Starship Construction & population

[Bob Weaver]

I am populating a new area of known space IMTU (CT rules), and as I was populating planets I got to wondering which planets can produce their own starships. IMTU, planets with Class A,B & C ports can produce ships - the classification limits the size/quantity of ships, not the canonical 'starships from Class-A ports only'. Assuming they have the TL and the starport for it, the variable that I'm pondering is population. What population size would be the bare minimum to keep a starship construction operation going? Surely it would take 1,000's of people at least to do the actual building but many times that to support it all.
Any suggestions for the bottom limit would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Bob Weaver

 

[robject]

Numbers I've seen (from Trillion Credit Squadron) suggest 1 ton per 1,000 people, but pick whatever number sounds reasonable to you.

How about thinking "chop shop" instead of new construction? A low-pop world may take current ships, no questions asked, strip them for parts, and build "refurb" ships from them.

 

[Bob Weaver]

That sounds like a nice plot hook. Skip tracers hunting for starship chop shops, or a way for pirates to unload captured vessels. Thanks for the idea!

 

[Straybow]

Yeah, 1dT per 1000 pop sounds like a good guideline to the general economic requirements for supporting starship construction. With room for exceptions, naturally.

 

[flykiller]

Any suggestions for the bottom limit would be appreciated.

in the modern world there are about 2000 people per each ton of ocean-going ship produced, so 1000 people per 1dton of starship produced seems reasonable.

 

[vegascat]

I could see a minimum population of 10 people. They would be admin mostly watching the AI programming of computers controlling a small army of robots doing the actual work.

 

[vegascat]

TYhere are a few very low population spaceport A worlds listed in the books. The only people there would be for customer relations to sell ships, negotiate prices for new ships and repairs for visiting ships, and keeping an eye on what was actually going on in the yard. Every other job would be taken over by robots.
"Hello sir, What class of ship would you like, what color scheme do you want, and what wpecial requirements do you have? Your new ship will be ready in 30 days. How shall you be paying for your new vessel? Accepted payment methods are precious metals, Imperial Credits, or with documents backing from any major house you can finance for low monthly payments."

 

[Fritz_Brown]

flykiller, fix your sig, please. (The new software doesn't like html.)

 

[GypsyComet]

The formula from Trillion Credit Squadron resulted in a minimum pop digit of 6 for *normal* construction times of most adventure class ships, due to yard/crew capacity. I've allowed smaller populations to build, but the process is slowed, often considerably.

 

[Straybow]

Yes, well, if they have pop 6 the capacity would be ~1000dT. Of course, they already have four ships under construction and yours is at the end of a queue. They can schedule you in for the year after next...

 

[Jame]

I generally assume that class C ports can build small craft (and maybe something up to 400-600 tons or so), which wouldn't take all that many people to do, and that B ports can build any non-jump craft available to their TL.

My question is why starship construction takes so much time.

 

[atpollard]

I generally assume that class C ports can build small craft (and maybe something up to 400-600 tons or so), which wouldn't take all that many people to do, and that B ports can build any non-jump craft available to their TL.

My question is why starship construction takes so much time.

I would imagine a class C port as able to build small craft.

I don't know what TNE & T4 ultimately came up with for construction time, but in Classic Traveller the issue is more one of why all ships seem to take about the same time to construct no matter what the size is.

 

[tinker123]

How many ships are out there?

I was trying a similar thing, to work out how many landing pads a typical starport would have. The answer is 21. Fewer on a low-pop class-E, more on a high-pop class-A. That fits with very little shipbuilding for private ownership (plus big stuff for the Navy, plus Scouts, both of which have their own bases).

The calculation is from Supplement 7 (Traders & Gunships) which has a roll of 6+ on 2d6 for an encounter during the journey to or from jump distance. That's a 5-hr trip (typically) out of 2 weeks per jump, so the chance of bumping into 1 specific other ship is 10hrs/336hrs (since you could meet them on their way outbound or inbound), and the number of ships needed to make the probability be 6+ is 42 (ta-da). At any given moment half of those ships are in Jump, and most of the rest are in port. So the port needs landing pads or hangars for 21 ships.

