Extensible spin habitats in GURPS Spaceships

[Proteus]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Wouldn't be a massive hassle to go back and forth from the tethered capsule to the main ship?

You might build in a small elevator.

Or you might just teleoperate robots instead, using signals sent down the cable.

Or you might just not need to leave the habitat; with lower-tech drives and limited delta-V, you might be coasting for a very long time; let the rest of the ship run quiet and dark, while you reel out the habitats and kick back until arrival.

So the solution is to build the system as entire small ships for the habitats? That seems excessive for the gloriously simple Spaceships rules.

Do the separately-built habitats then get attached to the main vessel -- or is the proposed solution one specifically to model the design I saw (for a Mars cycler?) where you had two identical small ships which linked up together on a long cable so they could both enjoy a long spin radius?

Originally Posted by Humabout

With regard to the OP's post, I'm not sure why you'd bother making a settlement so small as to require a spin tether to achieve 1G at the ends.

I'm not looking for a settlement: I'm looking for a long-duration exploratory vessel using one of the setting's few super-science bits, a wormhole network for FTL travel. So the setting has FTL, and access to multiple solar systems, but no artificial gravity; folks are going to want a spin habitat, and may have long quiet spaces where they don't need to maneuver.

Thus my proposed rules. Any comments on those? How do they compare with the results of the vessel statted in Spaceships #7?