Proposed Alternate Universe Project

[JAFARR]

This is an open invitation to help design an alternate rule set using the best parts of what we have now. I am not sure if this should be here or in IMTU so if this is the wrong place, please accept my appologies.

Background for this universe:

Character generation, use any form you like. This universe will focus on technology.

Worlds and starmap to be determined.

Technology increases make for more efficent usage of equipment at an increased cost. At some level a given technology will reach dead spot where it can not be improved. At that point it must be replaced with another kind of technology to gain improved preformance or it may be improved in another aspect. For example: Jump drives start out big and bulky and get smaller and more expensive at increased TLs. This peaks out at say TL 15. At TL 16 a way is found to improve fuel effecency while package size remains the same. Or jump drive is replaced with a new kind of drive.

Technology will not have inconsistancies like the LBB2 drive tables. I.E. laws of physics are consistant over all tables used. You may use straight linear progressions, a curved progression, or even steps in your progression but don't have units that aren't on the line. In other words if you introduce a step in your progression, make the remainder of the progression consistant with that step.

Don't be totally realistic. Try to maintain simplicity to aid playability. For example, MT introduced weight and multiple computers. Let's get rid of the weight and use volume only. Keep the multiple computers but reduce overall size and cost to something in line with CT values. MT got rid of the bridge but added life support and sensor structures. If you think the bridge is better then use it, but clearly state what it includes and what equipment is installed there. If you want smaller computers and other controlls to use some of the volume prevously used by computers then specify what you are doing so others can understand your thinking.

Standards that I want to specify:

Volume is in tons of displacement and refered to as tons. 1 ton is 14 kl. For deckplan mapping purposes use the standard of 3 meters between decks and 2 - 1.5 meter by 1.5 meter squares per ton. (I know that works out to 13.5 kl., but assume the other 0.5 kl is in the actual decks themselves.) Volume of components includes the component and extra space required for humans to have access to controls and to make emergency repairs and perform routine maintaince. For hangers and cargo space the specified volume includes access to standard cargo containers (I envision they are like sea/land/rail shipping containers that are set on the mating docks and locked to the carrier's frame.) Component volumes are expressed to the nearest 0.1 tons.

Weight is not used.

Power is in Energy Points (EP) and expressed to the nearest 0.1 EP. If some item's power consumation is negliable, state that also. It is assumed for playability that rounding to 0.1 EP will have some excess power avalible for these items. For the those who want to use watts, 1 EP = 250 watts.

Acceleration is same as in CT & MT. (Not sure if the other versions of Traveller differ.)

Feel free to take some area of technology and develop it. Post your work here for others to comment and speculate about and lets see what we can do together. If you do not like or agree with someone's ideas, please don't attack them. Do your own version and present it for comparison. Someone else may be able to take the best parts of 2 or 3 plans and make an even better one that pleases everybody. Please remember the idea is not total reality, but playability.

It's your chance to redo what you don't like about Traveller technology, Enjoy.

EDIT: On the economic front; Passages and shipping is based on distance travelled, not the number of jumps to get where you are going.

 

[Spinward Scout]

For example: Jump drives start out big and bulky and get smaller and more expensive at increased TLs. This peaks out at say TL 15. At TL 16 a way is found to improve fuel effecency while package size remains the same.

I've thought about this before. Jump Drives show up at TL 9. I always thought as the Tech Level goes up, the size of the drive remains the same. Example: at TL A, a Jump-2 drive would be the size of a TL-9 Jump-1 drive and the TL A Jump-1 drive would be half the size it was at TL-9. And use half the fuel. Same for Maneuver and Power Plant.

Is this the type of thing you are looking for?

 

[Golan2072]

I take it that your design systm would be a modified version of HG? Or of MT? I propose a modified version of HG for simplicity and a certin degree of bacward-compatibility.

Technology wise, we need to formulate a basic set of assumptions: Do we use gravitics? Grav-dampening? Meson weapons? Nuclear dampers? Black globes? Anagtics? HEPLAR? Do we sepeate sensors from computers (MT/T20) or do wemerge them ito one unit (CT)?

Also, are we going to use one version of the manouver-drive (as in CT), or multiple versions (as in MT/TNE)? Same goes to ship powerplants and to ground-vehicle/robot drives/powerplants.

