As a change from bibliography work (you may be pleased to hear), I thought I'd have a go at creating something. As Supplement 14: Space Stations arrived in the post today, that seemed the obvious choice.Naturally I thought I might start BIG! As the table on page 3 lets you think about 5 billion tons or more. However, that's TL20 so let's be more modest...Plus, for the adventure I ran last year at TravCon I had "designed" (without all these details) a 1000 deck station for the 6,000,000 inhabitants of Anther (near Capital in Core Sector). That's TL14 so the table lets me go up to 1 billion tons. Seems like a good place to start for a monster station.Most has gone ok, although quite the largest tonnage thus far is taken up by residential space (not surprising when you've got 6,000,000 people). Out of the air I've plucked 'luxurious' quarters for 10,000 and Hi quality for 100,000 the rest being mid quality. So that's some 24,000,000 tons.However, one thing seems surprisingly out of line with what might I might expect and that's another large portion of the (so far) allotted tonnage. Command modules. I have to have 5 sections (for space stations over 200,000 tons) - that's fair enough. I have to have one command module per section which also seems reasonable. BUT each command module takes 0.2% of the station. That's 2,000,000 tons *each*. 10 million tons total. It seems way out of kilter for what's being described as essentially a starship bridge - although maybe somewhat bigger. The cost (at MCr0.1 per ton) is also then a huge proportion of the cost (so far) at MCr1,000,000. Yes, that's a million *megacredits*. Thus far the whole thing only costs MCr3.3 (pretty much all the rest of the cost is residential units).Am I doing something wrong? Reading the rules incorrectly? Doing the math wrong? Anyone else run into this?While I'm here... how on earth do you work out what would be appropriate commercial space for such a station? (shops, malls, arcades etc). There's no guidance and I've chucked in 20,000 tons just for something to be going on with but I think this may be woefully inadequate. Especially if residential space is over 20,000,000 tons. Anyone got a rule of thumb?I'm also wondering if Docking Space of 300,000 tons (which allows up to 100,000 tons of docked ship) isn't a bit small as well. This is a major station, one Jump from Capital, A-class port, on x-boat routes. I'm guessing there will be a *lot* of ships berthed and coming and going and this would only allow for thirty 10,000-ton ships (or 300 1,000 tons), so I reckon I might go up to a million tons of docking space.Oh, and just for info: the Power Plant (presumably a lot of them spread out through the station) comes to 12,500,000 tons! (and M Drive for station keeping at 7,500,000 tons). I think there will be a few engineers! But that's a chapter for tomorrow night. Bed now...tcPS one of the things I put in my description last year was that every deck was 6m high instead of the usual 3m (ish). So yes, it's at least 6km long/tall! Nothing in these rules affects that or is affected by that but surely it should affect tonnage or costs at some point?----- The Traveller Mailing List Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml Report problems to listmom@travellercentral.com To unsubscribe from this list please goto http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=Qjs81DnfPhuRQ7Rw3I0XVltos3d36yjy