(now starting a IMTU fight...)

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 9:53 PM Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Ethan McKinney <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
There's pretty obviously a huge fixed infrastructure, so there are significant barriers to entry . . .

IMTU, the only system on a starship that *needs* to be built in a shipyard is the jump drive. If someone can glom onto one of those from some other source (wreck sold for salvage value, lucky find in an asteroid belt, small merchant line bankruptcy sale, etc), the rest of the ship can be built by any competent repair shop. So a lot of the ships in my campaigns - all of which are set on the fringes of settlement - only look like various CT ships (when they do) because using an existing hull (even if it starts out heavily damaged) is easier than building one from scratch.

Whereas IMTU, every jump drive is fairly unique and paired with their hull, so they require their TL or higher to be built, and a salvaged one is really only good for parts (unless you have an exact match for the hull and recovered enough of the drive to just rebuild it).

Even major rebuilds (from massive damage, as an example) have a chance to require major tweaks and minor rebuilds to the drive.

So it's a matter of repurposing old ships until the hull falls apart, and that's when you salvage the drive.