I can imagine situations in which you are visiting a system in which there is more than one training point such that you might want to jump in, travel to the mainworld then subsequently make an in-sytem journey to another world too close to make an in-system jump practical vs a 4G drive.

Otherwise, In versions of traveller universes where you aren't guaranteed to jump into 100 diameters of your destination, it's possible that more time is typically spent in real space rather than in jump space, and the 4G drive would minimize that.

On Wednesday, November 20th, 2024 at 3:33 PM, David Johnson - piperfan at zarthani.net - tml at simplelists.com <xxxxxx@simplelogin.co> wrote:

> Thanks to eBay, I recently got of a copy of Issue #4 of Gryphon magazine from Winter 1981. This "Traveller Special Issue" has some interesting articles, including the original version of Roberto Camino's "Crash on Cunno[n]ic" adventure.
> One article has me scratching my head: the Girl-class 400-ton merchant starship by James Steuard and Peter Daglio. The Girl-class ships are something like a typical Type-R subsidized merchant except that they have jump-2 and 4G acceleration.
>
> Now, a jump-2 merchant makes some sense but why in the blazes would a merchant ship need 4G acceleration? That's the same as a Type-T patrol cruiser (and its corsair variant)! And it's more than the 3G acceleration of a Type-C mercenary cruiser.
>
> There's little rationale provided for the ship's performance parameters in the article itself. (Most of it is focused on a detailed description of the also-provided deck plans. This was the era, after all, when most of us had more experience crawling 2D dungeons than dodging asteroids in 3D space.)
>
> The Girl-class merchants have a "heavily standardized" design and are "widely encountered" with over 700 ships having seen service in the Classic era Spinward Marches. So, it's not like they're some specialized ship intended for bold merchant adventurers trying to escape Type-VP corsairs in the Vargr Extents!
>
> Anyone able to make any sense of that design choice?
>
> Happy Travelling,
>
> David
> --
> "She took time out for mental arithmetic; even a spaceship officer had to do that, when a question of interstellar time-relations arose." - H. Beam Piper, Uller Uprising
>
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