[TML] CT Sup 7, Crews room sizes.

[Richard Aiken]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Bruce Johnson
<johnson at pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
> On Apr 22, 2008, at 11:55 AM, Tom B wrote:
>
> >  I built a deckplan from an MT ship design that
> > was faithful to the sizes of all of the subcomponents and the thing
> > strikes me as claustrophobic. Now, okay, it is in fact a big, fast
> > ship with stealth and armaments, but good lord is it tight!
>
> So are submarines, which are the best RW equivalent to Trav ships,
> imo, particularly military ones.

Yeah.  A luxury liner should be huge - those ticket prices are paying
not just for a room, but for entertainment and social interaction
during the trip.  But military and other commercial ships should be as
small as possible and yet still perform the job.  Even a Tigress isn't
*really* big (compared to the Super Star Destroyers and Death Stars of
Star Wars, anyway).

Off-topic a bit: One thing that Thousand Suns does differently than
Traveller is it says right out that interstellar trade isn't much like
historical international trade.  There just aren't enough commodities
which require transport between worlds, especially when the trip takes
weeks or months (FTL tech is similar to Trav).  In TS, even megacorps
don't ship much in the way of goods.  Megacorp products are instead
manufactured to common (copyrighted) patterns on each world, by
wholly-owned subsidiaries located on that world.  Only passengers,
information (production patterns, electronic templates, related
software, etc) and low-bulk, high-value luxury goods are transported
by commercial starships.

In other words, PC-scale ships are also megacorp-scale ships.  So "The
Traveller Adventure" makes a lot more sense if you run it in the
Thousand Suns background.  The PCs really *are* cutting into potential
megacorp profits, in trying to get an exclusive shipping contract with
Fireau Et Fille (sp?).

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein