On 12Oct2019 0925, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
> I do recall some text towards the end of CT HGv2 stating that CT LBB2
> could still be used to create valid ship designs & I also recall
> that, in some instances, it was advantageous to do so as fuel
> requirements were calculated by a different method.

The fuel requirements for *power plants* is where the savings comes in.
On HG a powerplant requires 1% of displacement per power plant number
per month. In Book 2, they require 10 DTons per power plant number,
regardless of ship size. Yes, that means a type A power plant requires
more fuel when it's mounted in a 100 DTon hull than it does when mounted
in a 200 DTon hull. Also, Book 2 drives and powerplants are sometimes
smaller than HG ones for the same rating, depending on size and hull
size (and in HG's case, TL).

Honestly, HG's rules make a lot more sense, and the Book 2 rules
wouldn't scale up at all well. While I personally think HG went too big,
Book 2 was rather limited - only three types of weapon and one defence,
and quite small ships. Note that a Liberty or Victory freighter of WWII,
a decent sized but not huge freighter for the time, would be 2500-3000
DTons using Book 2, as the basic cargo load of a Liberty ship was a
nominal 10,000 tons. As a 'ton' is merchant shipping cargo terms was
nominally about a ton of weight and taken to be 100 cubic feet of
volume, and a Displacement Ton is 14 (or 13.5) m^3 or just about 500
cubic feet, 1 DTon is 5 tons in this sense. Thus a 'Liberty load' is
about 2000 DTons, and even a J1 ship needs to be about 2600 DTons to
carry that.

A WWII cruiser comes in at about 2000 DTons, and HMS Dreadnought no less
than 3000 DTons. A 'treaty' battleship would be ~6000 DTons, an Iowa
~8000 DTons, a Yamoto ~10000 DTons, a modern US aircraft carrier over
20000 DTons, and a super tanker up to 30000 DTons.

I do wish that HG had limited itself to 50 or 100 KDTon ships, or at
least had an implied cap around there. At the very least, if Supplement
9 had been so limited, and thus the 3I, it would have been good, IMO.
The stupidly big ships of the 3I (and HG, MegaTraveller, and so on) so
completely overshadow PC-size ships it's not funny, and explaining how
they don't commercially as well is a bit hard. It doesn't help that the
ships PCs are likely to own or run are very small, too small to have
been able to make a living from for most of the 20th century if they
were ocean-going tramps.


--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief