Integration of deck plans with T4.
Hmmm... Last year I bought the pdf download T4 Starships which has a number of deck plans.
There are small squares on each drawing labelled with scale. The lavels are 1m, 1.5m, and 2m.
These are scout boats, rescue balls, liners of different sizes, patrol cruiser, etc.
You know, sometimes my mind works in strange ways, and for that I apologize. But in reading what you wrote, I suddenly realized that, in english, we use the word "scale" for so many different things -- whether it's a music scale, a fish scale, or a scale to weigh something.
The reason I bring this up is because I believe we are using the word "scale" to mean two different things. More specifically, I believe "scale" is used in two different ways in T4's
Starships, and T4's
Naval Architect's Manual.
Mr. Rux's origional question was:
I've done a check through T4 Books 1, 2, B, and D looking for instructions on drawing deck plans without finding anything.
Can someone point me in the right direction please?
For what it's worth, Mr. Marn's description of
Starships is not completely accurate. There are small squares on some of the drawings in the supplement, and they are labeled either 1m or 2m. There is not a 1.5m box in
Starships. Furthermore, there are four examples of ships in
Starships that have no little box at all, and therefore are not given a scale. They are the Large Armed Freighter, the Military Frontier Cruiser, the Military Destroyer, and the Luxury Liner.
But this isn't a big deal, right? In a Rand McNally atlas of the United States there is a scale ruler in the corner. But those scales will change from state to state, because the states are different sizes. Well, these starships are different sizes, so the little ruler in the corner changes to let the reader know the relative size of each illustration as compared to another.
That's the purpose of the "scale" in the
Starships supplement.
I believe the little boxes in the
Naval Architect's Manual serve a different purpose. They are there to
establish a scale -- to establish a
common scale between each and every drawing. That was the purpose behind the
Naval Architect's Manual -- to be able to copy and cut different sections of a ship out, and tape them together in order to make a deck plan that characters could run around on, presumably for establishing a character's movement and location during combat.
I believe this is the crux of Mr. Rux's question. Because he's right. I can't find it in there either. Ironically, they never say exactly how large each box is in the
Naval Architect's Manual, other than to say they're exactly the same. Based on the evidence I suggested above, I believe each square in the
Naval Architect's Manual is 1.5m x 1.5m for each and every drawing.
They
do say, in the T4 main rulebook, (p. 92,) "hull size is measured in standard displacement tons, equivalent to 14 cubic meters, or the volume of one metric ton (1000kg) of liquid hydrogen." Both as described in other editions of
Traveller, and mathematically, if a square is 1.5m (long) x 1.5m (wide) x 3m (tall,) that equals 6.75 cubic meters. Double that, and you end up with 13.5 cubic meters, which is approximately the 14 cubic meters described above. Since it takes two of these 1.5m squares to equal one ton, a 100 ton starship would have approximately 200 squares for a deck plan, (including fuel.) A 1000 ton starship would have 2000 squares in its deck plan, etc.
Mr. Rux...you can do whatever you want. But to answer your question, to help point you in the right direction, I would suggest you draw your deck plans using a scale of 1 square = 1.5m = 1/2 "ton" (of starship displacement.)
This scale integrates with earlier editions of
Traveller, with the movement rules described above, and the range modifiers for combat given in T4's main rulebook.
The Combat Range chart on p. 61 would become:
Range number: 0 = Contact = 0-3m = 0-2 squares = easy = 1.5d6
Range number: 1 = V. Short = 4-15m = 3-10 squares = average = 2d6
Range number: 2 = Short = 16-45m = 11-30 squares = difficult = 2.5d6
Range number: 3 = Medium = 46-150m = 31-100 squares = formidable = 3d6
Range number: 4 = Long = 151-450m = 101-300 squares = staggering = 3.5d6
Range number: 5 = V. Long = 451-1500m = 301-1000 squares = impossible = 4d6
I hope this was helpful.
