Hallo,

Gurps Traveller - Far Trader also has also a few paragraphs an
maintenance (p. 74 - 76). It uses the same formula, and a sidebar an p.
76 lists some existing ships, e,g., the Empress Marava needs 29.5
man-hours per day - as I understand, this means everything from cleaning
the air filters to checking the J-drive.

Starships lists (p. 115) mainenance as a major duty aboard, and a major
part of maitenace is cleaning.
So,as I see it, every crew memeber has a tablet / PDA that lists up what
he has to maintain and clean at his workstation and aboard the ship. And
it will give a loud and annoying alarm if he "forgets" it.

Thoughts?

Bye
Ingo

Am 16.10.21 um 13:43 schrieb Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at
port.ac.uk (via tml list):
> Following the report on TML of the death of Bill Prankard I did as I
> said and had a look at the things he was credited with for Traveller.
>
> One of which was _GURPS: Starships_ (as 'Other contributions by').
>
> Browsing through I firstly remembered what a treasure house this is even
> if I'm unlikely to build ships using it.  Secondly I came to page 22 and
> was reminded of the 'Maintenance Requirements' that I've not looked at
> in ages (years) and never tried actually using.
>
> Oh, brilliant!  I thought.  Maybe this was something I could use to
> better structure jobs and repairs for our engineer on the March
> Harrier.  So I dutifully dug out my calculator as I can't do square
> roots in my head.  I've shown my working below just in case I *have*
> fouled up the math(s) which I wouldn't be surprised at.
>
> And immediately ran into "is this right?"  "I must be doing it wrong?"
> "is there something I'm not understanding?"  "is there something I'm
> missing".
>
> So,
> "To calculate a starship's maintenance requirements, use;
> Maintenance = 4.8 x original purchase price in MCr / (square root of
> actual purchase price in MCr)
> The result is the number of man-hours per day required for maintenance."
>
> (I should say in passing that it seems odd to base this on ship cost
> rather than ship size but I can see a kind of logic and I suppose it
> means that all those luxurious noble yachts are being kept in tip top
> condition.)  Anyway.
>
> I immediately grabbed the March Harrier's price: MCr101.03 [1], decided
> I'd pretend for the moment that it was brand new and plugged in the numbers.
>
> = 4.8 x 101.03 / 10.05
> = 4.8 x 10.05   [2]
> = 48.25
>
> !!!
> That's quite a bit more maintenance than I was imagining.  With 8 hour
> days it suggests six engineers!  (For a 400-ton ship!).  Even if The
> Captain wields a cat o'nine-tails and drives them to 12 hour days you're
> looking at four of them.  This for a ship that is supposed to only
> require 1 engineer.
>
> Don't forget it gets worse if we know the ship is 100+ years old and
> presumably worth nowhere near its original price.  I think there are
> rules for that somewhere but I couldn't be bothered to hunt for them.
> Let's pretend the March Harrier is only worth 80% of it's purchase price
> now.
>
> = 4.8 x 101.03 / 8.99
> = 4.8 x 11.24
> = 53.94 hours!
>
> Hmmm, I thought, maybe there's a large difference in ship costs between
> classic _Traveller's The Traveller Adventure_ and GURPS Traveller.
>
> Well, let's keep it simple then and take the (old style) subsidized
> merchant from the _Starships_ book itself.  Here we are, p.93 the
> /Colresh/-class Subsidized Merchant: Price: MCr92.1.  Not so far off.
> This one requires two engineers - as does the 'standard'
> /Akkigish/-class of GURPS Traveller (p.146) although the latter only
> costs MCr57.2174.  So let's see what that does for us:
>
> Colresh
> = 4.8 x 92.1 / 9.59
> = 46 hours!
> Hardly any better.  2 engineers would still be getting only an hour's
> sleep each!
>
> Akkigish
> = 4.8 x 57.21 / 7.56
> = 4.8 x 7.56
> = 36 hours
> Well, at least two engineers are now getting 6 hours a night sleep with
> no free time.
>
> Just to see if different ships mattered, I tried the 100-ton Scout.  In
> _Starships_ you've got the Iiken-class which costs MCr51.7 but at least
> it requires *four* engineers (along with pilot and co-pilot) (p.92).
> The standard Sulieman-class in the core book (p.130) is MCr26.3796 and
> (usually) has one engineer (as well as pilot and co-pilot).
>
> Iiken
> = 4.8 x 51.7 / 7.19
> = 34.51 hours
>   - that's better - a 6 hour day (34.5 / 6)!
>
> Sulieman
> = 4.8 x 26.37 / 5.13
> = 24.6
> (well, not much else to do in Jump!)
>
>
> Just for fun, although I appreciate it's probably not fair comparing
> different rule sets, I ran the numbers for three Mongoose 2nd Edition
> ships: Free Trader - 32 hours with 1 engineer, Scout - 29 hours with 1
> engineer and Sub Merchant - 43 hours with 1 engineer.  (Again, assuming
> they're new.)
>
> So, have I missed something?
> Or are all Traveller ships just massively behind on maintenance and
> that's why they need their annual maintenance and are generally quirky?!
> Is it possible they meant hours of maintenance per week?!  (And my
> apologies if this is a known erratum - although this would imply not:
> http://www.sjgames.com/errata/gurps/traveller-starships.html
> <http://www.sjgames.com/errata/gurps/traveller-starships.html> - or if
> TML has been round this buoy before - I should have searched.)
>
> It does seem as if I've been massively underworking our engineer!
>
> Or should I just accept these rules aren't fit for purpose?
>
> tc
>
>
>
> [1] _The Traveller Adventure_, p.109
>
> [2] Yes, with rounding I might as well have just done this in my head as
> MCr100/10!
>
>
>
>
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