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Cargo and its Effect on Performance
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Bren
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 04, 2019 1:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
Bren wrote:
Let's just agree to disagree on this, shall we?

Well, we could, but I'm genuinely curious as to how you justify the existing Falcon's stats, yet find this house rule problematic.

    A. I feel no particular need to justify the stats.

    B. I strongly suspect the writer who created those stats did so without giving any thought whatsoever to the question of whether or not the Falcon had the same cargo capacity as a stock YT-1300 freighter. I don't know whether the Falcon's stats were created prior to the stock YT-1300 stats. But in either case, I think it is most probable that whoever wrote up the second stats merely cribbed the cargo capacity from the first stat write-up without giving it a second thought.

    C. What I proposed does not in anyway prevent the Falcon from carrying 100mt of cargo as the stats indicate.

    D. What you have proposed allows the Falcon to carry nearly a kiloton of cargo (780 mt). That does not at all match the stats listed for the Falcon of "Cargo Capacity: 100 mt." Logically you can't really argue while you are changing cargo capacity of all ships that somehow the existing cargo capacity of one ship is sacrosanct.

    E. Let's just agree to disagree.
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Whill
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 04, 2019 3:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bren wrote:
What you have proposed allows the Falcon to carry nearly a kiloton of cargo (780 mt). That does not at all match the stats listed for the Falcon of "Cargo Capacity: 100 mt." Logically you can't really argue while you are changing cargo capacity of all ships that somehow the existing cargo capacity of one ship is sacrosanct.

Not quite. Even with what he is proposing, ships are still limited by the volume of cargo they can carry. Even with the handwave of the Falcon being impossibly larger on inside than the outside, it is still very cramped. The central room shown in ANH, TESB, and Solo isn't just a lounge - It's actually the ship's main hold. Every time we saw it, it just happened to not have any cargo in it.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 04, 2019 3:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bren wrote:
A. I feel no particular need to justify the stats.

B. I strongly suspect the writer who created those stats did so without giving any thought whatsoever to the question of whether or not the Falcon had the same cargo capacity as a stock YT-1300 freighter. I don't know whether the Falcon's stats were created prior to the stock YT-1300 stats. But in either case, I think it is most probable that whoever wrote up the second stats merely cribbed the cargo capacity from the first stat write-up without giving it a second thought.

That's possible. The first official write-up for the Falcon was in the 1E Star Wars Sourcebook, released in 1987, so if it's an error, it's certainly an enduring one.

For myself, I tend to think that it's not as simple as trading cargo capacity for speed, and that as has been discussed elsewhere, WEG's listed cargo capacity does a poor job of representing the vagaries of actual cargo transportation (weight =/= volume, for example). A larger, more powerful engine might, for example, maintain a ship's Cargo Tonnage while reducing its Cargo Volume. It's not inconceivable that a ship in the SWU could have an extremely high Cargo Increment, yet have next to no Cargo Volume. A space tug or barge hauler, for example, would transport all of its cargo externally, yet still need the engine power to be able to wrangle it around. Also, an engine modified for performance might also result in higher thrust without loss of cargo capacity, but at the expense of loss of reliability, thus requiring constant maintenance and 'tweaking' to keep it in good running order - something which isn't reflected in the stats.

Of course, that opens up an idea for another House Rule; allowing characters to modify their ship for better performance at the expense of a certain 'upkeep CP cost' needed between missions to keep the ship in running order. But I digress...

The point is that there is more than one pathway to achieve a certain level of performance, and more than one factor involved in the trade-offs that achieve it, not all of which are reflected in a WEG stat.

Quote:
C. What I proposed does not in anyway prevent the Falcon from carrying 100mt of cargo as the stats indicate.

D. What you have proposed allows the Falcon to carry nearly a kiloton of cargo (780 mt). That does not at all match the stats listed for the Falcon of "Cargo Capacity: 100 mt." Logically you can't really argue while you are changing cargo capacity of all ships that somehow the existing cargo capacity of one ship is sacrosanct.

Well, the point I'm going for is that, rather than a hard cap on performance, overloading your ship with cargo involves accepting certain trade-offs in its performance envelope. This is consistent with my own real-world experience driving a CMV; performance drops off gradually as load increases.

