Spaceships, Floor / Deck Plans, Volume and Hexes

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Langy

Those figures can vary hugely. Spaceships gives rough estimates for length, but they're not meant to be taken literally.

By RAW, a streamlined vessel of the same SM has about double the length of a non-streamlined vessel. That won't make it more cramped;) (it should also have the same volume as a non-streamlined vessel; no idea why it would have less, as the density of the ship shouldn't change just because it's streamlined)

Something with the same SM from the side and -1 SM from the front/back should have less volume (and thus higher density if it's the same weight) with that SM all-around.
As for the SL vessel being twice the length of the US, I can't figure out any way to make that work. 2x length is going to correspond to +2 SM, meaning there needs to be an effective loss of -2 for targeting purposes. The only way to get this to work would be if a US is a square box/sphere while the SL is long enough that it doesn't get any + to SM from its width... but at the that point the SL vessel would be targeted at -2 from the front/back, rather than at the -1 given by SS.
Looks like this may be one of those cases where the abstract nature of SS makes such an analysis break down...

Originally Posted by Langy

I'm not sure why you're unconvinced about being able to get a semi-accurate density. It's not exactly all that difficult; we should be able to at least assume that the ship will at most be as dense as water (most likely less so); this is because ships are likely to be roughly as dense as sea ships, which have to be less dense than water in order to float.

Even if we assume a density equal to water, we get a mass-volume multiplier of 32, yielding 32 cubic feet per ton. Thus, an SM+8 ship should have a volume of 32,000 cubic yards or higher.

I don't see why a spaceship would need to have a density comparable to a sea vessel. With that said, however, I seem to remember calculating that an SM+0 spaceship would be around 200 lbs under the SS system, which isn't too far off from the weight of an SM+0 human. Considering my system breaks down when trying to apply it to the SS rules, I'd say going with density equal to or slightly less than water would indeed work just fine.