Here's the topic for discussing ships, deck plans, etc.

Please refrain from posting copyrighted material that you do not have permission to distribute.

I'll link to something I created for a campaign in which I played the Operations Officer on a Beowulf Class Free Trader variant.  Here you go:

Ship's Organization & Regulations Manual, Merchant Vessel Busted Flush

It's been a while since we've had any posts here, so I'll give it a kick...

I was reading something the other day that got me wondering (yet again) about starship density.

A Traveller ship's displacement is measured in dTons, but this is an arbitrary measurement related to the density of liquid Hydrogen - it is a measure of the ship's volume, but says nothing about its mass or density.

One thing is for sure, starships do not have the density of LHyd - they'd skitter about in an atmosphere worse than a blimp. Besides, many of them are covered in armour, some of which may be several times the density of steel.

I'm a CT fan, and I'm not sure if this was addressed in one of the later, bean-counting editions, but CT never defined starship density.

Was there ever any definitive statement?

If not, where do you place the density of a starship?

around 0.1 tonnes per cu metre (like an Apollo spacecraft)?
around 0.2 tonnes per cu metre (like a commercial plane)?
around 0.3 tonnes per cu metre (like a fighter plane)?
around 0.5 tonnes per cu metre (like a modern warship)?
around 0.9 tonnes per cu metre (like a submarine or iceberg)?
over 1 tonne per cu metre (so it sinks in water like a battle tank)?

Not that being lighter than water overall would help the majority of ships, whose deckplans show their engines jammed in the tail. If they landed in water, they'd bob around vertically, like a hydrometer...

In reply to Beowulf (msg # 2):

I always took dTons to be the how much water would be displaced if you were to put the vessel into a standard water... Goes to show you that I must have misread the rulebook in my youth and have remained clinging to my version of the game all these years!!

Am sure in later editions there was a measurement of dTons and actual weight / mass...??