And five areas that need to be dealt with in regards to Traveller technology:
1) Computers (we need a more modern computer architecture to appease the tech-savvy)
2) Biotechnology
3) Cybernetics (to which extent do we use them?)
4) Nanotech (to which extent do we use it?)
5) AIs (TLs and capabiliies)

 

[rhoneycutt]

I think mass must be used to figure performance instead of volume. Mass affects acceleration for everything from race cars to rocket ships. Otherwise every starship made would be loaded with armor without any worry of trade-offs from acceleration.

I might even go so far as to say mass would affect jump performance given that gravity wells degrade j-drive stats....fuel usage at least.

Might make dumping that load of tugsten overboard to get the extra G's to escape pirates a viable option.

Volume is just easier from back in the days before ppl had PC's

 

[JAFARR]

Sir Dameon Toth,
Put it in a chart. How for are you taking this, IE to what TL? What about the costs?


Employee 2-4601,
Take an area that appeals to you. For example computers, do the work up, and make a statement about why you did it that way and not this way. Admitedly CT computers and how they operated was rather lacking in detail. If you want to include sensors as part of the computers as seems to be emplied in CT/HG and the subsquent changes in MT, say what is included and what is not. Don't make us guess as we had to do in the pass.

Shere Khan,
I think that is what was behind adding weight in MT, BUT,it means you have to calculate the mass of every bananna, carrot, head of lettuce, whatever you take on board if you want to be totally realistic. That kills keeping the system playable,which was the appeal of Traveller in the first place. Once again the matra is: Don't be totally realistic. Try to maintain simplicity to aid playability.

 

[JAFARR]

I have a busy week or so ahead in real life, but I want to do hull materials like in MT and some form of armor like HG to go with it.

BTW, if you can, put some sort of break down cost effectivness showing where it becomes cost effective to switch to a more expensive technology for a given size or class of ship. Like the hull material of a higher TL may cost more, but may have a higher armor value so that in the long run it is more cost effective to use the more expensive material if you expect to use this ship in a rougher part of the empire.

 

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Andy Fralix:
It's your chance to redo what you don't like about Traveller technology, Enjoy.

Unless it is the mass vs volume question, hmmm?

I think that is what was behind adding weight in MT, BUT,it means you have to calculate the mass of every bananna, carrot, head of lettuce, whatever you take on board if you want to be totally realistic.

Correction:
...but, IF it means you have to calculate the mass of every bananna...

The answer is: No, it does not require that level of nit-picking (or else we would have to examine your manifest to explain the extra "n" in your banana loading).


As long as a huge 14m³ volume is called a "ton" the dissonance will remain.

That kills keeping the system playable,which was the appeal of Traveller in the first place. Once again the matra is: Don't be totally realistic. Try to maintain simplicity to aid playability.

Except the cargo rules aren't playable, hence the reason the conflict arises like clockwork.

Make the ton 3m³ (100 ft³/British ton converted to SI volume and mass would be 3.11) and multiply dTon specs for hull and components by 5 until you get around to generating new tables. Use 3m (or 3.11m) deck heights and you've got 1m×1m per ton for deck plans.

Assume 1 ton mass of fuel or cargo takes up 1 ton of space. For fuel, Palladium-based aerogels (or some such) absorb the H2 rather than storing it as LH2.

That should be simple and playable enough, unless "simple" really means "don't change what I'm already used to."

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Andy Fralix:

Employee 2-4601,
Take an area that appeals to you. For example computers, do the work up, and make a statement about why you did it that way and not this way. Admitedly CT computers and how they operated was rather lacking in detail. If you want to include sensors as part of the computers as seems to be emplied in CT/HG and the subsquent changes in MT, say what is included and what is not. Don't make us guess as we had to do in the pass.

Sooner or later I'll do this for Robots - that is, create a robot (and vehicle?) design system based on HG; all I need from you all to do this is the following:
1) What do you prefer: a system based on weight (e.g. Striker aircraft) with volume calculated from the final weight, a system based on volume (e.g. High Guard - I prefer this option) with weight calculated from the final volume, or a system based on both (e.g. LBB8 - over-complex IMHO)?
2) How abstract do you want things to be? I prefer, for example, to use a HG-style "drive number equals powerplant number" system with minor components not needing calculated power and energy weapons/heavy gear requiring semi-abstract EPs.
3) I'd be grateful for help in determining realistic component volumes and/or weights of components - any engineer aboard?

