I think I heard this was the official explanation somewhere. I forget where though.
IMTU I just make up the TLs of worlds with class A ports to TL 9, or 10 if theyre high pop.
CT Only: Starships & Starport A's & TL
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I think I heard this was the official explanation somewhere. I forget where though.
IMTU I just make up the TLs of worlds with class A ports to TL 9, or 10 if theyre high pop.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Then what is the minimum population of a starport and planet to produce at least ten 1000 Traveller dTon cargo liners a year?
What is the population required to produce a 500,000 Traveller dTon dreadnought in 60 months?
In short, what is your production rate in terms of Traveller dTons of ship per man per year?
Edit Note: This in NOT for simply assembling the components, but producing the entire vessel from scratch, meaning all components are produced on the planet.
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pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
And therefore the planet/system has the infrastructure necessary to support said constructions. Transportation networks, raw materials, education systems to support the necessary educated populace...political willpower...
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
According to Striker Book 2, page 39, a world can import higher tech at higher costs.
I guess it was worth it to somebody, even with the 20% higher maintenance costs.
The value of the Kinunir, at the time it was built, might be measured in more than just Imperial credits, though. Maybe the Duke meant it as a show of strength against the saber rattling done by the Zhodani before one of the Frontier wars.
The Zho's, seeing Regina produce such a high tech vessel, when the Zho's thought that the Duke's fief was TL A, could be priceless in terms of galactic politics and worth every credit spent by the Duke.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
You have correctly stated what is implied in my edit note. Thank you.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Zero population.
You use robots.
:CoW:In TNE there was an unfinished story arc that would have had the PCs being able to take control of an automated (Virus controlled) 3I shipbuilding facility.
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Which is similar to the rule in 79 HG.
In the Traveller Adventure we find out the IN ships spinal meson guns via civilian contractors.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
The answer would be, it depends.
I think it reasonable to presume that it takes X man-hours per TL to produce Y tons in Z time to the high standards operating in a harsh space demands.
I expect some things will be easier to do as tech advances, while new technology and challenges demand more man-hour resources to achieve.
But I don't accept that it will require X population- high automation for industrial processes should be very very doable, and largely decouple yardworker count from allowing starships to be built.
Some facilities may be loaded with robots- the next one eschews robots for a massive jobs program and requirement for human workers for cultural or economic middle class support, still another may make each ship by hand on a more craftsman rather then industrial process.
I would tend to use the TCS numbers as a guideline, but I could just as easily decide that it is an externally funded shipyard and not dependent upon population/taxbase/worker numbers. The story and creating a sense of place and industry is the thing, not standardizing all my numbers across space.
I don't accept the assumption that a starport rated A class must have such and such tonnage capacity to merit the rating. All that counts is that it can build starships. If it typically builds 1 200 ton yacht with Jump drives with 20 workers, that's a starship.
And I don't accept the 'must be native tech/economic base' assumptions implied in your questions. IMTU LBB2 ships are component-driven and so could be assembled at a TL5 A starport- given the labor cost differences, might be VERY profitable to do so.
IMTU HG ships wont be built at TL5, so if one wants a supertech battleship it will need to built somewhere appropriate.
Of course that's the answer...
... unless you're personal TU has all the soul of a spreadsheet.
Our Absent Friend Hans and I went round and round for years on this topic. While I agreed with him that the shipyard component of a Class A port meant a certain TL and population had to be present, I did not agree with him as to where the line should be drawn.
In Hans' thinking, a Class A rating meant a yard could build any and all starships at any time. Putting it another way, check in hand you should be able to walk into any Class A port at any time and buy a Plankwell.
In my thinking, a Class A rating meant a yard could build a starship from what might be a limited selection at any time. Putting it another way, check in hand you can walk into a Class A port and buy a Beowulf or a Broadsword but not a Hercules or a Tigress.
The ability to build starships doesn't necessarily mean the ability to build all starships.
The ability to build starships doesn't necessarily mean the ability to manufacture all starship components either.
That is, unless your personal TU is little more than a spreadsheet.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
Not according to the rules, unless you allow import*.
The minimum TL for a world with a Class A Starport is TL 5.
The TL chart says that TL 9 is required to build Jump Drives A-D.
Even then, TL 9, Class A worlds can build a maximum of 800 ton vessels.
The Aramis Class A starport is TL B, thus it can build up to 2,000 ton hulls with max Drive-K.
Hans didn't want to count on imports or, more accurately, he didn't want imports to support commercial/civilian sales.
Either all systems with Class A ports would be retconned to a minimum TL and population or all systems with a Class A port that didn't meet those minimums would see their port classification reduced to meet the existing TL and population.
I'll be the first to admit that sysgen creates too many "unicorns" which require torturous "explanations". I'll suggest, however, that killing every "unicorn" isn't the only solution or even a desirable one.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
Yes, I never agreed with Hans when he messed around with the established UWPs.
DGP's Grand Survey establishes a minimum TL for Starports. He may have gotten that idea from there.
And, if you go strictly by LBB's 1-3, he has a good case. It isn't until Book 5 that we see that World Starports have the TL of the world around them.
Unicorns are what makes the universe interesting. And, there's plenty of them in real life. Look at Trappist-1, with seven Earth sized worlds , as Aramis said, "M8V system - Red dwarf - with all 7 inside the Orbit 1 ring..."
That's a unicorn that, if on paper, Hans might have changed.
It was always a matter of degree and not kind.
Hans didn't mind the occasional "unicorn", he just thought there was too many of them. I thought there were too many also. Where we differed was in how many "unicorns" there should be. My number was a wee bit higher than Hans' number.
Agreed.
We know that now. If anything, the increasingly wild and wonderful xenoplanets being detected show that all of Traveller's sysgen systems are broken!
