Starship Sizes in Traveller

[InterStellar Arsenal]

With the idea of the Babylon 5 resource being released for Traveller I had a couple of questions: Babylon 5 ships are huge compared to canon Traveller ships (an Omega Destroyer is supposed to be just over 1700 meters length) so how exactly are ships from different settings going to be stat-ed up? Will different ships from various universes "cross-over" against each other?
Also, has anyone generated statistics for various established media properties like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, etc.? (somewhere I remember reading the USS Enterprise as a 5000 ton cruiser with six 150 ton weapons bays) It would be interesting to have the ability to do comparisons between well-known ships and canon Traveller designs.
Thanks,
Kevin
www.freewebs.com/interstellerarsenal/

 

[Infojunky]

With the idea of the Babylon 5 resource being released for Traveller I had a couple of questions: Babylon 5 ships are huge compared to canon Traveller ships (an Omega Destroyer is supposed to be just over 1700 meters length) so how exactly are ships from different settings going to be stat-ed up? Will different ships from various universes "cross-over" against each other?

Which Traveller ships are you comparing them too? The published "character" scale ships? or to the battle wagons in Fighting ships?

Also, has anyone generated statistics for various established media properties like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, etc.? (somewhere I remember reading the USS Enterprise as a 5000 ton cruiser with six 150 ton weapons bays) It would be interesting to have the ability to do comparisons between well-known ships and canon Traveller designs.

They have all been done at one time or another, the biggest issue is that most "movie" ship's are built to look cool with their physical statistics a after-thought at best.

My opinion is match their capabilities instead of their pictures if you want stats.

Here is a place to start Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions.

 

[GypsyComet]

Also, has anyone generated statistics for various established media properties like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, etc.? (somewhere I remember reading the USS Enterprise as a 5000 ton cruiser with six 150 ton weapons bays)

5000? No, even the TOS Enterprise is bigger than that. The warp nacelles are, if the merzo site is used for measurement, nearly 2000 tons apiece.

The original Galactica is also very big, though apparently opinion varies as to how big exactly.

 

[towerwarlock]

The Original Battlestars including the Galactica fell arround 500,000 to 750,000 d-tons in size. I have the original Blueprints that were made for it.

 

[Golan2072]

Not to mention the fact that most capital ships in Babylon 5 are about a kilometer or so long each, and the Babylon Station is several kilometers long... I wonder how the Traveller adaptation of B5 is going to handle this.

 

[Infojunky]

roller-skates?

 

[Dave Chase]

Remember in one episode they say it can take all day to walk from one end of the station to the other.

Thats why they have the lifts and zeroG monrail

Dave Chase

 

[katadder]

babylon 5 is 5 miles long. so how it takes a day to walk it I dont know. but thats the speed of plot I guess.

 

[GypsyComet]

Depends on how many straight line paths there are to cover that 5 miles...

 

[Infojunky]

Depends on how many straight line paths there are to cover that 5 miles...

Or how many Mercenary Starships one has to avoid in the core....

(ref; Schlock Mercenary in the past week or so.)

 

[Klaus Kipling]

I worked out the Enterprise (TMP) to be, very roughly, 20,000dTons. It'd have 18 100 ton PB bays and 2 100 ton torp bays. With some of the extra variants in HG, you'd be able to build something fairly close in performance (tho you'd have to come up with shield rules).

 

[InterStellar Arsenal]

Thanks for all of the replies. If I can figure out a baseline of comparison of a ship I know (say the Enterprise that was just posted) it allows me to see how big my designs are in comparison. In my ATU ships double in size at each class and use a letter code to connote their size (for example):

G=Gunboats 4,000 tons+
F=Frigates 8,000 tons+
E=Escorts 16,000 tons+
D=Destroyers 32,000 tons+
C=Cruisers 64,000 tons+
B=Battleships 128,000 tons+
A=Advanced/Arsenal Ships (like Battlestars & Star Destroyers) 256,000 tons+

My ships are assumed to be built similar to modern wet navy ships so a ship 300 meters in length (similar to a USS Nimitz class carrier) masses around 100,000 tons (but is a cruiser to allow for the bigger ships we see in science fiction). In the old 1970s Franz Joseph Star Trek Tech Manual the Enterprise is said to be 190,000 DWT (dead weight tonnage) and just over 300 meters. So knowing how that translates to Traveller allows me to "translate" other designs based on dimension and mass. So, thanks!
Kevin
www.freewebs.com/interstellerarsenal/

A comparison of some smaller vessels:

Some larger bad guy ships:

Some smaller Star Viking-type fast attack ships:

My classification system:

 

[captainjack23]

WOW !

OTU comparisons aside, that is some impressive work !

Thanks for sharing.

 

[InterStellar Arsenal]

WOW !

OTU comparisons aside, that is some impressive work !