 

[Laryssa]

Here are my maneuver drives plus the Traveller Maneuver drives all on one chart.
The traveler Maneuver Drives are all reactionless and I bumped them up to higher tech levels to make room for my reaction maneuver drives. The main difference is this, the reaction maneuver drives require a certain amount of reaction mass per hour, listed under RMC to throw backwards in order to accelerate forward at the listed rate. The reactionless maneuver drives only require electrical input and provides a push forward on the ship without the use of reaction mass, this begins at Teck Level 9 and utilizes some previously undiscovered laws of physics, these reactionless drives also provide artifical gravity for the ship and inertia control so the occupants in the ship don’t feel the acceleration provided by the maneuver drives. Reactionless drives all require separate power plants to provide the electricity, some reaction drive do too, such as the Mass Driver, but others are their own power plants and provide excess EP for use by the rest of the ship’s systems as listed below. If the EP number is preceded by a ‘-‘ it’s a power requirement, if it’s a ‘+’ its excess power output. Each example of the drives below is listed as per drive unit of each type.

MANEUVER DRIVES
Type ________________ TL Cost _____ Size EP __ Mass_ RMC _____ ISP Thrust
Chemical Rockets
-Metal-oxygen _______ 07 MCr 1.0100 2.53 00000 10.13 253.00 MO 274 6-G (405 tons)
-Kerosene-oxygen ____ 07 MCr 0.2050 1.02 00000 4.091 220.00 KO 395 5-G (337.5 tons)
-Hydrogen-oxygen ____ 07 MCr 0.1640 0.82 00000 3.273 540.00 HO 514 4-G (270 tons)
Laser Rocket ________ 08 MCr 0.2025 1.01 0000* 4.050 40.500 P 1500 3-G (202.5 tons)
Mass Driver _________ 08 MCr 4.0500 10.1 -40.5 40.50 0.2025 RD 720 0.015-G (1.0125 tons)
Fission Drive _______ 08 MCr 2.0000 2.50 +2.50 10.00 235.00 H 1034 1-G (67.5 tons)
Fusion Pulse Drives
-High-impulse (HI) __ 08 MCr 3.3750 8.44 +8.44 33.75 0.3375 N 30,000 0.5-G (33.75 tons)
-High-thrust (HT) ___ 08 MCr 6.7500 8.44 +8.44 33.75 1.3500 N 15,000 1-G (67.5 tons)
Fusion Torch Drives
-High-impulse (HI) __ 08 MCr 6.7500 8.44 +8.44 33.75 0.3375 H 36,000 0.05-G (3.375 tons)
-High-thrust (HT) ___ 08 MCr 6.7500 8.44 +8.44 33.75 2.1094 H 18,000 0.125-G (8.4375 tons)
Atmospheric
-Fission Air-Ram ____ 08 MCr 8.1000 10.1 00000 40.50 n/a ____ n/a __ 3-G (202.5 tons)
-Turbo-Scramjet _____ 08 MCr 2.0250 5.06 00000 20.25 1.0000 J 13,333 3-G (202.5 tons)
1-G _________________ 09 MCr 1.5000 1.00 -0.5 ______________________ 1-G
2-G _________________ 09 MCr 1.7500 2.50 -1.0 ______________________ 2-G
3-G _________________ 10 MCr 2.0000 4.00 -1.5 ______________________ 3-G
4-G _________________ 10 MCr 2.7500 5.50 -2.0 ______________________ 4-G
5-G _________________ 10 MCr 3.5000 7.00 -2.5 ______________________ 5-G
6-G _________________ 10 MCr 4.2500 8.50 -3.0 ______________________ 6-G

Mass (in tons), Size (in dtons),
EP (1 EP = 1 MW; + indicates power output, - indicates power requirement),
RMC: Reaction Mass consumption to provide one hours worth of given thrust
ISP: The drives specific impulse; to calculate total change in velocity capable of:
Delta-V = 0.003 x ISP x ln[Loaded Mass (in tons)/Dry Mass (in tons). The symbol “ln” means natural logarithm, a function found on most scientific calculators.
* The laser rocket has no onboard power requirements, but must be energized by an external 20-GW laser beam per dton of drive (20-GW laser requires 40,000 EP of energy to operate at ground installation)

