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

[Tom B]

> 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.

Sorry, my brain had momentarily checked out. OF COURSE IT IS! <slaps
self with a Tigress>

>  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.
>
5000 lds/sq ft was what I saw for sand. I got it from building
footings/foundation stuff, but they have the same constraint - can't
sink into the ground.
12000 lbs/sq ft was for bedrock.

>  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.

I'm assuming it can fail or be turned off (accidentally or purposely)
and thus you can't depend on it.

>  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.

Well, that makes some sense I think.