So yes, under these rules, the Falcon could conceivably haul up to 800 metric tons. However, to do so requires that:
    1). Whatever it is hauling must fit within the Cargo Volume of the ship, whatever that may be (using the generic WEG formula of 2 metric tons/cubic meter, the Falcon would have 50 cubic meters of cargo volume).

    2). The pilot must deal with the +40 Difficulty to all his Piloting rolls, as well as the reduced speed. Not outside the realm of possibility for Han Solo, but then, he's Han Solo, and everyone else is not.


Quote:
E. Let's just agree to disagree.

Okay.
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Bren
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 06, 2019 11:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Whill wrote:
Not quite. Even with what he is proposing, ships are still limited by the volume of cargo they can carry.
They aren't strictly limited to the inside volume though. We have seen ships carrying external cargo pods. I seem to recall seeing some versions of the YT-1300 that place an external pod between the cargo mandibles -- which (since they don't seem to move like an insect's mandibles) seem named because they allow the ship to carry cargo externally.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 06, 2019 8:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bren wrote:
They aren't strictly limited to the inside volume though. We have seen ships carrying external cargo pods. I seem to recall seeing some versions of the YT-1300 that place an external pod between the cargo mandibles -- which (since they don't seem to move like an insect's mandibles) seem named because they allow the ship to carry cargo externally.

The version of this that I liked was that the bow "mandibles" are the mounting point for an automated cargo handling system. When loading, a pair of droid arms grabs shipping crates off the ground (or off a skimmer or repulsor-platform backed under the bow of the ship) and lifts them up into the opening on the front end of the ship. This feeds into a conveyor belt system that transfers the shipping crates into one of the three main holds.

It can be seen on this deckplan of the Millennium Falcon. I wrote up stats for it as a system that could be fitted to any light freighter by sacrificing 10% of its cargo capacity in order to facilitate loading and unloading rather than having to funnel everything up and down a ramp. Alternately, depending on the sort of cargo the captain intends to haul, it might be more efficient to remove the system in trade for more cargo volume.

But to bring it back around to the point in question, increasing volume won't do anything to offset either the Speed Penalty or the Maneuver Penalty, so the pilot will need to be very sure of his skill level to keep from spinning out of control or running into something because his ship is too heavily loaded to handle properly.

Incidentally, I got the math wrong on my example above. If the Falcon were loaded all the way up to 800 metric tons, it would be dragged down to a Space of 1, and Han & Chewie would be facing a +40 Difficulty modifier to every Piloting skill roll.

So yes, it's theoretically possible, but would be extremely difficult. And as I have said elsewhere, I much prefer a system where the characters have an exceedingly slim chance of success to one that simply imposes an absolute prohibition regardless of the character's skill level.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 12, 2019 4:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A somewhat related note...

Someone I follow on Twitter recently made an excellent analogy as to the difference between horsepower and torque. To paraphrase...
    Remember playing on the merry-go-round as a kid? Torque is the husky kid who can't run very fast, but who ended up playing center on the varsity football team; Horsepower is the wiry, fast kid who ended up as a track star. If you put twelve kids on the merry-go-round, the husky kid is more able to get it moving from a dead stop, but once its spinning, the fast, skinny kid is the one who will make it go faster.

That's what I see here. Cargo Capacity / Cargo Increment is Torque; Space / Atmosphere is Horsepower. You can have an engine with both, so long as you are willing to pay for it.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 11, 2019 11:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So, the next step in this, IMO, is factoring in the cargo mass vs. cargo volume question. The D6 Starships book does a very nice job of defining how much cargo volume some of the floorplan options might take up, but the factor currently on my mind is the amount of volume taken up by the various ship systems listed in various sourcebooks.

For example, under the WEG system, a Space 8 Sublight Drive weighs 16 metric tons, so how many meters^3 of volume does it occupy?

For reference purposes, here's a (slightly modified) list of cargo volumes per ton by cargo types:
    Item Type = Metric Tons / Cubic Meter
    Low Tech = 2
    Mid Tech = 1
    High Tech = 0.5
    Metals = 10
    Minerals = 5
    Liquids = 1*
    Foodstuffs = 0.5
    Medicine = 0.5

    *Added in based on the rule of thumb that 1 meter^3 of water weighs 1,000 kg / 1 metric ton.

