an emergency. I hadn't considered what might happen if a warship, exploration ship, etc. was forced to abandon ship, but I'd have thought if there was time to wake the sleepers, there'd be time for them to get to the lifeboat. At a reasonable starport, I figure a ship in an emergency would either wait for rescue or be in such a hurry that the low berth passengers would have to be abandoned. How do you see the rescue balls being used with respect to the low berths?
...The rescue balls must be capable of sustaining life support for one person for 24 hours, be equipped with an emergency locator beacon and short-range communicator, 2 liters of water, emergency rations containing at least 1800 calories, internal light, and liquid waste disposal. Rescue balls must show evidence of passing a safety and reliability inspection within the past 360 days. ...
Why the locator and communicator? Also, have you considered requiring the ball to contain a dose of Fast drug to lower metabolic demand, as an alternative to requiring the food and water and 24-hour air supply? I recall from IE that the (MT) rescue ball delivers enough air (and presumably CO2 scrubbing) to support the occupant for two hours, which under Fast drug should last 5 days (assuming the CO2 scrubber is of a design that can function for 5 days) without the occupant experiencing noticeable thirst or hunger in that time. At Cr200, Fast drug is likely cheaper and certainly much smaller than a system delivering O2 and providing CO2 scrubbing at normal metabolic demand for 24 hours.
...The ship must carry a life boat or launch or small boat capable of carrying all crew and passengers (again based on total berths on the ship) at the rate of 8 persons per displacement ton of usable space, sufficient life support for the required number of people for 2 weeks, to include water and food, a basic survival kits for each passenger, and a more complete survival kit for each crew member. Mandatory emergency evacuation drills will be carried out prior to being cleared for departure. Small boat crew must have demonstrated the ability to collect rescue pods within a 12 hour time period within the past 180 days, as well as maintenance and safety checks on the small boat and ship.
Would this include the ships that are assigned to established trade routes between high-quality starports? If so, is this a legacy requirement from a period when things were less safe, or is there a specific class of emergency that might render them useful on such routes?
I'm also curious about the collecting-rescue-balls bit. If the ship is required to have a lifeboat, why are the rescue balls not being taken directly into the lifeboat before the lifeboat launches? Is this a backup requirement in case the lifeboat itself is damaged in the emergency?
...2) Passenger ships might require them as a commercial necessity if some or most passengers don't understand or psychologically can't accept the logical arguments.
Maybe, but my thought is that in a thousand-plus year old Imperium, itself an heir to a civilization that had already been in space for 4000 years, passengers on
regular routes between
good quality starports would no more expect a lifeboat than passengers in a modern passenger jet would expect a parachute. Those who don't understand or psychologically can't accept the accumulated experience of 5000 years of interstellar flight most likely suffer from cosmophobia and are likely to just stay home.
On the exploding drive thing - if the drives manipulate gravity then couldn't catastrophic failure involve gravitational type problems e.g. ship being ripped in half or bent out of ship or forced into crazy spins?
This doesn't negate the jettison argument but potentially makes for some interesting gravity-based disaster scenarios e.g. ship moving "forward" at 3G while the floor has the standard 1G and then the floor gravitics fail.
An interesting idea for an IYTU dramatic event to throw at your players, but the exploding drive thing was only intended to reflect the CT Book-2/High Guard business about ships exploding/vaporizing on certain critical hit results. There's really not anything on a ship that will generate a ship-vaporizing explosion except a black globe unit and maybe the missiles, and not all ships carry black globe or missiles. One is obliged to invent some acceptable explanation for why the ship goes BOOM when the rolls say it goes BOOM, lest your unlucky Scout/Free-Trader owning player heap curses upon you for inflexibly following rules unsupported by logic. It's hard to argue the J-drive should go boom when it's not in use, and there's nothing about a PP that suggests a ship-shattering KABOOM; that by elimination leaves the M-drive as the potential source of sudden woe.
This is where things get hinky and the lifeboat question comes into play. Book 2 says the ship "Explode(s)". No indication of the fate of passengers and crew. A merciful DM might allow time to reach the lifeboats, but this implies the explosion is for some reason delayed long enough for them to have a chance at reaching the lifeboat - and as I noted earlier, if there's time for that, there's time to get rid of the dangerous equipment, and the game doesn't seem to recognize such an alternative (though of course you could add it in for your own TU). Ergo, an "Explode" event is too quick to mitigate.
However, Book-2 also says, "If a critical hit is achieved, then the critical hit table is consulted with one die. The result is complete destruction or incapacitation of the indicated item. Unlike ordinary hits, the entire item is destroyed (
crew is not necessarily killed, but is rendered unable to function)." A merciful DM might extend that to rule the explosion destroys the drive compartment and its associated drives while leaving individuals in the bridge and living spaces alive, at least for the moment. (One hopes they're already in vacc suits and rescue balls.) In that case, the utility of a lifeboat depends on whether SDBs are hurrying to your rescue or whether you're entirely on your own.
Book 5 says "utterly destroyed," but I don't think your players are going to point out that rule if you let them have a floating hulk to shelter in.