The Gravtrawler

The Gravtrawler, the 1km-long grav racer I mentioned in my Traveller biography, is actually something I mathed out using the Civilian Vehicles handbook.  I don't have access to the new combined handbook, so there might be something I'm missing.

This is about the best a T13 grav ship can reasonably pull and not have a ridiculously silly footprint.  Using the calculations in the book, found the best power differential I could by stripping features and leaving empty space, maintaining a 4:1 power differential.  From there, I simply scaled up the size up to 1000 M3, which ends up with a 5:1 power differential and a top speed of 19,824 km/h.  I'm not certain if you can build a grav platform that can beat that in the new guide, but to give you an idea, that's about 4 times the current air speed record.  The final ship uses about 52.55 M3 out of 1,000, which appears to be the minimum size for a turbine-powered craft of that size.  The turbine is the most efficient and powerful engine available at T13, and remains that way until antimatter becomes a possibility.  Note that the difference in cost is exponential as you increase, while diminishing returns in speed hit as you pass around 30 M3, with small jumps at 100 M3 and 1000 M3 due to the increased engine efficiency at that size.  Of course, this entire exercise is silly, but I wanted to show just how over the top that particular character could get.