[TML] Firefly, wait no it is a Subsidized Merchant ship.

[Timothy Little]

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 12:24:04PM -0400, Tom B wrote:
> If the scout needs 93 square feet to land on bedrock, 280 on sandy
> soil, and possibly twice that on clay, then you can add 50% to those
> numbers for the subsidized merchant (loaded) and the Midu Agashaam
> and about 100% for the Gazelle.

Much, much more than that.  The Midu Agashaam needs about 40 times the
landing area as the scout - about 3900 sq ft of rock.  It's directly
proportional to mass, not to density.

Though I have to say that those ground area figures seems to be rather
large.  A had a table of permissible ground pressure for cranes lying
around, and even sand is listed as supporting 200 kPa.  Hard rock is
listed as 2 MPa.  These figures for the scout on bedrock would give a
foot area of 3.5 m^2, which is about 37 sq ft.

And of course these figures have quite a generous safety margin built
in, are applied in a case with highly variable loads, and where even a
rather small shift could lead to the crane toppling.  For a craft with
a much lower center of gravity, that won't matter nearly so much and I
would not be surprised if the maximum loads for the sort of short-term
static support needed by a starship were a factor of ten greater.  And
that's assuming that the craft does not use contragrav to reduce
ground pressure.


One interesting thing I found while looking up this sort of thing was
that the Empire State Building is probably pretty similar to the size
and mass of some of the larger Traveller starships: 70k dtons and mass
of about 350k tonnes.


- Tim