Hello Rupert,

CT LBB 2 is used to design Starships.

Is the small ship universe going to use CT LBB 3 or CT LBB 5 TL limits for the jump drive, maneuver drive, and power plant?

If the TL limits are from CT LBB 3 a 5,000 ton hull is not capable of being built as a starship until TL 15 when Jump Drive Drive Types W through Z become available which are the only ones available per CT LBB 2.

Tom Rux

> On 06/16/2020 12:01 PM Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 17Jun2020 0531, Greg Nokes wrote:
> > I’ve done a lot of thinking about small ship IMTU’s over the years,
> > and it always comes down to:
> >
> > If you want the attacker and defender to be balanced, you have to
> > allow for ships to be roughly the same size as the defenders.
> >
> > If you say that Jump blocks ships over 5k dton, or 2.4k dton, or 30k
> > dton, but you can still build SDB’s and monitors and stations up to
> > 500k / 1m dtons; attacking systems with appreciable resources is a
> > fools errand. Or you end up with skads of destroyers tossing
> > themselves at large, impervious things.
> >
> > I’d love to have a small ship universe - it really appeals to me, but
> > the I’d have to use both hands to hand wave that one away.
> >
> > The only reason that I’ve ever come up with is cost, but the real
> > world kinda disproves that with the mega-ships that we build.
> >
> > Even if we say that Artificial Grav and Inertial Compensators goes up
> > exponentially with the volume of the ship, then build hulls with those
> > systems in a subset of the hull.
> >
> > I fear that humaniti loves to build big things, and we will never find
> > a way to hand wave away the happy fun balls.
>
> Yet aside from aircraft carriers, which the operators devoutly hope
> never actually get hit (i.e. never come up against an actual equal
> opponent), today we use warships substantially smaller than in the past.
>
> There's a reason for it, and it can be used to explain a 'small ship'
> setting - weapons that can kill a ship of any size in a few hits, but
> which can be mounted on small ships. Nuclear missiles without good
> damper tech, for example. Now a large ship is just a huge pile of
> credits waiting to be set on fire, while a fleet of small ships spreads
> the credits out so they don't all burn at once.
>
> The problem with small ship Traveller settings is that you end up with a
> 'huge fleet' setting instead, which might be as bad or worse for one's
> purposes as a 'big ship' setting. Using good old Supplement 9 - Fighting
> Ships, from CT, we find that a /Sloan/-class Fleet Escort is 5,000 tons,
> and thus the biggest ship you could build using Book 3 sizes (it's more
> capable than a Book 3 ship, but that's not really relevant to my point
> here) and costs about GCr3.3. Using TCS a TL15 world with the mean
> population of 1.7 billion people has a naval budget of about MCr850,000,
> and can thus afford to build and run over 2,500 Sloans on a peacetime
> budget.
>
> Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the problem isn't the
> big ships, it's the '/big worlds/'. Most worlds have quite small
> populations (the median and mode is 500,000), but the worlds with
> hundreds of millions or billions of people and TL8+ can afford stupidly
> big navies - that 'average' world above can afford over twenty
> Tigeresses or fifty-odd conventional 200 kDTon battleships.
>
> If you want smaller ships and small navies in YTU, you need to find some
> excuse to remove the hi-pop, mid-high TL worlds.
>
> --
> Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
>
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