Quote:
Originally Posted by Emerald Cat
The question that comes to my mind is "How do they eat?" Total life support eliminates the need for consumables. I'm still curious as to the duration of an interstellar flight.
Let's assume that we want the capability to travel 8 light years per jump. That may sound like a lot, but that only allows travel to Sol's 5 nearest neighbors. Hopefully, this will also make bottle neck systems rare.
Based on her length, the Millenium Falcon is a SM+8 ship. A ship that size would have a warp speed of 1 light year per 64 days. Making an 8 light year jump would take her 512 days = ~1.5 years.
That is a long time to spend in transit! And begs the question as to why anyone would bother with interstellar trade in universe. Unless the game is about the journeys between systems, I would personally go with much shorter travel times.
Simply multiplying your speeds by 5 goes a long way to solving this problem. Speed = 5/SM^2 light years/day. A SM+5 ship takes 40 days to travel 8 light years, an SM+8 ship takes 102 days, and an SM+10 ship takes 160 days. That gives a big advantage to smaller ships without making space travel prohibitively slow. |
Oh yeah at this stage the FTL speeds are more for comparison between ships then anything else, I was considering mulitping them by 10 even.
The MS+8 ship was chosen for the smallest example becouse it is both in the ball park of the MF size and the smallest Size ship that can grow enough food to sustain the crew.
But given that 500 man days of food only takes up one system of cargo for a SM +5 ship for trips measured in months it's basically self-sufficient if cramped.