TNE HePlaR - Efficient???

[captainjack23]

Well, I'll admit defeat. Sort of.

Book 1 (1977 1st edition) does rate everything in displacement tons... but no definition is given. It was impossible from the original 1977 rules to determine the volume of your ship.

Fair enough. It assumed that you were familiar with nautical design, which was why they had to add explainations later. It is not an intuitively obvious distinction or measurement -for my traveller group in 77, we were in a coastal area, with lots of shipping, about half our adult gamers were squids, and we were all into sailing to some extent - so I admit, we took it for granted it was displacement volume- but I suspect we were the exception. Marc was a navy guy from a navy family, and the rest at GDW were hard core gearhead military wargamers, as were we.

 

[rinku]

Hm? Wasn't Marc Miller an Army Captain? I know High Guard is dedicated to Commander Charles Arthur Miller (ret), though.

 

[BP]

Well, I'll admit defeat. Sort of.

Book 1 (1977 1st edition) does rate everything in displacement tons... but no definition is given. It was impossible from the original 1977 rules to determine the volume of your ship.

The 1981 2nd edition is the first place that defines what a displacement ton is: "As a rough guide, one ton equals 14 cubic meters (the volume of one ton of liquid hydrogen)". This also states that when drawing up deckplans that a leeway of plus or minus 20% is acceptable.

Given that there is an acceptable variation in volume for a displacement ton is between about 12 to about 16 cubic metres, I'll stand by my opinion that the real rated mass is assumed to be the same as the displacement tonnage.

If it works for you that is great.

Using mass ton = displacement ton, means that 1 ton of empty cargo space has the same mass and volume as 1 ton of filled cargo space or 1 ton of M-Drive equipment.

As you mention - that is also an assumption that is not supported directly. The original authors were technical folks who made their own assumptions that readers understood what they meant by explicitly stating displacement ton (and the relationships between mass, density and volume).

By general definition (language - not specifically Traveller), displacement tons is a reference to unit of volume. So sure, if first printing neglected to define what that volume was numerically, you could not calculate the actual volume - assuming it also left out the deckplan sizes.

 

[rinku]

Yup. No deckplans were published until 1979 as far as I can tell; they first appeared in one of Snapshot, Adventure 1 - The Kinunir or the 1st issue of JTAS (the Annic Nova adventure).

I don't think *any* basic set of Trav included deckplans until GURPS, actually.

Edit: Kinunir refers to Snapshot, so it was probably Snapshot that pioneered the deckplan format.

 

[captainjack23]

Hm? Wasn't Marc Miller an Army Captain? I know High Guard is dedicated to Commander Charles Arthur Miller (ret), though.

You know, I think you may be right about marc. His dad was navy, that I'm pretty sure about. He's got serious taste in naval books, though -I've bought a few off of him on ebay