Cargo Containers - sizes?

[Condottiere]

Only matters dirtside.

You need two sets of dimensions:

1. External, which tells us how much space it takes up in the hold

2. Internal, which tells us how much we can pack in

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well that is the challenge when delivering to a TL% word without gravitic technology. Your 10 tons of ore is 140 m3 of very heavy material and you need umpteen dump trucks to haul it away.

 

[gilthy]

GURPS Traveller: Far Trader has info on containers (on p.56-58).

The Series 4 (Interstellar) Standardized Cargo Container comes in 4 varieties (A, B, C and D), is 3m (10ft) wide and tall, and is 3m/6m/9m/12m long (for A/B/C/D). They are 2/4/6/8 displacement tonnes in size.

This being GURPS, the containers are designed using GURPS Vehicles rules at GURPS TL8 (which is coincidentally also Traveller TL8), and there's a bunch of variants (general purpose simple metal boxes, sealed, controlled environment, open top, open frame, platform/pallets, modular (comes apart), tank and habitat) with sizes, costs and empty weights.

 

[Reynard]

Psi, we see that today in which ports have facilities to receive and store various cargo types then have conveyances to ship out the items in smaller loads. For lower tech non-gravitic worlds, this would be rail systems, trucking plus nearby air and sea ports. I lived in a small victorian era town that had a (abandoned) freight rail that could pour various grades of coal below the carrier cars then send it up a conveyor and across the upper area of the building to sort in to various bins below. Trucks backed in to receive the load and distributed to other towns. There also was a two story warehouse ring for shipments brought in by rail probably unloaded originally by carriages then tractors to the appropriate slot. Carriages and truck did the rest. A much smaller scale than a star port but still fits.

 

[phavoc]

Previous versions of Traveller had presser/tractor beams which would be HUGELY advantageous. But since they don't exist in MGT universe you have to go old school with pods.

They are in the High Technology chapter of the new High Guard.

That's just optional tech. It's not canon. Hyperdrives are in there, too.

So I would still go with the idea that tractor/presser technology isn't standard. It wasn't in V1 either.

 

[Jeraa]

Previous versions of Traveller had presser/tractor beams which would be HUGELY advantageous. But since they don't exist in MGT universe you have to go old school with pods.

They are in the High Technology chapter of the new High Guard.

That's just optional tech. It's not canon. Hyperdrives are in there, too.

So I would still go with the idea that tractor/presser technology isn't standard. It wasn't in V1 either.

Plasma guns, particle beam turrets, meson bays are in there too. Those have been canon for decades. The fact they are in the High Technology chapter only matters if you are a 100% by-the-book person. If you are trying to model the Third Imperium using MgT 2, some of the items in that chapter should be perfectly usable. Canon changed, not everyone agrees with it.

 

[phavoc]

They are in the High Technology chapter of the new High Guard.

That's just optional tech. It's not canon. Hyperdrives are in there, too.

So I would still go with the idea that tractor/presser technology isn't standard. It wasn't in V1 either.

Plasma guns, particle beam turrets, meson bays are in there too. Those have been canon for decades. The fact they are in the High Technology chapter only matters if you are a 100% by-the-book person. If you are trying to model the Third Imperium using MgT 2, some of the items in that chapter should be perfectly usable. Canon changed, not everyone agrees with it.

I agree with you Jeraa. Tractors/Pressors were in previous versions, but got dropped from v1 of MGT. v2 moved out previously existing tech into, basically, an alternative technology setting. The CRB for v1 had optional equipment like hyperdrives listed (now the alternate tech is much more expanded).

Canon concepts change between publishers and versions on a regular basis.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Medium tractor beam bay (energy inneficient) x22

HG, p216, "Dreadnought, Tigress-class"

 

[Jeraa]

Medium tractor beam bay (energy inneficient) x22

HG, p216, "Dreadnought, Tigress-class"

Several of the example ships contain items moved to the High Technology chapter. So on one hand we have a chapter for "non-canon" stuff, but the example ships, which are supposedly canon, still contain some of those pieces of equipment. So either way it is in error - either that equipment is no longer canon and the ships are wrong, or the ships are still correct and several of the things in the High Technology chapter should be in the regular creation rules.

Personally, I think the High Technology chapter shouldn't exist at all, with all of that stuff just included in the regular (non-Third Imperium setting specific) creation rules. Then have a small section detailing how the Third Imperium setting differs (no hyperdrives, single spinal mount only, no small craft jump drives, etc.) instead of spreading that throughout the book.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I agree we are left with a rather ambiguous reading of the rules.

I'm not unhappy with a separate chapter with optional stuff, they are not as well play-tested, and some combinations of technologies may potentially be unbalanced.

It should be clear what is included in which setting.

 

[Condottiere]

Some of it doesn't make sense.

If you can build an FGMP, you can scale up through vehicle mounted variants, and spaceship turrets.

The problem is, that this follows under the title of house rules, not just alternative technology.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Some of it doesn't make sense.

If you can build an FGMP, you can scale up through vehicle mounted variants, and spaceship turrets.

I agree there is a problem, but there is a non-trivial difference between a weapon with 1 km range and a weapon with 10000 km range in space.

 

[Condottiere]

You can always add more cowbell, or scale that to reach the desired performance.

 

[GarethL]

.
How large is a typical cargo container?

My standard answer is "4 tons". A basic metal box that fits into a volume of 3x3x6 meters

Any thoughts? Is there something in the rules I haven't read yet?
Believe it or not, this kind of crap is what I stress out about when creating deck plans! lol

I designed some shipping containers a while back,

I forget the exact source (possibly HG2), but I found reference to 32 and 64 ton containers being standard (it stuck in my mind because a 32t container is just above the threshold for the cheapest way of connecting them to a ship - I had used 30 and 60t for this reason).

I forget the exact dimensions, but I think my 30t container was roughly 4x4x10m with roughly 2t being used for a small powerplant (some cargos need a suitable environment, and may not be able to survive high-g) , fuel, stationkeeping drive, etc.

 

[GarethL]

Are we talking about a container filled with feathers or lead?

Real-world containers have a maximum gross weight as well as a volume-limit,

Sure, you can fill them with lead, but their frames are not designed to withstand the stresses of that mass.

 

[Condottiere]

Depends on the material you're constructing the containers from.

I think five tonnes is about the limit you want to strain the floor with.

 

[GarethL]

Real-world containers go up to 30t or so IIRC,

 

[AnotherDilbert]

While the TEU is not itself a measure of mass, some conclusions can be drawn about the maximum mass that a TEU can represent. The maximum gross mass for a 20-foot (6.1 m) dry cargo container is 24,000 kilograms (53,000 lb). Subtracting the tare mass of the container itself, the maximum amount of cargo per TEU is reduced to approximately 21,600 kilograms (47,600 lb).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-foot_equivalent_unit#Equivalence

 

[GarethL]

They come in 12m sizes as well (https://www.mrbox.co.uk/shipping-containers/), these are more like what you see on the roads and at freight terminals,

According to the datasheet they have a MGW of 30,480kg or a capacity of apx. 26t (they don't scale linearly, probably as a result of similar construction),

 

[GarethL]

If you can build an FGMP, you can scale up through vehicle mounted variants, and spaceship turrets.

This doesn't always follow - sometimes their are limits on scale imposed by physics, as some issues can be exponential (anything ruled by an inverse square law for example), this may make small-scale application viable but large-scale applications unrealistic.

Laser beam collimation may be a good example here - unless you can improve collimation, energy density deposited on the target will drop off exponentially with range - a target at twice the range requires 4x the power to inflict the same "damage", etc.