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Old 12-31-2020, 09:05 PM   #41
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Excellent advice. You should take it and let other people discuss the matter if it interests them.
I was trying to help the OP overcome his mental block and move on with his setting, not indulge your mental masturbation. And my interaction would have ended with one post if you hadn't decided to get snarky, so your little attempt to put me in my place was sort of counterproductive there, huh?

OTOH I really appreciate your help in the discussion about superscience reactors and drives, so I guess that sort of balances out. :)

My apologies to the OP for this unpleasant sidetrack.

Last edited by acrosome; 12-31-2020 at 09:15 PM.
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Old 12-31-2020, 09:30 PM   #42
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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I was trying to help the OP overcome his mental block and move on with his setting, not indulge your mental masturbation. And my interaction would have ended with one post if you hadn't decided to get snarky, so your little attempt to put me in my place was sort of counterproductive there, huh?

OTOH I really appreciate your help in the discussion about superscience reactors and drives, so I guess that sort of balances out. :)

My apologies to the OP for this unpleasant sidetrack.
OP posted this thread 4 years ago, and last posted on this site 2 years ago. I'm pretty sure he doesn't mind.
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Old 01-01-2021, 12:21 AM   #43
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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OP posted this thread 4 years ago, and last posted on this site 2 years ago. I'm pretty sure he doesn't mind.
When I saw the thread title, my first thought was "Oh, I should find that old thread where I pointed out the Falcon fell under the rule for stubby shapes having less length than their SM might suggest." This is that "old thread."

I will warn anyone converting "canonical" numbers from fiction into game mechanics: science fiction writers usually do not know how numbers work. Things like ships apparently made out of balsa wood or the borders of alien empires being inside the orbit of Neptune.
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Old 01-01-2021, 07:14 AM   #44
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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W
I will warn anyone converting "canonical" numbers from fiction into game mechanics: science fiction writers usually do not know how numbers work. Things like ships apparently made out of balsa wood or the borders of alien empires being inside the orbit of Neptune.
Before I offended acrosome with my interest in the subject I was posting observations based on my viewing of the props as compared to human beings i.e. the size of the Mandalorian's ship compared to humans walking down it's cargo ramp or standing next to it.
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Old 01-01-2021, 03:59 PM   #45
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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I will warn anyone converting "canonical" numbers from fiction into game mechanics: science fiction writers usually do not know how numbers work. Things like ships apparently made out of balsa wood or the borders of alien empires being inside the orbit of Neptune.
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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Before I offended acrosome with my interest in the subject I was posting observations based on my viewing of the props as compared to human beings i.e. the size of the Mandalorian's ship compared to humans walking down it's cargo ramp or standing next to it.

The limitations and biases of the medium greatly effect which numbers on which things are dependable and reliable. As the milenium falcon is a prop that appears multiple times in multiple places and needs to look consistent with humans standing next to it, I'd trust the length, width, height, and shape to be consistent, and you can extrapolate from there.
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Old 01-01-2021, 04:53 PM   #46
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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What Traveller calls small ships start as SM+8 but Traveller ships are _huge_. One of their SM+8 100 dTon scout ships would be 500,000 cubic feet or like a 5000 sq,ft house with 10 foot ceilings. Also note that such a vessel would not merely fit inside a rectangle of that volume. It would _fill_ a rectangle of that volume. If the ship wasn't brick-shaped its' external dimensions would be even greater than those of the 5000 sq.ft house.
For what it's worth, SM+7 gives you a ship about as capable as Traveller's Type-S scout. A lot of a Traveller ship tends to be filled up with liquid hydrogen, and thus they often don't mass nearly as much as their size would suggest.

This leads into my recommendation for the OP - do not use the size of ships in other systems or non-game settings as more than a rough guide. Use their capabilities. Falcon can carry a few people, a few cubic metres of hidden cargo, and (presumably, as we never see it doing so) some more normal cargo - say a room full (about 50-100 cubic metres, and thus around 25 tons). It goes very fast in normal and FTL travel, has decent defences for a souped-up freighter, and what seems like a fairly heavy armament. That could be SM+7, but might be SM+8 because of the number of very heavy (in Spaceships) systems the high performance requires (though Star Wars ships seem to use screens, not armour, and are probably TL11^, which helps with that).

There's a Falcon look-alike in one of the Spaceships books, as I recall.
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Old 01-01-2021, 09:12 PM   #47
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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F
This leads into my recommendation for the OP - do not use the size of ships in other systems or non-game settings as more than a rough guide. Use their capabilities.
True enough. It's just that there's this divide between at least two camps of roleplayers.

One wants to use any and all game stats as relative measures v. other game entities with no connection to RW objects. I once had a fellow with a Traveller background tell me that an X-Wing was like a 100 dTon ship.

Then there's another camp (possibly quite a small one) that makes connecctions between things and figures out things they imply. If you tell me that 1 whatever is 500 sq. ft. for purposes of drawing deckplans then that has firm implications for the ship's exterior as well as its' interior.
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Old 01-01-2021, 10:18 PM   #48
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
True enough. It's just that there's this divide between at least two camps of roleplayers.

One wants to use any and all game stats as relative measures v. other game entities with no connection to RW objects. I once had a fellow with a Traveller background tell me that an X-Wing was like a 100 dTon ship.

Then there's another camp (possibly quite a small one) that makes connecctions between things and figures out things they imply. If you tell me that 1 whatever is 500 sq. ft. for purposes of drawing deckplans then that has firm implications for the ship's exterior as well as its' interior.
Yeah, the problem with not hewing to measures is that size is itself a gaming-relevant property. Or at least it has a lot of potential to be. A game might find that the outside dimensions and inside 'sets' never need to cross over. Some media get away with that certainly. But it's a bit risky. With the Falcon, players may have pretty firm ideas of what kinds of spaces it can fit into (since it did a lot of fitting into spaces across multiple films) and be disturbed if you give them a 'falcon' that badly mismatches that.
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Old 01-01-2021, 11:17 PM   #49
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

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Yeah, the problem with not hewing to measures is that size is itself a gaming-relevant property. Or at least it has a lot of potential to be. A game might find that the outside dimensions and inside 'sets' never need to cross over. Some media get away with that certainly. But it's a bit risky. With the Falcon, players may have pretty firm ideas of what kinds of spaces it can fit into (since it did a lot of fitting into spaces across multiple films) and be disturbed if you give them a 'falcon' that badly mismatches that.
That is part of its 'capabilities', so you'd take that into consideration when picking a size. The fun comes when some capabilities require a quite small ship and others a rather larger one, but the source material doesn't think that and therefore players who want to hew closely to the source material are likely to get twitchy about using Extradimensional Interface systems to reconcile the differences.
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