This page is intended to be largely canonical. This does not mean that it slavishly follows just what the books say, if we did that there would be no point in having a webpage. I have taken a certain point of view on the published materials, which may not be the same as the readers. For example, I have allowed fusion drives as small as the smallest fission drive in ship design, I do not feel this is unbalancing as it does not create an artificial barrier to smaller warships. To this end I am making notes on the positions I have taken.

Fusion Power

I have postulated that fusion drives other than the 5 listed are possible, and these may be in the same size range as the fission reactors listed in the next column. The effect is that fusion drives of down to 30MW may be built, allowing smaller destroyer sized vessels to be fusion powered, stopping the creation of an artificial gap between destroyers and cruisers.

Missile Design

The Karl Bergman articles which were published in Challenge do not reproduce the missiles in Star Cruiser. The reason appears to be the fact that he took the SIM-14 as a baseline. The SIM-14 predates the creation of the ship design system, and does not follow the rules that created the other missiles. This can be easily corrected by remassing it to 10.4 tons, which maintains the published combat stats.

I can't see any reason why missiles should be costed differently to a starship.

Starship Numbers

I have assumed that we have the full number of merchant starships implied by calculation of trade volumes, about 20,000 merchants. This allows for "free traders" and other sci-fi staples. For warships, I've assumed Invasion is essentially correct. The French Navy of ~60 warships is the largest, with the Brits, Germans and Yanks on about 40 each. Fighters is a different matter, the main two products which contain fighters, Invasion and SotFA are contary. I've assumed that SotFA is essentially correct, with fairly large numbers of fighters (the French with almost 300, the others with less).

There will be other quibbles and I will expand on this, but this covers the main ones.