On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Roger Burton West <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 06:22:58PM +0100, Onno Meyer wrote: > >If I have independent pods and lift shuttles, that means I have reactors, > >life support, cockpits, either fusion rockets (at TL10-) or reactionless > >thrusters (at TL11+) -- it would be trivial to add hyperdrives and power > >cells or warpdrives. > > Yes, but you can have millions of pods and only thousands of > pod-shuttles - it'll still be quicker than marching people on and off > individual spacecraft. (I'm talking about practicality here, the real > difficulties of shifting millions of self-willed beings around the place > especially if they're a bit panicky, not the VE rules which reasonably > enough say nothing about this.) If there's a riot at one spaceport, the > shuttles just load up from somewhere else, and the people keep flowing. > > I run games in a setting which has huge starships. Typical is a cylinder of 40m diamter by 1200 meters length. (plus assorted radiator panels and such like that hold up from jumps.) they're designed to carry wedge shaped containers, around a hexagonal spine. The containers provide a usable interior volume of 1150 cubic meters. Ships are set up to carry up to 252 of them. 1150 cubic meters is about 40,600 cubic feet. 100 cubic feet per pax gives us 406 per container. (There's enough dead space in the envelope the container's usable volume fits in for life support power, and docking facilities.) 252 containers * 406 pax/container = 102,312 pax. (Well, the pods would need service crews, probably. so less. Loading 400 people on a container is easy enough (it's what jumbo jets do today, more or less.). Getting containers into orbit is done either with shuttles or a beanstalk, depending. Ship's crew is on the ship, and there's room enough for a couple hundred pax as well (Though normally, ships carry a small number of luxury pax.) At a big star port, with loading facilities 252 containers can come off a ship in about seven hours, and loading 252 new ones takes the same amount of time [Really, really big places have robotic facilities that can load and unload at the same time, doing the whole ship in 8 or 10 hours. ] to move 200 million people a year, you'd need about 2000 departures a year, six a day. Ten trips per year, means a fleet of about 200 jump ships, and 50400 containers. Two hundred ships would cost about half a trillion bucks; don't have a number for the containers, but ten million a pop is another half a trillion. Infrastructure to support this would be several times that, so it would be a 10 trillion dollar project. Not cheap, but well within the capabilities of anywhere iwth that sort of population: 1 trillion bucks a year / 200 million pax/ year is only 5K per pax. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