I must admit that until two days ago I would have changed it also.
I'll just go with THAT.
Also, Whipsnade, I'm down near Boston if you ever want to come down and say Hi for an in person game (I don't have a car or I'd go there).
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Not if you go strictly by the rules, there is nothing in LBB2 about a minimum starport or world TL for building or maintaining starships.
Yup, and by the LBB2 rules it may build and provide maintenance for starships.
Annoying isn't it
My solution is those drives and parts are shipped to the starports that need them.
Note Kinorb 0602 A663659 5 Rich. Non-industrial. - it can buy in the tech.
Another question about Kinorb is how it is only TL5 when sys gen gives a minimum of TL of 8 for its stats
)creativehum
SOC-14 1K
A thought about the Main World sysgen:
It was designed to work within certain parameters and does it quite well. And when I say this I am, of course, looking at the original rules and text found in 1977 -- before there was an OTU and players for two years were left to their own devices to make up whatever they wanted.
First, it is a "prod to the imagination" to help the Referee create worlds full of exotic location and edge-case logic like those found in the SF stories from the 50s to the mid-70s. It is not built to build a selection of worlds that are uniform or logical in the sense that many world-builders (like Hans) might enjoy, or even "Hard Science Fiction" as the term is used today.
It should be noted that the rules make clear that if the Referee knows what he wants a world to be like he should just make that world and not used a system of random generation.
Second, location: The implied kinds of worlds we find in Books 2 and 3 are world that are geographically and culturally isolated from each other. And as Book 4 sums up, "Traveller assume a remote, centralized government..." The worlds, then, do not work with the assumption of any sort of centralizing or cosmopolitan influence.
Each world is, then, "It's own thing" and designed to be such. with the PCs and other travellers being the extraordinary folks who travel the stars and bring word and news of these other worlds or influencing politics between worlds (as spies, mercenaries, whatever). There is no assumed standardization across the worlds as to the way things work. A naval or scout base might belong to the world it orbits, belong to a nearby world, or belong to the remote government. Only when the Referee decides the justification for the base's presence is this matter settled.
Whether these "remote" worlds are on a frontier, or have grown fallow, or are being developed is up to the Referee. The key, though, is that the system is no generating worlds that would make sense at the hub of an imperial government or most locals where a centralized government has strong influence.
Third, the number of unicorns is very large because we often use it outside the scope of its design. The sysgen was built to create only 40, or perhaps 80 worlds.
From Book 3, 1977 edition:
I know that if I were in the position of having to justify all the unicorns in a game preserve of 640 worlds (a sector), let alone all of the The Third Imperium I'd probably go nuts with frustration about having to justify all the unicorns as well. But the rules as written and designed never assumed this. There are settled worlds beyond this subsector of play -- but there is no need to roll them up or define them or justify them.
Because the number of worlds is very specific, we don't have countless weird cases. We have the really unique and interesting cases in a specific patch of space that the Referee has built. Because the setting of play is limited in scope the Referee can find interesting ways of making all the pieces interlock and be interesting with each other. The logic is built for this particular setting of the subsector and does not have to make sense across all subsectors are all iterations of all Traveller settings.
None of this is to say that Referees should trap their Traveller settings or logic in the assumptions of the Boo 3 Main World sysgen rules. My only point is that over time the needs of the OTU -- and the logic of players that wanted the OTU to make sense as presented in the fluff -- the rules got stretched to the point of breaking.
This, however, is not a fault of the system but of expectations that don't want or don't need the kinds of setting material the system was designed to produce.
In my view, however, the toolkit aspect of the rules allows a Referee to re-jigger the Main World sysgen system tables easily enough. If he wants a prod to the imagination, but a different range of outputs, it would be easy enough to create the tables to do this.
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Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
So, you'd ignore LBB3 then?
Page 9, LBB3: "Tech Level: The technological level of a world determines the quality and sophistication of the products of a world."
There's nothing about a starport having a tech level different from that of a world (this fact is confirmed in LBB5).
Thus, the world TL governs the ships produced at the starports.
That is an extremely cogent point. You've put your finger right on the nub of the situation.
Sysgen "worked" when it was employed to explain a limited number of worlds within a very personal setting; the famous "... one or two sub-sectors should be quite enough for years of adventure..." quote.
When sysgen was expanded far beyond it's intended use, the system quite naturally broke down. The same can be said for many parts of LBBs 1 - 3.
While the delightfully wonderful and entirely real Trappist-1 system could have easily been "hand crafted" for a setting, it never could have been produced by any of Traveller's "automated" system generation processes. More importantly, our reliance on those systems to determine what is "realistic" or not mean that most of us - myself definitely included as I've admitted above - would have never even thought of handcrafting a Trappist-1.
Not only are all versions of Traveller's sysgen broken, those versions unwittingly place boundaries on our imaginations.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
Hm. I'm not sure that I agree, but I'm willing to listen. I do see your limit-on-creativity point on Trappist-1.
In what way does the system break down?
What other parts of LBBs 1-3 break down on large scale use?
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Yup, LBB3 TL tells you what a world can build, not what a starport can assemble.
Nor is there anything to say that a starport has the TL of the world - in the basic rules and LBB5 may as well be a different game since so much of it is different to LBB2.
Which contradicts what it says in LBB2:
"Space ships are constructed and sold at shipyards throughout the galaxy. Any
class A starport has a shipyard which can build any kind of ship, including a starship
with jump drives; any class B starport can build a small craft and ships which do
not have jump drives. The military procures vessels through these yards, corporations
buy their commercial vessels from these shipyards, and private individuals
can purchase ships that they have designed through them as well. The major restriction
on the purchase of ships is money."
No mention of world TL limiting construction.
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