Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
Wouldn't one issue be that if you use cold berths the cows would now be considered "frozen" rather than fresh, never frozen.... Sounds like an advertising nightmare to me....o:
No, Enoki, they would be "fresh frozen".
Passenger Transport Pods
- Thread starter Timerover51
- Start date
No, Enoki, they would be "fresh frozen".
Wouldn't one issue be that if you use cold berths the cows would now be considered "frozen" rather than fresh, never frozen.... Sounds like an advertising nightmare to me....
They used to be frozen, but they got better.
Hans
How about this point? You're deliberately confusing a bit of color text with ship design rules.
Do you seriously think the author even once thought about life support capacity when writing up his little intro? It's fluff and nothing more. It was meant to set the mood for the players. They're recently demobbed soldiers who hitched a ride to Emerald just like the sailor, soldier, and bombardier hitched a ride to Boone City aboard a B-17 The Best Years of Our Lives. It's a plot device, like a Shakespearean shipwreck, meant only to get the characters to the stage where they'll perform.
Context counts and you're ignoring it.
But Traveller changed the paradigm by making low berths designed for human occupancy, thus making the chance of death less plausible and the low lottery downright silly. The writers just didn't realize the ramifications of the change.
Hans
The MgT Book 3 Scout has a 150 ship called the Scout SX Frontiersman. It is a 100 on Scout that has been stretched to include space for two modules. One configuration is Passengers, which between both modules gives;
9 Staterooms
9 escape pods
and some other small stuff including some cargo space.
Also, in MgT High Guard there is discussion about building a ship with modular components and possibilities are modules with passenger living space. I don't see why you couldn't just build one as per the rules.
9 Staterooms
9 escape pods
and some other small stuff including some cargo space.
Also, in MgT High Guard there is discussion about building a ship with modular components and possibilities are modules with passenger living space. I don't see why you couldn't just build one as per the rules.
So does consistency. If I'm watching a series in which, for plot reasons, it is possible to do X one week, but in following weeks it becomes impossible to do the same thing without some adequate explanation for the deviation, then the series isn't worth the watching. Not that a lot of television hasn't fallen into that trap, but it's pretty lame when it happens.
Plot device or not, it is presented as possible in one canon source, and not just some tangential source - it's a GDW-published adventure. I've not heard anyone talking about that particular source being decanonized, ergo it is one possible arrow in the quiver of the game master - a very restricted arrow, perhaps, but available nonetheless. Think you're going to advertise for riders in your cargo hold? Not if the starport authorities or customs officials have anything to say about it. On the other hand, if the player can manage to get around that little barrier and can find people desperate enough to take such miserable passage, or when the meteor is coming and you're their only hope, guess what arrow the gamemaster has available in his quiver, should he choose to use it.
I think the thing you're ignoring is that you're free to discount whatever canon elements you don't like, and he's free to embrace whatever canon elements he likes, and you're both absolutely right within the context of your own TU's. No harm, no foul - and others are entitled to hear both views.
Yes, I'm as much a fan of realism as anyone else, but arguing about the life support capacity of a far-future starship, in a game where ships put out as much power as small cities and yet can somehow manage to be difficult to detect, might be a bit much. The great thing about plot devices is, it's available for other storytellers too.
It might be easier to accept it and try to resolve the contradiction. Consider the situation of our soldiers en route to Emerald. We know they can breathe, that much is a given. Beyond that, anything that gets them there alive while making the alternative less attractive and therefore less viable is fair game. No food is provided - they have to bring their own. Let's also say, since we want this to be something people don't really want to do: no access to the freshers - the recycling system isn't able to handle the added load of solid and liquid wastes.
Yes, unless you invest in some port-a-potties, it's buckets for you, and maybe a few barrels or something else in some out-of-the-way corner of the cargo bay to dump the waste in. We can airlock it if you bring enough containers with good seals to do the job - otherwise it stays down there with you, 'cause I'm not having that sewage flash-boiling in the airlock and getting all over everything in there. And then there's water - if the system can't handle your waste, then I can't afford to be giving you water out of the ship's stores, so very likely you bring your own of that too.
Climate control? Well, there's air circulating, or they'd have died. That doesn't make it comfortable. No idea what kind of ship that was, or how big a bay is, but twenty warm bodies to a compartment can get things pretty warm pretty quick if the ship's adequately insulated.
Did I mention "dull"? Seven days with nothing to do but whatever you brought with you, and nowhere to go.
What are you left with? You're left with seven days in a hot, increasingly stinky compartment eating and drinking only what you brought with you, no showers or baths, the warm air rich with the ripe aroma of the 19 other unwashed people sharing your bay, peeing and pooping into buckets and then dumping that into a container that you close as quick as you can to keep as much of the stink as possible from escaping, no fresh-air deck to escape to as they had in the Age of Sail. All in all a mode of passenger transport that might be acceptable to refugees fleeing likely death or to soldiers fresh from war and inured to hardship and discomfort, and to precious few others.
Maybe some enterprising soul could think up ways around some of the hardships, but precious few captains are going to be willing to put passengers in with their cargo unless they're sure they can keep the cargo safe. If - as many of us do - you're running in a TU where cold sleep is not the Russian-Roulette game that the Classic rules make it, then there's only so much one can spend reducing hardships before it begins to make more sense for the folk to buy a low passage.
