Low Berths

[DrSkull]

When working up the details of T20, might I suggest you be very careful with how Low Berths are described. In CT if you had a competent Doctor in attendance, then the risk of death from Low Berth travel was eliminated. But, in T4, no matter how good the doctor or medical facilities, there was still a fairly significanr chance of death from Low travel.

If 5% of all Low passengers die, no matter what, that's going to really, really make it undesireable. Competent doctors can mitigate this, then Low Berths are useful. I'm especially thinking of Large-scale troop transport and colonization missions.

For example, Mercenaries won't stand for 5% attrition each trip, and the expense of transporting them awake is prohibitive (the life support costs alone at 2000cr per month).

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Dave "Dr. Skull" Nelson

 

[Phil]

Your point is well taken, remember though, T4 is targeted to year 0 on the imperial calendar, while CT is significantly later. One could assume both low berth technology and medical science have advanced significantly during that period of time. Using that theory, in T20 the system should be similar to CT. Just to really complicate the issue, you could also consider the reliability of low berths to be variable. The military would obviously maintain their berths to a high standard, as you pointed out, the cost of high passage is far more that even extreme maintenance levels on a low berth. Passenger liners would do pretty well but might still have some failures. And of course, at the bottom of the reliability list would be the small independent carriers who can't afford the spotless maintenance of the military or the passenger lines. Even in this case, a doctor/life support tech should still be able to make a difference in the operation of the system.