QuoteEach vessel has an assigned Plimsol mark which is painted on the side of a vessel at her lowest point of sheer, and is supposed to mark the lowest depth to which the ship may safely be loaded. The distance between this mark and the deck line is called the freeboard. The freeboard must be entered in the Articles of Agreement between the owners and the crew. A copy of this agreement is always hung up in the forecastle. There is no law that fixes where the Plimsol mark is painted, it is left to the owners to decide. The owners may give the ship as much or as little freeboard as they choose.

The inspectors of the Board of Trade ensure that the ship is not loaded to exceed the Plimsol mark and can force the ship to be lightened if this is exceeded. If the ship completes loading and goes to sea at night, the Plimsol mark cannot be seen. If the ship flounders at sea, the Board of Trade will hold an inquiry. If the ship's loss can be proven to have been caused by overloading, the owned is technically liable for all damages. Should all hands go down with the ship, it is impossible to prove that the ship was overloaded.  In that case the owners pocket the insurance money. If the Board of Trade is able to determine that the ship was overloaded, the master of the ship is censured or their certificate is suspended for a time. It is very rare that a ship is determined to be overloaded by the Board of Trade, as there is no set value for the freeboard of a ship and "expert testimony" can be purchased by the owners.

For ocean going ship's, this is used to determine allowable loading and is a visible marking. While I'm sure there is an effective load limit for a starship, what would be a (visible) way to determine it for an inspector (and the crew)?
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Quote from: GreentongueFor ocean going ship's, this is used to determine allowable loading and is a visible marking. While I'm sure there is an effective load limit for a starship, what would be a (visible) way to determine it for an inspector (and the crew)?

You could get that by calculating the force needed to push the ship's mass.  So perhaps a physical gauge built in to the shock absorbers for the thrusters so that when the thrusters are at a certain power level, they show how much mass the ship has.  It's sort of like putting a bathroom scale between the thruster and the ship to weigh the ship against the thrust.

Visible warpfields. Make a test run before jump. Red field = not so good.

In my TRAVELLER campains the players sometimes like to fill the cargo hold "to the brim" - then I remind them : "Did you leave enough room for the crew to walk back and forth in an emergency?"  (Look at the standard Empress Marava deckplans and you'll see what I mean.)

After awile we just started assuming that slightly neon painted lines or bright noticeable duct tape lines let the crew or cargo handling rookies where to stop stacking crates.

Also, sometimes Maggie will say if its too much.


- Ed C.

Quote from: John MorrowYou could get that by calculating the force needed to push the ship's mass.  So perhaps a physical gauge built in to the shock absorbers for the thrusters so that when the thrusters are at a certain power level, they show how much mass the ship has.  It's sort of like putting a bathroom scale between the thruster and he ship to weigh the ship against the thrust.

I think this is the most logical approach. Next would be some kind of gauge in the "push off" mechanism for separating the ship from its dock.

You might be able to measure the gravitational field of the ship but you might need to be a good distance from other massive objects to get a good reading.

Now, why limit a ship's mass? This is the question behind the question. I'd say the most important reason is the maneuverability of the ship. Sure, you can get the thing moving with any amount of thrust, but if you need to alter course quickly, then an overloaded ship (relative to thrust capacity) will have trouble dealing with obstacles and correcting orbits. Also, if you have some sort of FTL system, it may have an inherent limit on the mass it can move, beyond which you may strain the engines or cause unpredictable effects (jump errors).

You really can't answer the Plimsol Mark question unless you're given some of the background assumptions for the campaign that it will be used in. So, tell us about the campaign...

The idea is a ship centered setting where the ship is owned by investors who are trying to maximize their return on investment. The players are among the crew and have to survive the results of cost cutting and risky ventures to maximize profit.

They are NOT the owners.

Need as many indicators that the ship is being run past its limits as possible.

The theoretical physics used for the ships seems to be more important to me than "background assumptions for the campaign". Unless you consider that a background assumption.
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For starships it will come down to mass.

For most setting mass will come into play when trying to take off or land on a planet.

For voyages that start and end in space there is no limit as added mass means the voyage takes longer. Of course you stretch the travel time longer than your comsumables (oxygen, food) life then you are in trouble.

Of course if you have to do something really quickly, like correct a bad orbit from a blown navigation roll then your added mass could kill you as you won't have enough time to apply enough deltaV.

For settings with FTL then does mass play a part? If so then there will be limits there. In Traveller this wouldn't make a difference as jump capacity is based on volume. For a warp drive setting mass may play a part.

In most published setting the only time overloaded would really be hazardous would be taking off or landing on a planet. Basically any situation where you need find control maneuvering near a body with gravity.

For example take Apollo versus Deep Space 1 or SMART (both using ion engines)

In the case of trouble the Apollo CSM could have aborted during trans lunar coast by turning around and thrusting back to earth. A day or so later it would reach re-entry interface. It could do this because it had a huge powerful engine for the size of the spacecraft.

SMART in contrast used ion engine which produces a little bit of thrust for a very very long time. While continuously thrusting it's path to the moon was a big spiral and took a while compared to apollo. If SMART ran into trouble there wasn't a whole lot that could be done quickly as amount of thrust was very small.

Hope this helps.