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for taking a look. I provided a scale so you can see how large (or small) these ships are supposed to be. I'd like to stat them up in Traveller and maybe even do some fleet books that would be kind of like Jane's Fighting Ships in the far future. Of course, I'd have to emphasize a lot of the smaller ships as those are the ones that seem most useful in Traveller, but the big ships can be useful as a strategic-level backdrop for a campaign.

(Here are some examples of pages for the Fleet Book idea. I'm a big fan of the old Terran Trade Authority books and would like to do something similar, only with game statistics so players can use the designs):

 

[Baeron Gredlocke]

If it helps, here's a graphic I refer my players to in terms of ship size. It doesn't do cross-genre comparisons, but it shows a nimitz-class carrier and a 747 compared against the commonly-seen traveller vessels.

http://www.traveller3d.com/sizechart/index.htm

 

[Walker]

If it helps, here's a graphic I refer my players to in terms of ship size. It doesn't do cross-genre comparisons, but it shows a nimitz-class carrier and a 747 compared against the commonly-seen traveller vessels.

http://www.traveller3d.com/sizechart/index.htm

So this graphic brings up a question I have pondered for awhile. How do DTons compare to Actual mass. For example, the Nimitz class carrier displaces 88,000 tons, but it appears comparable in size to an 800 to 1000 DTon Traveller vessel.

 

[GypsyComet]

Traveller Displacement Tons ("dTons") don't have any direct relationship to the ship's overall mass, being specifically a unit of volume.

The definition of the dTon is the volume taken up by one metric ton of cryogenic hydrogen, or roughly 13.5 to 14 cubic meters.

As such, the fuel tankage of a ship does indeed weight one metric ton per dTon.

The rest of the ship is not that light.

A prior edition assumed that the default for civilian ships is approximately 10 metric tons per dton, as a whole-ship average. Heavily armored ships could be 15 t/dt or higher.

Normally, the mass of a ship is only important for a couple instances: "Will the ship float in water?" being the most common.

 

[Infojunky]

http://www.traveller3d.com/sizechart/index.htm


So this graphic brings up a question I have pondered for awhile. How do DTons compare to Actual mass. For example, the Nimitz class carrier displaces 88,000 tons, but it appears comparable in size to an 800 to 1000 DTon Traveller vessel.

No, the Graphic in question the Nimitz is compared to the 60,000 dTon Lighting Class directly below it. Not the smaller vessels above.

As for the graphic of the Nimitz it is a waterline picture, thus a third of the ship is not displayed. Or from the bottom of the picture to the flightdeck is 90 feet, from the waterline to the keel is another 30 feet. It's that hidden volume that constitutes the 88,000 tons of displacement (that is approx 88,000 cubic meters as that is water displacement). Which works out to approx. 6500 dTons under the waterline, now figure four times the submerged volume for the rest of the ship, which gives us a approximate volume of about 30,000+ dTons.

Now this exercise is only possible with an intimate knowledge of the hull form of a USN carrier (Paint the the hull of one 4 or 5 times and well you know it). While displacement tonnage gives a certain volume, a better number is the registered tonnage which has a direct volume conversion (100 cubic feet to the registered ton).

 

[Scarecrow]

I started a project a few years back where I built 1:1 scale block models of various sci-fi ships in 3D and then measured their volume to get the dTonnage. This is what I came up with before I lost interest:

SHIP____________________Length__________Volume___________________DTons

X-Wing Fighter__________12.9m___________36.43 cu M_______________2.7
TIE Fighter_____________6.3m____________23.52 cu M_______________1.74
B-Wing__________________16.9m___________56.61 cu M_______________4.19
A-Wing__________________9.6m____________29.04 cu M_______________2.15
Y-Wing__________________16m_____________45.68 cu M_______________3.34
Jedi Interceptor________5.47m___________6.03 cu M________________0.45
Millenium Falcon________26.7m___________863.48 cu M______________63.96
Slave 1_________________21.5m___________432.18___________________32.01
Rebel Transport_________90m_____________17,876___________________1324.1
Star Destroyer__________1604m___________69.18 mil cu M___________5.1 mil
DeathStar II____________160,000m________17,088 bil cu M__________1265.8 Billion
Tyderium Shuttle________20m_____________594.10___________________44
Cloud City		16000m		306,322.3 mil cu M		22,690.5 mil


Enterprise A____________305m____________251,924.92 cu M__________18661 DTons			
Enterprise D____________643m____________5.85 Mil cu M____________433352.2 DTons
Federation Starbase_____3730m___________2966.8 mil cu M__________219.76 mil

Federation Runabout_____23.1m___________575 cu M_________________42.6 dTons
Bird of Prey		109m		38,600 cu M		2860 dTons

Borg Cube_______________305m___________28.4 mil cu M____________2.1 mil dTons

Star Fury_______________9.7m____________191.91 cu M______________14.2	


1 DTon = 13.5 M cu
1 Billion = 1,000,000,000,000
1 Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

 

[Infojunky]

I started a project a few years back where I built 1:1 scale block models of various sci-fi ships

I want your backyard.....