If you are running a risky-cold-sleep universe, then it still comes down to the right combination of desperate passengers and captains who lack cargo for the trip. In most instances, the need to give a tolerable journey while securing your cargo favors some version of the "transport pod" idea the OP is presenting. I really don't see this as a game-changer.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Hmmm, what did the guys do when riding troop transports in the Pacific during World War 2 when travel times were measured in weeks? Ditto, submarine patrols when it took 2 weeks to get to the patrol area? Troop ships from the UK to the Mid East around the Cape of Good Hope took a minimum of a month to get there. Then there is the current fleet ballistic missile subs that spend 60 days at a stretch underwater, with no communication to the outside.
"Dull" as you put it is nothing new whatsoever.
Submariners keep busy - they have only 1-3 hours of "daily" "free time."
Remember: 1 watch on, 1 watch off, 1 watch on, 2 watches off. And there are 7 watches per real day, but only 16-20 hours per sleep cycle (16 if both 2-hour "dogwatches" are in your personal day, 18 if 1, and 20 if neither). And an expectation of a meal and bathing during that 2-4 hour watch off. And many have studying to do for BMR tests, rating tests, and not a few have correspondence coursework to do. Some even make time for RPGing or board games.
Remember: 1 watch on, 1 watch off, 1 watch on, 2 watches off. And there are 7 watches per real day, but only 16-20 hours per sleep cycle (16 if both 2-hour "dogwatches" are in your personal day, 18 if 1, and 20 if neither). And an expectation of a meal and bathing during that 2-4 hour watch off. And many have studying to do for BMR tests, rating tests, and not a few have correspondence coursework to do. Some even make time for RPGing or board games.
As I recall, the military tends to put people to work when there's nothing for them to do. Limits the dull time, reduces the impact on morale even if its something as silly as polishing your boots. And, even the Marines get to go up on deck once in a while, get some fresh air, make use of whatever limited entertainments the ship might have.
At any rate, the point isn't that it's impossible - people endure quite a lot when they need to. The point is to make it unpleasant enough that folk don't think of it as an alternative unless they're pretty well out of other choices, without making it dangerous since there's no indication the Alien Realms incident presented any danger. Otherwise, there's an argument for letting a market grow around something that was supposed to be an unusual occurrence.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Having been worked over enough by all of the posters, I will ignore this thread permanently.
Sorry that you feel that way, but I enjoyed reading all the ideas, seeing the artwork and exploring the 'what if'.
Unless I missed something, the consensus seems to be that stuffing people into a hold cattle style is possible, but probably not commercially viable as an alternative to middle passage. In Mythbuster terms that makes this idea 'PLAUSIBLE'.
I think this is doable. It's essentially a hull carried within the cargo hold, so it's like doing starship design without requiring a bridge or drives. Allocate 4t per stateroom per usual and you get a common area. Add an infirmary and a medic. Make room for a Steward and you sure could put High Passengers in there. Or provide access to the ship's main passenger deck (probably a good idea anyway).
I can see other uses for this as well. A quarantine area (in which case you would not provide access to the ship's main passenger deck). A holding cell. Areas for sophonts with special atmospheric requirements.
DangerousThing
SOC-13
I like this. Also one could put life support in the pod. Since it's for a small amount of people maybe the life support could be half normal size.
In T5 it might be made of a 10t specialized cargo module.
Life support 0.5t
Galley 0.5t
Modular connector air locks (1 on each side) 1 t
4 staterooms 4t
Shared Fresher 0.5t
Common area 3.5t
Perhaps you could replace the airlocks with iris doors and have 6 of them.
The doors could be made so that they could be connected to other modules, so you could have up to 4 habitation modules connect to one "lounge" module for more space.
These modules could be sent to a specific destination like train cars are today, changing ships as needed without the need for the passengers to disembark. If the stop was long, perhaps waiting for a free trader to go to a seldom visited system the passengers could use their module as a hotel room while it is docked to the high port. For a fee, of course.
I'll try to work up a deck plan.
Does anybody know the dimensions of a 10t cargo container?
DangerousThing
SOC-13
And I think that a luxury pair of modules could be made for nobles who don't have a yacht. That I'll have to work on some numbers for....
DangerousThing
SOC-13
I'm sorry you feel that way, and I'm puzzled. Nobody has attacked you, and you started a long thread with a lot of discussion.
Heck, on one forum me and the Bear go at it (politely) like cats and dogs. That forum is more for writing SF and I like to have my ideas challenged so that I think about them more. Sometimes the Resident Polar Bear and I come to an agreement of sorts, and sometimes at the end I don't change my mind. In either case I learn a lot.
On this forum people mostly ignore my posts.
I have not followed this thread to now, and not yet read all the posts, so I'm not sure if anyone has already talked about it, but IIRC, in MT:HT a pirate bland was told to have most of its members living in living modules on the hold of its far trader (the Blue Moon, again if IIRC).
Sadly, nowhere in MT (AFAIK) are those modules described.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Using HG - use a 30t cutter module fitted with 15 small craft staterooms. They can be used for double occupancy.
You can now carry 30 extra people.
You can now carry 30 extra people.
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This is getting to be a habit.
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