[Spaceships] Benchmarks for spacecraft cost

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I highly doubt that an external clamp necessarily takes up 1/20th of a ship's total mass. That and quite a few of the other things that pop out of spaceships come about, I think, because of the abstractions the book makes. For example, the guns don't make a lot of sense to (why would barrel size be necessarily tied to gun tonnage?)

External clamps taking less than 1/20 are of course allowed under Smaller Systems. But they cost the same per ton and also have somewhat limited functionality.

Gun barrel size tying in to tonnage is a completely unsurprising simplification to allow guns to inhabit a 1-dimensional spectrum. It might be reasonable in many cases...I can't really see lower-velocity 'sawed-off' cannon being attractive considering the issues, except maybe as a bombardment weapon due to bombs being strictly 'dropped' rather than thrown. And a higher velocity cannon variant might be technically infeasible.