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Have you looked at the deckplans produced over the last 40 years? 😂

There's a distinction between design and modification. Once a design has been engineered, modifications have constraints.

So, no. There's only one basic Beowulf hull layout. That's a specific deckplan.

But that does not prevent there being many different Type-A hull layouts. The Type-A is just a collection of design choices and you can draw up whatever layout that fits them.

As a well known example, the standard Suleiman Type-S and the Serpent Type-S.

Same CT design specs, different deckplans.
 
only if you completely misundestand what the word CLASS means in regards to ship design
Kitty Hawk-class Aircraft Carriers

USS Kitty Hawk - Length 325.8m Beam 86m Draft 12m
USS Constellation - Length 332m Beam 86m Draft 12m
USS America - Length 319m Beam 76m Draft 11m Power
USS John F Kennedy - Length 321m Beam 77m Draft 11m

Yeah. It means there can be major differences between ships, especially after refits, such as being 5 meters shorter or 10 meters narrower. Things that are impossible in the Traveller universe, such as altering the size of the hull. So which one of those is a Kitty Hawk-class carrier? Which deckplan do you use for a Kitty Hawk-class ship? 4 were completed and they were all different.
 
Kitty Hawk-class Aircraft Carriers

USS Kitty Hawk - Length 325.8m Beam 86m Draft 12m
USS Constellation - Length 332m Beam 86m Draft 12m
USS America - Length 319m Beam 76m Draft 11m Power
USS John F Kennedy - Length 321m Beam 77m Draft 11m

Yeah. It means there can be major differences between ships, especially after refits, such as being 5 meters shorter or 10 meters narrower. Things that are impossible in the Traveller universe, such as altering the size of the hull. So which one of those is a Kitty Hawk-class carrier? Which deckplan do you use for a Kitty Hawk-class ship? 4 were completed and they were all different.
you just argued against yourself?
 
Some of the starship designs are centuries old, if not a millenia.

And probably built in different yards in a dozen sectors.

You're going to have variations.
In the example I gave, 4 ships of the same class are all constructed over a 6-year period. Not one of them is the same size as any of the others. Thinking about shipyards on different planets building across centuries, yeah, there would be a lot of variation in the classes if we only looked at mass and not volume.
 
Some of the starship designs are centuries old, if not a millenia.

And probably built in different yards in a dozen sectors.

You're going to have variations.
yup though older designs are more likely to be more uniform in dimensions as they will have found the best balance. smaller vessels are also much more likely to be uniform in external dimension, though possibly even more variable in interior layout.
 
DTon is explicitly a volume (if we wanted to talk about mass we would be talking about Tons - and then arguing about which sub flavour of mass tons we meant).

Enclosing an Air Raft doesn't alter it's shipping size according to the Vehicle Guide. Adding life support takes up space and therefore would increase shipping size if you kept all the other components the same. The shipping size per space changes for each vehicle type (maybe the dirt bikes wheels add volume compared to the smooth underside of the grav bike).

Hopefully in the new Vehicle handbook we'll have something more like the robot or ship rules where the various characteristics of the vehicle have volume weight and cost and we can build them like Lego rather than at present have series of different basic types which have their own specific options and then some more general options that bolt on.

I'd rather have a system that I could choose "hull" DTonnage (fractional please) and then populate with the various drive trains and propulsion/mechanisms, power plants, fuel tankage and payload capacity.

That book would probably have to ignore every vehicle previously designed and start again as trying to make it backwardly compatible would break it to the point where it would no longer be any use. You can hand wave it by saying that things were different back then, and modular design imposes certain constraints that did not exist in previous iterations of finished vehicles (you can just use those old designs if you prefer). If you can't live with that then don't buy the new book.
 
yup though older designs are more likely to be more uniform in dimensions as they will have found the best balance. smaller vessels are also much more likely to be uniform in external dimension, though possibly even more variable in interior layout.
Another thing to wonder. Why are there older designs? We have no currently in-use designs on Earth that are over 100 years old. Yet, almost every "Standard" design in Traveller is several centuries old. I don't buy it. Humans can not resist the urge to "tinker", to "change", to "make something their own." At minimum every generation will change the design from the previous generation to better suit their needs. Remember cars with ash trays and cigarette lights? Lots of examples like that exist if you go look for them. The Ford Mustang from 1970 is not the same as the 2025 Ford Mustang and the differences are not solely technological improvements. There are also aesthetic and personal choices of year model year's designer. The original Ford Mustang was something like 63% the size of a modern Mustang.

