ShawnDriscoll said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
What would the displacement tonnage of this ship be?
Hull volume of the sphere section only is 113,000 cubic meters. 8370 displacement tons,
You answered your own question.
Anyway, other weight scales mean nothing in Traveller ship design. The unit of 1000 kg of liquid hydrogen is the measuring/building block for Traveller ships.
It approximates the ship's mass for game purposes in determining what a maneuver drive or any other drive will do. the real physics of acceleration is thrust divided by mass.
Here is an example of another starship.
Interstellar vessel of Island One size, ion-driven. Central arc substitutes for sunlight. Reaction of matter and antimatter gives power (twenty-first and -second centuries).
Island One to refresh your memory is this when not in starship form:
Cutaway view of Island One. Axial cylinder is air passage and corridor to docks and industries in zero gravity.
If we calculated its displacement tonnage, we'd get a figure way over a million, but most of that is just air, its density is lower than the standard multi-decked Traveller Starship. It is about 500 meters in diameter I believe. This picture gives a scale of the thing:
Detail of Bernal sphere with size comparisons.
That would be a huge starship, most tables I've seen top out at around 1,000,000 dtons, but I believe the internal volume of this thing is greater than that. 65,400,000 cubic meters or 4,844,444 dtons, it is just a hollow sphere with air in it, it mass would be nowhere near as much as a Traveller Starship of that size, as it assumes a deck every 3 meters of height.