Richard Aiken wrote:

>	The OP mentioned "20 km long, 10m wide" ships not daring to come close to a gravity well.
>	I would add that they should also only ever attempt to change vector VERY SLOWLY.
>	Unless that hull is built from space-elevator-grade material, it will snap like a twig
>	under any significant degree of lateral thrust.

I take the point, but I venture to disagree.

First, given that the OTU *can* build space elevators, surely they would use that
technology in their warships? What *is* the tensile strength of superdense, anyway?
"Strong enough" as far as I'm concerned (and I am not a gearhead :-) ).

Second, the assumption here seems to be that thrust is only being applied at a
single (or small) point of the hull (e.g. a rocket). If, instead, this is a
volume-effect drive (which affects the entire volume of the ship at the same time
and in the same way), there's no stress on the hull. Of course, we have no idea
how to build such a thing with present-day technology, but a Jump drive contains
a similar idea (with the lanthanum grid).

Third, one could conceive of a network of reaction drives spread over the entire
surface of a ship, which work in unison to change the orientation of a ship, while
minimizing stress on the hull.

FWIW, IMTU (which is highly non-canon), starships have three sets of drives:
	- Jump drives, for travel between systems;
	- Stutterwarp drives, for travel within a system;
	- reaction drives, for fine manoeuvres, such as docking.

Ships which land on planets also have grav plates/drives.

Meanwhile, Tom Rux wrote:

>	I was disappointed with CT LBB 2 limiting the maximum hull size to 5,000 tons
>	since historically someone is always going to push the limit and at some point succeed.

I suggest that 'pushing the limit and succeeding' is pretty widespread in Traveller.

There are tens? hundreds? of thousands of shipyards out there, each with a slightly
different mix of tech levels and hence the ability to optimize some aspect of ship
design (and likely degrade some other aspect). So shipyard X might manage to squeeze
a Jump-3 drive into a particular class of ship designed for a Jump-2, but shipyard Y
can't repeat the feat because they don't have the right tech level in Jump drives.
Then again, shipyard X's craft are notoriously uncomfortable for the crew because
the Life Support system is noisy and doesn't work that well, whereas shipyard Y's
craft have really good cargo- and load-handling facilities. YMMV, and your imagination
is the limit.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Phil Pugliese wrote:

>	Actually the USN & now the PRC (maybe the UK too) doesn't see the CVN as too much
>	of anything except a critically necessary asset.

An acquaintance of mine, retired XO on a USN boomer, was known to refer to a carrier
battle group as 'a big fat hairy target'. My POV is that a nations naval forces are,
these days, fundamentally a transport fleet. Nothing wrong with that, of course. One
could make the same argument about current-day "fighter" planes, which could be seen
as just a transport mechanism for missiles and smart bombs.

Meanwhile etc, Richard Aiken also wrote:

>	IMTU, I make jump drives for larger volumes progressively less efficient.
>	That is, the jump drives get larger and more power-hungry, the larger the
>	hull being jump becomes.

I totally agree with this. IMTU (as noted above) the volume/power/... used
by the Jump drive goes up as the square of the volume being Jumped, and up by
the cube of the Jump number. It goes down (somewhat) with increasing tech level
(and with a huge wiggle factor also as noted).

Anyway, I hope that this might spark some thoughts.

Jonathan