Of course the Proto-Traveller concept was surely built on the players' experience and the Age of Sail, rather than economic analyses.
And I think that's the right way to write a game: for all its hard Science Fact shell, Traveller has a nice gooey Science Fantasy soft center.
I agree that's ideal if you can do it.
My take is purely for those who want a small ship universe but have a brain that insists it must be a big ship universe (cos population x TL).
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(nb this is only relevant to people who think a certain way)
If I was designing the Spinward Marches from scratch for people who think that way I'd just reduce the pop and TL down to a small ship size, simply say all the 9+ pop, TL12+ systems are in the core regions and in a frontier sector the sector capital might be in the pop 8, TL11-12 range and sub-sector capitals around pop 7, TL10.
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However even as it is the OTU can be tweaked enough for me by
1) tweaking the trade as described above
and
2) making the big ship navy too big to use
As energy weapons lose a lot of energy with range then if you say IYTU that having the longest range weapons is a critical advantage then it means ships of the line have to have the highest rated energy weapons possible and if that means those weapons need to be as big as possible then it means ships of the line have to be as big as possible.
Which ends up with them maybe costing 50 million credits a jump - each.
So IMTU the alpha systems can have 100 Tigress each and it doesn't matter in the game as I say they are [too expensive / too much of a hassle] to move out of their home system except in wartime leaving sub-sector patrol for small ships.
I prefer that actually as having 100 Tigress conducting a training exercise in Glisten as the players return to their patron makes cool scenery without messing up the small ship flavor in the backwater systems.
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Only a tiny fraction of people can tolerate J-Space travel
That's an interesting one.
o:
