Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
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.
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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.
As for scale I'm thinking of more then a dozen habitated systems, but certainly less then fifty. Devides among 7 for fewer factions. This game will be following the collapse of a great TL12 Interstellar Galactica human federation that would of teraformed any planet where that was feasible.
FTL communication isn't possible except for pony express style ships delivering data on high density storage devises, or single use exotic particles entangled at a Forerunner instalation that's fought over by the various factions, or use of telepaths (the setting includes Psi) so multi solar system governments are hard to keep under control but possible.
My new idea for the FTL speed formula is Ship SM -5 (minimum sm+6) squared in persecs.
Sound more plausible to you guys?