FFS: K'kree Lose Starflight

More troubles on the FF&S/BL front:

Lately I decided to try to check out the boundaries of the starship design
rules by building a K'kree Xeekr'kir! (Imperial designation "Merchant").
Obviously, FF&S/BL is meant for Imperial ships only.  However, the only
main differences were in accommodations, airlocks, and a few other details
of ship design which were easily converted from CT rules.  (The changes
can roughly be summed up that the K'kree require twelve times the space
Humans do for movement and living.)

The trouble came when I started calculating crew sizes.  K'kree usually
travel in herds -- besides working crew, accommodations need to be set aside
for wives, bodyguards, advisors, and so on.  Between this and their space
requirements, they needed 5000+ ton ships in CT.  This allowed, in CT, a
primary crew of ten or so, and about sixty or seventy family members, some
of whom also had shipboard duties of various types.  The ship I designed
had jump-2, one gee drives.

But crew requirements have exploded in TNE.  This 6000 ton ship required
some 4 engineers for the drives in CT/MT.  In TNE, my preliminary and now
abandoned calculations indicate a requirement of some 64 engineers.  This
effectively closes out K'kree star travel on this size class of ship.  My
quick estimates suggest that the K'kree may now require starships in the
battleship size class under TNE rules (100,000+ tons).

It looks like this rule change effectively closes out the K'kree as a
starfaring power.  It is now extremely difficult for K'kree herds to
move about at all like they did in CT.

Now, I don't know what the justification for the increases in crew size are
in TNE.  If it's a reaction to the *#@$ virus, they neither say so anywhere
nor provide alternative crew calculations for non-Virus campaigns.  Any
input or comments on this business?

Furthermore, this sort of thing sharply limits the size of the ships that
human adventuring crews can run with the party.  And warships of significant
size will have truly stupendous crew requirements.

Somebody asked recently why so many old-time "classic" Traveller players
are complaining about the rules changes, because they'd never seen AD&D
players react like this when AD&D Second Edition came out.  Well, my friend,
that's because TSR didn't do something that at times I could describe with a
pungent four-letter Anglo-Saxon word to the rules.  Right now is one of those
times, but I'm restraining myself.  AD&D 2nd Ed. *is* AD&D.  TNE isn't quite
old Traveller.  So some of us who played for a long time with the old rules
get upset sometimes when things we think had better work don't, again.  It
doesn't happen so much over there, I hear.

  Frustrated Starship Architect,

  Steve Bonneville
  [email removed]