Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Your ships will be cheaper if you don't build them to oversized standards.
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Traveller ships are not built to over-sized standards. They are built to
shipping standards. A Free-Trader is
not a 'stock light freighter', though it often fills a similar role in a Traveller campaign. A Free Trader is large enough to carry something resembling profitable cargo that's legal, and that's why it's so much bigger than
Millennium Falcon. That ~1400 cubic metre cargo hold (and the jump fuel to move it, which is the other source of size inflation in
Traveller makes for a big ship compared to
Falcon, which seems to have less 'cargo' space than your average suburban home's garage.
Note that a WWII 'Liberty' ship, considered small today, displaced (i.e. massed) about 16,000 tons loaded, and had a volume of over a million cubic feet (so 2,000 - 3,000 displacement tons in
Traveller terms).
Even in the
Star Wars universe the
Falcon, presumably with less internal free space than the stock freighter she once was due to the much more powerful engines, etc., seems to only be profitable to operate when running spice, guns, fugitives, and other illegal cargoes.
That said, I agree that
Traveller ship sizes are not the model to use if you want a
Star Wars like atmosphere, where ships are common, cheap, and not these massive, fuel hogging, bricks of crysteel that can happily skim gas giants and swim in oceans without damage (and that's the civilian ones).