Reaction Mass, Coolant, and Fuel Table (per dton)
Type _______________ Mass Cost
Ablative Plastic (P) 12.0 MCr 0.001
Hydrogen (H) _______ 01.0 MCr 0.00035
Hydrogen-oxygen (HO) 3.50 MCr 0.0003
Kerosene-oxygen (KO) 14.0 MCr 0.005
Metal-oxygen (MO) __ 21.0 MCr 0.005
Jet Fuel (J) _______ 10.8 MCr 0.01
Nuclear Pellets (N)_ 12.0 MCr 0.006
Rock Dust (RD) _____ 26.0 Free

 

[JAFARR]

"(or else we would have to examine your manifest to explain the extra "n" in your banana loading)."

It is one of three choices:
1. I can't spell. True
2. I can't type well. Also true
3. I didn't catch it when proof reading it. Which I did

I rely on the spell checker which only works if I word process it then paste it, which I did not do this time.

"Assume 1 ton mass of fuel or cargo takes up 1 ton of space." I thought that was the where we got the so called "dton" in the first place - the volume occupied by 1 mass ton of hygrogen at STP.

I prefer the volume based system like HG. I also prefer to use the Hg type numbering for drives. The main idea of EPs to me is smaller numbers to work with. If you want to say that minor shipboard power consumption is 1 Ep for every say 200 tons of hull or something like that and only calculate majorloads that simplifies it for me.

As far as the mass thing goes, to me it hinders play. IF you want a mass based system without volume, that would also work , but I don't see how to work it out. One thing I don't see any complaints about using a 2 dimensional hex map instead of a true 3 dimesional universe simply because you can say it's 1,2,3,4 hexes away instead of getting out the calculator and making 10 calculations to figure out how far away your destination is.

Enough said. Got to go clean the church. See you later.

 

[Laryssa]

For game purposes, you can simply ignore the masses on this table. I did this above, because I don't think its realistic for a tech level 7 society to have any sort of reactionless drive at all. The Maneuver Drive and the FTL drive system both begin at TL9. The laws of physics which enable the reactionless maneuver drive also enable technology that gets around the speed of light limit. This also means that TL8- societies are stuck in 1 star system and at best can build only generation, or "sleeper" STL star ships that take many decades to reach the nearest star system.

Now that were on the subject of starships lets discuss FTL systems:

Type _ TL
Jump-1 9
Jump-2 11
Jump-3 12
Jump-4 13
Jump-5 14
Jump-6 15

Type _______ TL
Hyperdrive-1 9
Hyperdrive-2 11
Hyperdrive-3 12
Hyperdrive-4 13
Hyperdrive-5 14
Hyperdrive-6 15

Type _ TL
Warp-1 9
Warp-2 11
Warp-3 12
Warp-4 13
Warp-5 14
Warp-6 15

Type _____ TL
Wormhole-1 9
Wormhole-2 11
Wormhole-3 12
Wormhole-4 13
Wormhole-5 14
Wormhole-6 15

Here are the differences between the drives.

The Jump Drive works just the way it does in standard Traveller, the drive number tells how many units of interstellar distance it moves per jump, but the time spent in jump space is always 1 week no matter what the distance covered it, with 10% variation.

The Hyperdrive is similar to the Jump Drive in that your enter a weird space called hyperspace. The Drive number in this case tells you how far you can travel in weeks time spend in hyperspace. You can drop out of hyperspace any time you want. The amount of time you spend in hyperspace in proportion to 1 week is how far your travel in proportion to your drive number. if for example Hyperdrive-1 takes you 1 parsec in one week and you spend two weeks in hyper space, you travel two parsecs.

Warp Drive is a surface FTL drive. While the warp drive is on, you can actually see where your going, with hyperdrive and jump drive you need to make predrive calculations otherwise the results are unpredicatble. With hyperdrive, you must predetermine how long your going to spend in hyperspace before you enter it, if you want to arrive where you intend to go, cut off the hyperdrive before or after that preset duration and the result is an misjump. With Warp drive, you just point the ship, press the button and engagem you see the stars drift by as your travel through space at a faster than light velocity. This FTL velocity isn't constant, instead it cycles in and out of FTL many times per second. What you see through the windows and view screens while the warp drive is engaged is the starlight which manages to enter the starship at those moments when the starship is slower than light, this has a "motion picture" effect and the viewer perceives one continuous motion at an average FTL speed.