That's a lower population of shipping than I'd expected. Anyone else got a view?

 

[Jame]

I like the GT:BTC table in the back for starship population.

 

[Icosahedron]

I'm guessing, Tinker, that your figures assume ALL starships operate on the one flight path?
Flight paths could emerge from the planet in a 360x360 degree sphere, and most of them would be beyond sensor range of each other for most of their length.

I've gone to GT Starports for my starport descriptions (with suitable tweaks), simply because no other book deals with ports in anywhere near enough detail to work these things out. However, even GT struggles at the smaller end where it suggests a staff of 1.5 people and 0.001 landing pads.

One day, I'll get a copy of BTC, but I'm not paying silly money for it.

 

[far-trader]

Tinker your numbers fit close with what I came up with for the small ship CT B2 universe model ages ago. However the big ship CT B5 universe (basically every game since then) is a totally different beast.

 

[far-trader]

[FONT=arial,helvetica]Icosahedron flight path effects on encounters will depend on the way you view jumpspace plots and several other factors. Like the 100d line for the world. Small worlds will have shorter runs, large worlds will have longer runs. Faster ships will spend less time in chance area and slower ships more. And is the encounter at the 100d line? World orbit? Half way between the two?

Given a small world with only 1 other world in reasonable jump range almost all encounters will be in the same place and very close. Change that to a large world (or a heretical world near a gas giant) with several possible jump destinations in reasonable range and the encounters should be more spread out. Though I make those factors that raise the overall traffic rather than changing the chance of a close encounter on your particular approach/departure vector.
[/FONT]

 

[fredofmars]

<snip>The calculation is from Supplement 7 (Traders & Gunships) which has a roll of 6+ on 2d6 for an encounter during the journey to or from jump distance. That's a 5-hr trip (typically) out of 2 weeks per jump, so the chance of bumping into 1 specific other ship is 10hrs/336hrs (since you could meet them on their way outbound or inbound), and the number of ships needed to make the probability be 6+ is 42 (ta-da). At any given moment half of those ships are in Jump, and most of the rest are in port. So the port needs landing pads or hangars for 21 ships.<snip>

Remember that the roll you reference is for "interesting" (read as "possible adventure material") encounters. There could, and likely would, be several to many "routine" encounters that are ignored for the sake of focussing on the adventure possibilities. After all, not every store cashier is likely to be major adventure material - most of them are just doing their (uninteresting to anyone else) job.

 

[far-trader]

Well fredofmars in CT B2 it's simply the chance of any encounter. The choice of making/interpreting it as routine or interesting is left to the ref Later editions of the rules may have stipulated (by necessity) that it is only "interesting" encounters. But in that case there's no way to draw any useful traffic data from it at all

 

[tinker123]

Thanks for the feedback. It's funny how every time I post on this site, someone points out a whole new topic I hadn't thought about.

When you travel 100 diameters out to jump, is there any reason that should be directly "towards" your destination? I can see why the opposite direction might feel like a bad idea (because there's a planet in the way), but jump travel doesn't pass through real space, so why not? I guess the traffic management may be better if all ships avoid each other, so Icosahedron may be right that there could be a lot more traffic out there, just beyond range.

The link with shipyards is also interesting. If a typical "private-ownership" vessel (around 200Tons) can be built in a year, and there are about 42 of them per system, and the chance of a class-A starport (with a shipyard) is 1/6 (so there are about 250 ships out there per shipyard), and nobody wants to be driving a century-old rust-bucket, then you only need 2 or 3 construction bays per shipyard to replace the ships that get scrapped. That's surprisingly low, and suggests that the average waiting list to get a custom hull started would be 5 months !