starship sizes

A thread of 2 messages, 2 February 1992 to 3 February 1992, in the order they were sent.

#3639 starship sizes

Brandon Cope · 2 February 1992

As to the person who basically said to toss the problem of paying for a fleet
by the government printing more money to use to pay for it -- SAY WHAT????
By the time you've paid for that grand fleet, you will have devalued the
credit so badly and caused such economic ruin that you'll wish you HAD been
invaded. Something like this is A Very Bad Idea.

Regarding starship sizes, the campaigns I have run all deal with a universe
about 500 years after the fall of the Third Imperium. Every planet that had
had a class A or B starport, that was TL9+, or had valuable resources, was
pretty well ruined with (nuclear) bombardment, literally blowing them back
into the stone age. With these worlds losing 90% of the population, and
the industry destroyed, they were effectively out for the count. And the other
worlds didn't have the technological base to build starships. Yes, when I had
I war, I had a WAR. None of this namby-pamby raiding -- total warfare, not
just amongst factions in the Imperium, but involving all the other races.

To the point: there is no capability to build 20,000 ton merchants. The largest
military ship (of which two of its class exist) is just over 5500 tons. Bulk
freighters range from 500-1000 tons. The old 400 ton patrol cruiser is once
again important. The 400 ton corsair now isn't worried about being put in the
trophy bay of a 30,000 ton light freighter. A large number of small ships works
better than a few large. It also means that 200 ton traders aren't shuttles for
50,000 ton vessels. The 'bigger is better' attitude GDW got when going from
basic Traveller to Book 5: High Guard to MegaTraveller is a bad one.

#3643 How to wreck an Imperium

Adrian Hurt · 3 February 1992 · reply to #3639

[email removed] (Brandon Cope) writes:
>
> As to the person who basically said to toss the problem of paying for a fleet
> by the government printing more money to use to pay for it -- SAY WHAT????
> By the time you've paid for that grand fleet, you will have devalued the
> credit so badly and caused such economic ruin that you'll wish you HAD been
> invaded. Something like this is A Very Bad Idea.

Well, it works better than the Computer Virus Idea, anyway!

Other possibilities:
1.  A mutant star goat came and ate all the TL 15 planets.

2.  The Zhodani Consulate found out how the Imperium had used psychology
to turn all its people against psionics, and had its secret agents mount
a similar campaign to turn all Imperial citizens against TL 15 equipment.
In revenge, the Imperial Secret Service used yet another campaign to make
the Zhodani forget all about the Imperium.  Both campaigns worked too well.
The Imperial citizens turned against all equipment above TL 11, and are
now working on TL 11 stuff as well.  The Zhodani forgot about the Imperium,
the Aslan and the Darrians, and are now fully occupied with their Core
Exploration expeditions.

3.  You've all heard of Chaos Theory, which means a butterfly can flap its
wings and cause an earthquake.  Now there's Megachaos Theory, in which a
flea can burp and cause a TL 15 processor to malfunction.  There's also
Hyperchaos Theory, a development of quantum mechanics which states that
if one TL 15 processor breaks down, all TL 15 processors break down in
exactly the same way.

Well, options 1 & 2 are more likely than the computer virus, and option
3 is about as likely as the computer virus.

Add a lot of :-) and enjoy!

- --
 "Keyboard?  How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   [email removed]