Tail landers can have great fluff reasons too, like making inertial compensation easier (crank the AG into the negatives, let acceleration make the gravity), and having their decks oriented like the gods and Heinlein intended.
Also, easier to find a landing spot (smaller cross section of ground pressure). Just drop a cargo elevator somewhere (maybe collapsible?) on the ship to allow access, and landing jacks to keep it even.

On August 15, 2017, at 4:51 PM, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On 16Aug2017 0448, C. Berry wrote:
> Yep. And more generally, extending gear and resting the ship's weight on
> it create a great deal of wear and tear on both the ship and the ground.
> I believe that Traveller CG and thruster tech implies the ability to
> maintain a stable hovering position in the face of reasonable wind and
> other loads. If that's the case, it's likely that both ship and port
> operators will prefer to hover whenever that is practical.
>
> When landing outside an established port area, the hovering option is
> even more attractive. Ships are heavy, and any reasonable landing-leg
> design is going to produce enormous ground pressure under the "feet".
> Anything softer than solid rock or very hard-packed dirt is unlikely to
> be able to support a ship. You'd end up with a lot of situations similar
> to what happened to Luke's X-Wing on Dagobah. :)

And this is why I very kindly made the hot little ship I let the PCs in
my campaign recover a tail-lander with no CG. It makes their life so
much more interesting.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
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