The Wormhole drive creates shortnecked temporary wormholes whose ends are the stated drive number in interstellar units in normal space, but allows a short cut through higher dimensional space to allow a quicker journey. The wormholes last a given duration and other starships can follow through that same wormhole if their widths are smaller than the wormhole aperture.

Now for interstellar units we have a number of choices:

Drive _ Distance
Drive-1 1 light year, 1 parsec, 100 light years
Drive-2 2 light years, 2 parsecs, 200 light years
Drive-3 3 light years, 3 parsecs, 300 light years
Drive-4 4 light years, 4 parsecs, 400 light years
Drive-5 5 light years, 5 parsecs, 500 light years
Drive-6 6 light years, 6 parsecs, 600 light years

 

[Laryssa]

Originally posted by Andy Fralix:
"(or else we would have to examine your manifest to explain the extra "n" in your banana loading)."

It is one of three choices:
1. I can't spell. True
2. I can't type well. Also true
3. I didn't catch it when proof reading it. Which I did

I rely on the spell checker which only works if I word process it then paste it, which I did not do this time.

"Assume 1 ton mass of fuel or cargo takes up 1 ton of space." I thought that was the where we got the so called "dton" in the first place - the volume occupied by 1 mass ton of hygrogen at STP.

I prefer the volume based system like HG. I also prefer to use the Hg type numbering for drives. The main idea of EPs to me is smaller numbers to work with. If you want to say that minor shipboard power consumption is 1 Ep for every say 200 tons of hull or something like that and only calculate majorloads that simplifies it for me.

As far as the mass thing goes, to me it hinders play. IF you want a mass based system without volume, that would also work , but I don't see how to work it out. One thing I don't see any complaints about using a 2 dimensional hex map instead of a true 3 dimesional universe simply because you can say it's 1,2,3,4 hexes away instead of getting out the calculator and making 10 calculations to figure out how far away your destination is.

Enough said. Got to go clean the church. See you later.

Well you can ignore the masses on the table, I also give the acceleration of each drive type. If you instal the given amount of drive units as required per T20 handbook, you are going to get the listed acceleration for your ship, assuming you have room for both the drive and reaction mass. If you install twice the amount of drive units as required you get twice as much acceleration, or if you install half as much, you get half the acceleration. You don't even need the mass of the shi to calculate this and ignore the mass of the drive. The reaction mass is given in volume DTons, so you'd figure that out just as your would power plant of jump fuel.

 

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Andy Fralix:
1. I can't spell. True
2. I can't type well. Also true
3. I didn't catch it when proof reading it. Which I did

Hey, just making fun of the fallacious account-for-every-kilogram argument when people bring up mass vs volume. Precision to 0.001 ton is not tied to the use of mass and volume for ship design and cargo, just as accounting for every 14 liters of volume is not required of the present system.

"Assume 1 ton mass of fuel or cargo takes up 1 ton of space." I thought that was the where we got the so called "dton" in the first place - the volume occupied by 1 mass ton of hygrogen at STP.

I prefer the volume based system like HG.

You can still use a volume based system. Base the system on a volume ton about the correct size for a mass ton: 3m³.

I first changed the ton to 3m³, and then said 1 ton of fuel takes 1 ton of space. 14m³/ton is the density of LH2 at -260°. H2 gas is 22,400m³/ton at STP. My notion is that the fuel and the high-tech storage matrix would occupy 3m³/ton. Exactly how much H2 is in that ton I don't know, but fusion should have a high enough energy density to make that a hand-wave.

(In Going Pirate I show that the 0.015% D2 occuring naturally in Hydrogen gas would be more than sufficient to provide the power indicated of Traveller ships via D-D fusion. 30kg of D2 would be 3.36m³ at STP, thus a simple pressurized gas storage would suffice at one extreme. If some other fusion tech is envisioned, a larger fraction of a ton of H2 is stored in the 3m³.)

I prefer the volume based system like HG...

As far as the mass thing goes, to me it hinders play. IF you want a mass based system without volume, that would also work , but I don't see how to work it out.

Again, that is unnecesary. Make the mass and volume congruent and the problem mostly goes away on its own. Simple volume ratios can account for acceleration under partial load or overload, jump limits, etc.