High Tech would seem an obvious first choice, but a lot of this stuff is going to involve some pretty serious heavy machinery. Thoughts?
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Bren
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 3:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
For reference purposes, here's a (slightly modified) list of cargo volumes per ton by cargo types:[list]Item Type = Metric Tons / Cubic Meter
Low Tech = 2
Mid Tech = 1
High Tech = 0.5
Metals = 10
Minerals = 5
Liquids = 1*
Foodstuffs = 0.5
Medicine = 0.5
Cargo volume for water is 1 cubic meter per metric ton. CHECK.

But why would the cargo volume for metals be 10 cubic meters per metric ton? Is your table not cargo volume per ton but tons per cargo volume (with a standard volume of 1 cubic meter)?
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 6:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The numbers in the chart are metric tons per meter^3, so 1 meter^3 of Metals would weigh 10 metric tons.
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Bren
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So # tons per standard cargo volume, not the cargo volume per ton of material.
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CRMcNeill
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 12, 2019 11:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bren wrote:
So # tons per standard cargo volume, not the cargo volume per ton of material.

Correct.

Probably needs to be something in there for compressed gases, too...
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Naaman
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 5:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CRMcNeill wrote:
A somewhat related note...

Someone I follow on Twitter recently made an excellent analogy as to the difference between horsepower and torque. To paraphrase...
    Remember playing on the merry-go-round as a kid? Torque is the husky kid who can't run very fast, but who ended up playing center on the varsity football team; Horsepower is the wiry, fast kid who ended up as a track star. If you put twelve kids on the merry-go-round, the husky kid is more able to get it moving from a dead stop, but once its spinning, the fast, skinny kid is the one who will make it go faster.

That's what I see here. Cargo Capacity / Cargo Increment is Torque; Space / Atmosphere is Horsepower. You can have an engine with both, so long as you are willing to pay for it.


It's a decent analogy, but it conflates horsepower with RPM (or engine "effort"). I tend to prefer this one:

If you had a race between The Hulk and The Flash where both had to move a pile of some astronomical quantity of bricks from point A to point B on a circular track, The Hulk would would simply pick up the entire pile of bricks and drag it to the finish line in one trip. The Flash would take one brick at a time at super speed. Whoever finishes first can be said to have more horsepower, while The Hulk obviously has more torque, and The Flash operates at a high RPM.

In either case, if you don't have enough torque at a given RPM, your ability to accelerate decreases.

If both racers finish at the same time, they can be said to have equal horsepower.

Now, add a third racer to the race: If Superman were also a participant, he would lift the entire pile of bricks (just like The Hulk) and move it at super speed (just like The Flash) and finish the race in one trip.

Superman, with his high torque and high RPM is able to achieve much greater horsepower than either The Hulk (similar torque) or The Flash (similar RPM).
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Whill
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the superhero analogy. I get it.
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Naaman
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 10:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Whill wrote:
Thanks for the superhero analogy. I get it.


Very Happy Very Happy

Where else but on a forum full of sci-fi/fantasy nerds like us would such an analogy be more apt? Razz

I could go on all day about this topic, but... I won't derail the thread with such minutiae that isn't relevant to the ultimate objective of coming up with stats.
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 11:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If we are going to fully Nerd out about this topic then I would say that cargo does not in any way affect performance at all.

It is no difference in space if I push a sattelite of 30 tons with a light push or if I give a baseball the same push in space, there is no resistance, there is no actual weight and both the asttelite and the baseball will now move until they meet any resistance.

So a ship loaded with 100 tons or 1 ton would not have any differences in effect, however the cargo space and where the cargo is stored in a ship can in some cases of overloadeg have negative effects, if crates are stored in hallways and the like it will lessen the combat effectiveness over all, but not more than that and not by much.

We have even seen this sort of in Rouge One with the hammerhead
if we used the earth physics on space travel that would be impossible to do, ergo earth physics is not applied, and thus they should not be applied on cargo.

Now there are aspects of take of weight and that, but is that also true in a star wars tech?
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