[Spaceships] Hull size of Falcon...

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by GoblynByte

Considering the size (38 yards long) and wide/flat dimensions, what size hull do you think would be most appropriate for the Millennium Falcon? 7 seems too small, but 8 seems to big. What do you think?

When you have mass numbers available for a fictional spaceship you use those to whatever extent you can. Linear dimensions are just too variable and Spaceships design is all about the mass.

So SM+5 is 30 tons or roughly a maximumally loaded F-15e Strike Eagle and huge amounts of that are external stores that don't compare well to Star Wars fighters that don't use such things.

SM+4 is 10 tons and only about 2 tons less than a light-load F-16. If you look at comaprisons of pilots to fighters in photos and models SW fighters are smaller than F-16s. They actually look more like the size of P-51s and other WWII fighters.

However, only the lightest WWII fighters (the Zero) come in at or under SM+3 or 3 tons/6000 lbs. So WWII fighters are SM+4 as a general rule and I would make SW fighters that size too. Make very large ones like the B-wing be SM+5 if you like.

Go to Spaceships 4 and you'll find SM+4 rules and examples.

Now we don't have total mass figures for the Falcon or even the stock YT-1300 but the stock ship is noted sometimes as carrying 100 tons of cargo. SM+6 is 100 tons so the Falcon can't be that but SM+7 is 300 tons.

So that's the figure I'd use. SM+8 is for substantially larger vessels i.e. up to 1000 tons.

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.

I know some of this may seem odd but whatever a unit of "SM+" is in the rest of Gurps it is not a measure of linear size here. It really, really is a unit of mass in Spaceships. Do not try and figure Spaceships SM from linear size. It will not only drive you crazy it will give you bad answers too.
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