 

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Laryssa
The symbol "ln" means natural logarithm, a function found on most scientific calculators.

Hey, what kind of morons do you think we are???

Fission Drive _______ 08 MCr 2.0000 2.50 +2.50 10.00 235.00 H 1034 1-G (67.5 tons)

I suppose you're bleeding +2.5MW from MFD generation or some such? Should be possible without significantly reducing performance.

ISP of 1000 and 1G thrust may be true for relatively simple fission engines like the 1960s era NERVA. I've been trying to find a Science Fact article from Analog about it without success. Thrust can be increased using CO2 without great loss of ISP. CO2 liquifies at more manageable temperatures and pressures than H2, and condenses to a higher degree. CO2 also absorbs energy more readily and thus is more efficient for modest ISP designs.

As I recall a more advanced version possible with present day tech would have ISP in the 3-4k range and higher thrust. Gas Core Fusion (requiring large scale diamond fabrication to withstand belief-stretching temperatures and wear) can reach ISP of 10k with foreseeable tech and theoretical limits around 20k. TSP drops off slightly with higher ISP.

 

[JAFARR]

quote:
Originally posted by Laryssa
The symbol “ln” means natural logarithm, a function found on most scientific calculators.

Hey, what kind of morons do you think we are???
------------------------------------------------

Not a moron, but very little higher math usage in the past 30+ years, so I would not have remembered what little I did know at one time. The only math beyond "+", "-", "x",& "/" that I have used are trig functions related to calculating angles. But I have not even had to use them for about the past 15 years.

 

[rhoneycutt]

how hard is it to determine the mass of a ship?.It can be found easily enough by adding it up in a spreadsheet during ship design?...mass of cargos will be relatively tiny compared to the mass of a combat ship itself...and cargo masses don't have to be exact....you know the volume...mutiply it times a reasonable density for a kind of cargo...one step on a calculator.

you can look up densities of common types of cargo up on a chart < which everyone seems to love using >
And it doesn't slow down play any more than the other minutae players seem to enjoy.< such as how many bullets the are carrying. Or how much they owe on their ship loan >

The main point for me is to make having heavy armor cost you something. Make extra performance cost you something. Otherwise manuvering in space means nothing because all ships would basicly be the same regardless of their armor or what they are carrying.

I also would use reaction drives so that fuel usage means something too. Having a limited number of G-turns would make manuvering a tactical decision too.

Both fuel use and mass based performance kinda solves the near_C rock problem too.

And make contragrav tech not so 'easy'...I happen to like railroads and boats and cars and planes. Cheap easy grav tech eliminates them. At least make it power hungry enough to require an equal energy as to change in potential energy of the thing being lifted. At least that way trains and wet ships can still compete in cost effectiveness.

And make the trade and fleet strength coincide with reasonable economy rules. And link pop of worlds to how habitable they are. Link tech levels to social profiles for the world ( luddite hippie communes will not be tech 15 ). And link starport type to tech available.

hmmmmmm...but then again, ppl would say it ain't Traveller anymore....

my .02cr

 

[BillDowns]

Originally posted by Straybow:
Base the system on a volume ton about the correct size for a mass ton: 3m³.

I first changed the ton to 3m³, and then said 1 ton of fuel takes 1 ton of space. 14m³/ton is the density of LH2 at -260°. H2 gas is 22,400m³/ton at STP. My notion is that the fuel and the high-tech storage matrix would occupy 3m³/ton.

I am quite curious how you arrived at 3 cubic meters for a ton?

If you base it on liquid hydrogen, its about 14.3 m^3. If you base it on water - which is how a metric ton is defined anyway - it is 1 m^3. If you base on a 40-foot ISO container, it is about 2.4 M^3 and if you base it on a 20-foot ISO container, it is about 1.2 m^3.

So, where did 3M^3 come from?

 

[Anthony]

Freight standards? A register ton is about 3 cubic meters.

 

[BillDowns]

Originally posted by Anthony:
Freight standards? A register ton is about 3 cubic meters.