Quote from: GreentongueThe theoretical physics used for the ships seems to be more important to me than "background assumptions for the campaign". Unless you consider that a background assumption.
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That's my point. A universe in which ships use a jump drive will be different than a stutterwarp drive which will be different than a warp drive, not to mention how sensor tech operates which will be the biggest indicator to other ships about the nature of the player's ship. So, while I'd like to answer your question, I can't until I know more about those background assumptions for the campaign - then I can have enough context to give you an answer that will make sense.

I guess I was thinking more in line with a "Trucker's Weight Scale" that was operated by the starport. With anti-grav, that wouldn't work well but some other instruments might.

Starships avoiding the scales instead of sneeking in and out in the dark. That sort of thing, but was hoping for other variations.
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Quote from: GreentongueI guess I was thinking more in line with a "Trucker's Weight Scale" that was operated by the starport. With anti-grav, that wouldn't work well but some other instruments might.

Starships avoiding the scales instead of sneeking in and out in the dark. That sort of thing, but was hoping for other variations.
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In StarCluster, the Jump Drive is calibrated to a rating in tonnes - by this I mean the drive is built to this rating, it's not something you can just change. Exceeding that rating means the Jump Drive will fail. This rating can be easily measured by accelerometers while under way. The difference between expected and actual performance will be quantifiable. If the company exceeds the total tonnage the ship is rated for, it can't Jump. The situation you mention would cause the company to skimp on other, overhead tonnage to increase cargo mass, things which are regulated like ratio of ship's lounge to number of crew, hot bunking, and such.

There's an example of the underlying assumptions changing the way you need to go at this. In Traveller, for example, Jump Drives are rated by volume, not tonnage.

-clash

Why not just make "weight sensors" in cargo pods obligatory? Complete with some bureau that controls those, puts seals on them etc.

Quote from: GreentongueI guess I was thinking more in line with a "Trucker's Weight Scale" that was operated by the starport. With anti-grav, that wouldn't work well but some other instruments might.

In space, it's not weight but mass that matters.  Weight is simply you're mass pushing down against the Earth as your body tries to accelerate toward its center of gravity.  So as I mentioned earlier, the way you get a weight in space is by putting your scale between the starship or cargo and the force pushing it.  In other words, if the authorities have a space tug that moves ships into and out of space docs, they could have a scale built in to the mechanism that latches the tug to another ship and use that to "weigh" the spaceship's mass.  Or it could be built into a ships thrusters (as I suggested above).  Or into a docking mechanism used to push a ship away from a space station.  If the ship actually lands, then simply build scales in the standard landing gear.

Quote from: GreentongueStarships avoiding the scales instead of sneeking in and out in the dark. That sort of thing, but was hoping for other variations.
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So what you are looking for is a reason to prohibit overloaded ships and incentive to evade that prohibition?

You can evade the sort of weighing that I described above by rigging hte scales, adding some additoinal "off the record thrust" to lighten the force needed to push the ship, bribing crooked officials to misrecord the mass or use crooked scales, or hack the data once it's recorded to change the values.  So that's the "how you do it".  But why would you want to?

One possible approach is to have the authorities limit the mass of a ship or it's cargo for safety reasons.  And here is an example of how it might all fit together...

Thrusters are rated to produce a certain amount of thrust safely.  You can hack a thruster to produce more force but doing so is dangerous (anything from thrusters blowing up to giving off too much radiation are possible dangers), so the authorities prohibit running thruster above their rating in civilized areas.  The authorities can tell because if they know how much a ship weighs (mass) and how much force its thrusters put out at the maximum safe rating (force), they can calculate the maximum acceleration they should see from the ship (f = ma or force equals mass times acceleration, which can be juggled to read f/m = a or force divided by mass equals acceleration (*)).  So the authorities weigh the ship and then go after the owners they see it accelerating too quickly.  The incentive for cheating on the weighing is that if you use hacked thrusters that produce more thrust than they are rated for, you can push more mass up to that maximum acceleration, so you can haul more cargo than a ship is rated for.

(*) The real calculations are a bit more complicated than that, especially if you are dealing with relativistic velocities, but that's the gist of it and probably good enough for a game.

Quote from: John MorrowSo what you are looking for is a reason to prohibit overloaded ships and incentive to evade that prohibition?

Of course it's all about the money.
The INSURANCE money.
As with historical ships, they are expensive and the investment must be insured. Accidents happen, especially if the limits are being pushed. A small shipping company is aready at a disadvantage against the bigger companies, so they need to push the limits to stay in business. The investors require payment. By being insured, a small company does not go out of business if a ship is lost (through no fault of their own.)

There are even times when collecting the insurance is more profitable than operating the ship.  

Proving that the loss of the ship was not their fault becomes critical.

Staying alive on such a ship, and after, is personal.
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Quote from: GreentongueAs with historical ships, they are expensive and the investment must be insured. Accidents happen, especially if the limits are being pushed. A small shipping company is aready at a disadvantage against the bigger companies, so they need to push the limits to stay in business. The investors require payment. By being insured, a small company does not go out of business if a ship is lost (through no fault of their own.)

The problem is, from a role-playing perspective, that if a horrible accident happens on a ship carrying all of the PCs, the next session will consist of everyone rolling up new characters or playing a different game.  It's not like a truck breaking down on the side of the road.  So I would suggest considering problems caused by the overloading that don't necessarily wreck the spaceship.  For example, overloaded ships having a higher chance of misjumping and a misjump being a bigger danger to something that gets in its way that the ship having the mishap (e.g., a ship that jumps into another ship will displace the ship that it's jumping into, destroying it, but not hurt the ship that's misjumping).