Imperial Family Travel Arrangements

[ottarrus]

Besides buck banging, what's the largest component besides percentage based ship systems that eats up space?

Since that's a fixed tonnage, the rest is gravy, and a megatonne battle barge is more impressive than a semimegatonne ball.

The largest single component of a starship is probably fuel tankage, followed by engineering [J-drive, M-drive, Power], followed by weapons in a warship.
The limitations of
1] only one spinal mount in a ship
- a] spinal mounts are integral to the ship's keel and cannot be replaced without scrapping the ship
- b] Meson Guns and Particle Accelerators max out at a given output; you can't just fit a bigger projection tube to a larger power plant and get a larger, more effective 'bang', there is a limit to what can be effectively fitted
2] Jump drives require 10% of the ship's hull per Jump rating number as fuel tankage
and
3] the manning requirements ['x' number of people to operate systems x 'y' number of tons for habitation x 'z' number of power points to operate life support]
tend to militate towards more hulls with more spinal mounts to fire on an enemy rather than One Great Big Hull. Seriously, what's the point of fielding a 1 million ton ship whose spinal mount is suited to a 500 kton ship? You could get 3 perfectly good 500 kton vessels for the price of the One Big One.

 

[Condottiere]

If I had to speculate, shortly after breaking the technological level fifteen barrier, the Imperium would at least try to build one class of megatonne superdreadnoughts, if only to quell dissent on the Rim.