Quote:
Originally Posted by Minuteman37
The MS+8 ship was chosen for the smallest example becouse it is both in the ball park of the MF size .
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No it's not. In Spaceships terms the US Space Shuttle was unambiguously SM+6 without its' external tank and boosters. A 747 is SM+7 (by mass which is how Spaceships measures things) and an SM+8 is 3x as big as that 747 and 10x as big as a Space Shuttle.
Your travel speeds look too slow for anything truly MF sized. Your big ships will be worse. that SM+15 ship will be doing barely 50% faster than light. Even that minimal SM+8 (which is an ocean-going vessel rather than a Millenium Falcon type flier) is only doing 6x light. That's _years_ to anywhere and quite possibly decades to any Earth-like world.
You could get lucky and Alpha Centauri (A or B but not C so much) could have an Earth-like planet but after that there might be as few as 4 more candidate stars within 40 light years (based mostly on age but also taking in star-type).
A calculation I did with the system generation rules from Space 1e led to "natural" Earth-like worlds being c. 100 light years apart and even vaguely terraformable ones about 60.
So first decide how far destinations are apart. Then decide how long trips should be. _Then_ you have your answer about trip speeds. Don't start with a mathematical formula before you know if that's the answer you want.
Right now your speed numbers are too slow for anything much like a "small merchant" and no one will be able to afford to wait for whatever return a truly big ship could bring.