Totally agreed.

I actually like how GURPS 4th ed did it, with the biggest ship in the book being 30k dTons. A 200 dTon trader can at least feel like it’s got a chance running from a 2000 dTon “cruiser”. But a 50 dTon “cruiser”? Not likely.

I get that the physics and economics might not work, but the speed of plot sure does.

>
> Honestly, HG's rules make a lot more sense, and the Book 2 rules
> wouldn't scale up at all well. While I personally think HG went too big,
> Book 2 was rather limited - only three types of weapon and one defence,
> and quite small ships. Note that a Liberty or Victory freighter of WWII,
> a decent sized but not huge freighter for the time, would be 2500-3000
> DTons using Book 2, as the basic cargo load of a Liberty ship was a
> nominal 10,000 tons. As a 'ton' is merchant shipping cargo terms was
> nominally about a ton of weight and taken to be 100 cubic feet of
> volume, and a Displacement Ton is 14 (or 13.5) m^3 or just about 500
> cubic feet, 1 DTon is 5 tons in this sense. Thus a 'Liberty load' is
> about 2000 DTons, and even a J1 ship needs to be about 2600 DTons to
> carry that.
>
> A WWII cruiser comes in at about 2000 DTons, and HMS Dreadnought no less
> than 3000 DTons. A 'treaty' battleship would be ~6000 DTons, an Iowa
> ~8000 DTons, a Yamoto ~10000 DTons, a modern US aircraft carrier over
> 20000 DTons, and a super tanker up to 30000 DTons.
>
> I do wish that HG had limited itself to 50 or 100 KDTon ships, or at
> least had an implied cap around there. At the very least, if Supplement
> 9 had been so limited, and thus the 3I, it would have been good, IMO.
> The stupidly big ships of the 3I (and HG, MegaTraveller, and so on) so
> completely overshadow PC-size ships it's not funny, and explaining how
> they don't commercially as well is a bit hard. It doesn't help that the
> ships PCs are likely to own or run are very small, too small to have
> been able to make a living from for most of the 20th century if they
> were ocean-going tramps.