Not to mention that every time one corporation buys another they go in and make changes to existing products. So, it is very hard to swallow that people think that all Beowulf-class Free Traders are the same. Makes it hard to have a published deckplan. What percentage of Beowulf-class Free Traders have that deckplan or even those same components?

As an example. The economy of space travel changed about 100 years ago. It becomes more profitable per jump to haul low berth than cargo. For the next 10 years, most of the ships in the class will be built with more low berths and less cargo space. Both still Beowulf-class, but different specs.

Another example. The Sea-Ray 26 built in 1990 and a Sea-Ray 26 built today. They do not even have the same dimensions. The only dimension that is 100% the same is boat length, hence the name "26". All of those boats are sold as Sea-Ray 26s. All of the official registrations (in the US anyhow) call both of them Sea-Ray 26s...
 
We have no currently in-use designs on Earth that are over 100 years old.

Because our TL has been rapidly changing for that 100 years?

In OTU TL is more slowly changing AND there are always backwaters who have lower TL who can use the old designs without the time and expense of creating their own design. Also they can pretty much assume anywhere in the Imperium the older lower TL design can get parts and maintenance.
 
Because our TL has been rapidly changing for that 100 years?

In OTU TL is more slowly changing AND there are always backwaters who have lower TL who can use the old designs without the time and expense of creating their own design. Also they can pretty much assume anywhere in the Imperium the older lower TL design can get parts and maintenance.
Agreed. My point is that even over a much more truncated timespan, human beings change things very quickly. Like My post about Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carriers. 4 built, not a single one is the same dimensions. That is over a time period of only 6 years, (no TL changes) so it was likely that some of the same guys who worked on one ship also worked on one of the others. So even if they are using the same designs and the same specs, the ships themselves still come out different. This would be exponentially more prevalent over thousands of years and hundreds of parsecs with a weeks, months, or years-long communication delay.
 
This would be exponentially more prevalent over thousands of years and hundreds of parsecs with a weeks, months, or years-long communication delay.
Unless of course they got beyond a "planned obsolescence" society and are very conservative then designs become "mature" and stagnate.

They might also have reached a TL where few people CAN learn to do the design work even with computer assistance so they are kept too busy to waste time revising those "mature" designs.
 
Unless of course they got beyond a "planned obsolescence" society and are very conservative then designs become "mature" and stagnate.

They might also have reached a TL where few people CAN learn to do the design work even with computer assistance so they are kept too busy to waste time revising those "mature" designs.
Just saying it doesn't match up with human nature is all. Even if you move beyond planned obsolescence, things do wear out, cultural norms change, societal needs change, etc.

Unless you are playing 40K anyhow.
 
Maybe only the classics stayed the same. All the designs that were not design classics are the ones that got mutated and ditched. Like every custom player design has :)

That is why there is so few of them.
 
Well... mostly it's for publishing convenience.

But there is a thing where mass production damps out the variations you get with hand built bespoke objects. Before mass production settled on a small number of general purpose hammers (claw, ball peen etc) *every* job had several specialist ones. Since it's almost as easy for a blacksmith to make one tool design as another and were mostly supplying local people they knew, the customer got what they ordered. Farriers got different hammers to carpenters who got different hammers to masons. It's a constant frustration for re-enactor types that themselves aren't blacksmiths, who pretty much have to modify store bought tools as best they can or put up with general use ones that aren't totally wrong.

There never was a mass produced warship - liberty ships probably came the closest, although they were freighters. Traveller ships seem more modular than mass produced, but it's not unlikely that most shipyards are building most standard ships with little scope to vary the build outside of standard options. The components are likely cranked out in bulk to average TL standard at the nearest high tech industrial hub and shipped in as required. That would be the way to interpret the LBB Book 2 method.

The NAVAL ships seem to have much shorter active service lives with more ship to ship variation.

Even in the published ship classes, you do see variations within a class. Kinunir, Leviathan and AHL cover an entire class in detail, and we have a good sampler for the Gazelles.
 
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