Freight standards. Let's see.
</font>

• Freight ton is defined as 40 cubic feet; most commonly used by railroad and trucking industries in the US.</font>
• British freight ton is defined at 42 cubic feet, because it is based on a "long ton", not the "short ton" of the US.</font>
• Register ton is defined as 100 cubic feet of cargo because that's how the Panama Canal charged; used in US and some European ship cargo measurements.</font>
• French tonne de mer which is defined as 1.44 cubic meters; could not discover why. I guess the French were just being French. </font>
• Displacement tonnes which is defined as 35 cubic feet; the weight of "standard" sea water; used for all military ships and actually most ships around the world as a definition of "size".</font>

All of these, except the displacement tonnes, are quite arbitrary. Since the largest volume on a Traveller spaceship is the liquid hydrogen fuel, it seems quite reasonable to me to use that as the standard, especially since everything else in Traveller already uses that figure.

Why change from one arbitrary measurement of volume to another?

 

[Laryssa]

Originally posted by Shere Khan:
how hard is it to determine the mass of a ship?.It can be found easily enough by adding it up in a spreadsheet during ship design?...mass of cargos will be relatively tiny compared to the mass of a combat ship itself...and cargo masses don't have to be exact....you know the volume...mutiply it times a reasonable density for a kind of cargo...one step on a calculator.

you can look up densities of common types of cargo up on a chart < which everyone seems to love using >
And it doesn't slow down play any more than the other minutae players seem to enjoy.< such as how many bullets the are carrying. Or how much they owe on their ship loan >

The main point for me is to make having heavy armor cost you something. Make extra performance cost you something. Otherwise manuvering in space means nothing because all ships would basicly be the same regardless of their armor or what they are carrying.

I also would use reaction drives so that fuel usage means something too. Having a limited number of G-turns would make manuvering a tactical decision too.

Both fuel use and mass based performance kinda solves the near_C rock problem too.

And make contragrav tech not so 'easy'...I happen to like railroads and boats and cars and planes. Cheap easy grav tech eliminates them. At least make it power hungry enough to require an equal energy as to change in potential energy of the thing being lifted. At least that way trains and wet ships can still compete in cost effectiveness.

And make the trade and fleet strength coincide with reasonable economy rules. And link pop of worlds to how habitable they are. Link tech levels to social profiles for the world ( luddite hippie communes will not be tech 15 ). And link starport type to tech available.

hmmmmmm...but then again, ppl would say it ain't Traveller anymore....

my .02cr

Under my system contragrav, reactionless drives, and FTL drives all begin at tech level 9. Tech Level 8, the tech level were just beginning in lasts through most of the 21st century, and perhaps a century or two beyond that as well, it is also called the fusion age, as fusion power is the primary source of power through most of this age, although now we just have fusion bombs. The technology of TransHuman Space is TL8 in Traveller terms. All TL8 technology is understandable to us, its engineering may be completely beyond us, but we understand how it works. Everything having to do with O'Neill Colonies, and Solar System exploration, terraforming Mars even is Tech Level 8. The key is all tech level 8 technologies exploit the laws of physics as we now know them, the same laws of physics that tell us that we can't travel faster than the speed of light and that for every action their is an equal and opposite reaction, and that the only way to make gravity is to put alot of mass together in one spot.

I think tech level 8 should go on alot longer than in the OTU, this will give humanity time to explore and colonize the Solar System and also send out generation ships and sleeper ships using reaction drives.

Tech Level 9 is when we begin to discover laws of physics that were not previously known to us, it becomes possible to have an action without a reaction, artificial gravity generation becomes possible, and by being able to bend space with artificial gravity we can slide past the light barrier and go faster than the speed of light. This of course makes in system travel alot more efficient, and allows spaceships to devote a greater portion of their internal voulme to both passengers and cargo rather than to fuel and reaction mass, although they still require fuel.

Another decision is whether to have FTL comunication. FTL communication is simply sending something faster than light, which is not a starship, that can carry messages.

One particular kind of FTL comm is tachyons, I suggest applying the same limits to tachyon communications as we do to starships, tachyons can only exist beyong the 100 diameter limit, that is also why we haven't discovered them as yet. Tachyons turn to baryons or electromagnetic radiation when they hit the 100 diamter limit of a gravitational well. It is perfectly possible for a radio receiver to pick up an incoming tachyon transmission, actually transmitting tachyons is a different story. Tachyons move so fast they are almost instantaneous, they do have limited ranges though, beyond that range they decay into slower than light particals or photons, that is why you need a tachyon relay system in order to have communication throughout the civilized and settled regions of space.