Quote:
Originally Posted by Minuteman37
An SM+8 ship has a length of 50 meters saucer shaped ships can be anywhere from 50% to 75% of that length for the same given SM, the millennium falcon is 35 meters roughly speaking.
It's close enough for my tastes, the Tramp freighter of my setting will tend to average slightly larger then the Falcon.
My new idea for the FTL speed formula is Ship SM -5 (minimum sm+6) squared in persecs.
Sound more plausible to you guys?
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"Length is only an approximation; feel free to vary it". That's the "important" part of the single paragraph about length in Spaceships. Still you're overestimating even based on that.
The official measurement for the Falcon is 26.7 meters rather than 35. That however, includes the "forks". If you subtract those and only look at the saucer you're going to be more like 20 making SM+7 more likely. I do mean "likely". Exact calculations based on length are not possible.
This is not to say that your small merchant ships should not be SM+8. However that is unambiguously 1000 tons of mass and 10x the size of the Space Shuttle and far bigger than the Millenium Falcon. You'll be misleading any players you have if you tell them it's the MF's size.
You still haven't gotten to the critical data for ship speed. Number of worlds doesn't matter. It's how long you want the trips to be and how far your ships have to go on trips of that length.
Your new formula (if I read it correctly) does increase your small merchant's speed from 6 light years per year to 40 but I still can't say if that's a useful speed.
It would make trips from Earth to a star 20 light years away 6 months out and 6 months back. In an astronomically realistic universe there won't be even a dozen habitable worlds in that volume. There might not even be one.