TL of Small Drives

[dalamar981]

The ratings for Small craft are from 1-16 and I cannot find any reference to the TL of said components. the only indication of TL for drives that I can find in in the previous spaceship design rules.

Drives____0__1__2__3__4__5__6
Maneuvre_0__7__7__8__8__8__9
Jump____0__9__11_12_13_14_15

This table does not work with the small craft design rules.

so my question is what TL should a 16 rating reaction drive be?

what about a rating 16 G-drive?

 

[atpollard]

To do the issue well, the rating should not be TL dependent, but the maximum and minimum size of the drives should grow with TLs.

Today we can make both larger and smaller Internal Combustion Engines than was possible in 1900, but a steam car in 1900 was capable of greater than 100 mph top speeds and today's top speeds for IC cars are not that much better than those of the 1950's.

 

[rust]

what about a rating 16 G-drive?

A small craft sZ gravitic maneuver drive with a performance of 16 G is
almost exactly the same drive as the maneuver drive K of the core ru-
les, and therefore should become available at the same technology le-
vel. Since gravitic maneuver drives are introduced at TL 9, I think that
TL 10 would be fine for this kind of maneuver drive.

 

[DFW]

so my question is what TL should a 16 rating reaction drive be?

None. There wouldn't be fooling with trying to produce one. Not when you have Deep space G-drives.

what about a rating 16 G-drive?

No more than 10, maybe 11. Grave tech is maxing about that time. Other than size of drives.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

You are overthinking the Drive Tables. The Drive tables are "standard" drives and represent about TL12.

The PERFORMANCE you get from that drive seems to TL dependent (which makes NO sense, but there you go).

For Example:
Jump Drive-C installed on a 600 ton ship produces Jump-1, allowed at TL9
Jump Drive-C installed on a 100 ton ship produces Jump-6, allowed at TL15

The drive tables are an approximation "good enough" for the game.

HG does give a table for TLs of drives on Page 63, but that is in the Capital Ship section.

To be done right, the entire drive letter concept should be scrapped and all drives should be calculated using formulas that change at every TL. Something Traveller has never done.