Detail on generated shipping

[rgrove0172]

When pulling a random ship into your game, say a freighter your characters want to book passage on or a military vessel patrolling a planet they are approaching... do you draw from the very short supply of pre generated ships out there, take the time to generate a legal one yourself before the game, or just whip one up with some appropriate stats on the fly, design rules be damned?

I game in 2300AD by the way.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

2300AD is a "limited" ship-environment. Ships are expensive and there just aren't vast numbers of them out there... think of them as about as common as big oil and gas-tankers, or huge bulk carrier ships today.

There are a reasonable number floating about, but they are not anywhere as common as in other settings.

I tend to use the ships the setting already has (also using those in the old GDW book 'Ships of the French Arm').

 

[locarno24]

I don't use 2300, so have more to draw on, but it depends on what I'm doing.

For a 'bit part' - a ship they're going to encounter but not have much to do with (other than maybe exchanging shots), a back-of-fag-packet stat list is fine.

For anything more (especially if they're likely to board it), I tend to use pre-generated, if only because of access to the deck plan and some nice artwork.

I tend to find it's worth it to avoid dropping the obvious hint of "he's got the deckplan out, clearly there's going to be a fight, let me 'randomly decide' to carry my gun with me" when I actually do...

 

[Mithras]

I create a shipping list for a subsector, with names of ships that can be encountered again and again. It helps build up player knowledge and familiarity with the setting. And it's something that happened whilst I was playing EVE online ...

 

[Lemnoc]

I have to confess, I've relied on the Thorez A. LOT. Probably too much. Mostly because it operates both as starship and lander out on the sketchy far ends of the arms, and because it is the closest equivalent to the Free Trader in the 2300U. It's a pretty good space truck, with a reasonably plausible design.

I got to the point where I designed (at the level of doodles on a cocktail napkin) a couple of faux-Thorez knockoffs—same tonnage, different configurations—just to mix things up a bit. And in the back of my mind I consider that most ships in the 2300U have close facsimiles designed by other manufacturers, just like car models today.

Like Mithras, I keep a list of operating starships and crews. If you think of most of these operating as freight and courier lines, then it really isn't too ridiculous that the same ships, the same kinds of ships, would be encountered again and again.

 

[rgrove0172]

That makes sense, at least you get some good bang for your buck once you work one up. It does seem likely that there would be many individual ships of the exact or similar models out there. (Freightliners, Mack, International, Kenworth Big Rigs etc.. all very similar)

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

I always get the impression in 2300AD that spaceships aren't like trucks... they simply are nowhere near that common.

I read the rules as spaceships being more like bulk container ships, there are quite a few, but not maybe more than a thousand total in all human space.

 

[jeheregh]

I always get the impression in 2300AD that spaceships aren't like trucks... they simply are nowhere near that common.

I read the rules as spaceships being more like bulk container ships, there are quite a few, but not maybe more than a thousand total in all human space.

I'd imagine that ships that are efficient to make money would be the first priority. Like for the real world getting stuff into space has a cost per kilogram. I could see some ships designed as status symbols and then instead of efficient space saving rooms and room for cargos appeal to the rich and those who having the luxury of big rooms ect drive the market. As well as commercial cruise liner tours.

 

[Lemnoc]

I always get the impression in 2300AD that spaceships aren't like trucks... they simply are nowhere near that common.

I read the rules as spaceships being more like bulk container ships, there are quite a few, but not maybe more than a thousand total in all human space.

IM2300U, there's a supply of big dumb slow robot freighters of tremendous capacity, like the Anjou only larger, as that really seems the only way to economically freight bulk items like ores and crops. They're not ships for adventurers, although adventurers might find adventures inside one.

I like the idea of big ponderous robots roaming the spacelanes. I'd think that so long as they were escorted in and out of systems, they'd be fairly pirate-proof underway under stutterwarp.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

There is a robot ship in 'Ships of The French Arm' along with a couple of really big carriers.

If you look at the production runs of ships in that book you can really see that ships are constructed in pretty low numbers.

 

[rgrove0172]

I read the rules as spaceships being more like bulk container ships, there are quite a few, but not maybe more than a thousand total in all human space.

I agree but there are a limited number of companies that use those bulk container ships and an even smaller list of manufacturers. Take a sail across the Atlantic and you will see dozens, not hundreds of mega-cargo ships but almost certainly more than one of each model.

Of those thousand ships you mention, I can see where there would be 120 of one type, 40 of another, maybe 200 of a really popular model, only a dozen of a rare one, etc.

 

[Batgirl III]

The United States Merchant Marine, alone, officially has some 400+ ships (minimum 1,000 gross register tons (GRT) tons or more) and if my memories of those early lectures in the USCG hold up, there's another seven- or eight-hundred ships owned by American interests but flagged in other countries. Roughly half work the Pacific, slightly less than half the Atlantic, and the remainder are scattered about the rest of the globe.

Most other "first world" nations have about 100 to 200 ships of similar size in their merchant navies. People without much time around ports are often surprised by the numbers of "third world" nations with sizable merchant fleets, often this is because its an American or a British vessel with a foreign flag, but sometimes its more straightforward. Pakistan, for example, has 12 ships owned by their nationalized shipping company. Tiny and economically poor Greece, believe it or not, has the maritime fleet in the world, over 3,000 ships!

Putting that into Traveller numbers... Well, I'm new to the game, but they should be fairly mundane sights.

 

[locarno24]

Heh. A useful rule of thumb is that the size of a country's merchant fleet is entirely proportional to how much that country's maritime law takes the mickey on trading rules, customs duties and safety-of-life-at-sea rules compared to international standards. And not in a good way.

 

[rust]

Putting that into Traveller numbers...

Please consider that many of those real world ships work the coasts
or island groups only and not the high seas, they are not the equiva-
lents of Traveller's starships.

 

[Batgirl III]

Yes, but that's because the economies and geography of our world make having a "green-water" merchant navy viable. By my readong of the setting material, the number of merchant ships operating at a similar scale must exist in the Traveller universe... Sure, most are going to be limited to the mains in their own subsector ("brown-water" shipping, equivalent to lakers or shipping in smaller seas [Caspian, Gulf of Mexico]), a sizeable chunk will probably stick to the mains in their home sector ("green-water" shipping). But some must be plying deep-space and multisector routes ("blue-water" shipping).

 

[Captain Jonah]

A look at the ship numbers given in the various books and the new 2300.

The Anjou 2000Dton cargo hauler, 78+ official ships plus many pirated designs. (note from GDW 2300 ref manual the Anjou make up a family of more than 600 ships).
Thorez courier 65+
Astral class bulk hauler 220+
Krupp 820, over 20 in German government service plus numerous corporate owned ones.
Commercant. Literally hundreds in service.

These are some of the named ships where there are numbers for them. There are dozens of other named ships that do not have numbers listed for them. Anjou’s make up half the libertine fleet, no mention of what the other hundreds of ships consist of.

Just with cargo haulers we have over a thousand ships in three classes.

Given how cheap statterwarp drives are and a lifespan of the only expensive part of the ships (the hulls) measured in many decades there are likely to be ships which have been overhauled with new power plants and drives again and again. Ships may be a weekly thing at the far edges of the arms but any major world is going to see multiple ships a day and somewhere like the core worlds are going to be like traffic jams.