Deckplan design: theory and practice

[gardclan]

Originally posted by Capt. Blacklight:
As I seem to recall it was a blend of tech as well, the Hull and I think the power plant were bought from Darrian, and the rest was built on Arden.... Interesting use of a small boat in a mini carrier mode.

Nasty bugger, yes. The design notes show the hull armor at factor 15, with agility 6, but yes, it was a blend of tech. That kind of armor requires higher tech than Arden had (but the maneuver drive doesn't), so it would have had to have been the hull itself that was produced by the Darians.

No jump drive though, this is strictly and SDB/Rider. Still, unless you are engaging big guns, a flight or two of these would mince things up very nicely assuming you could get them into play fast enough.

Oh come on Rhys, that month sitting around Arden, Hidding from Every Fedhead, Zho, and Customs puke they had... that's what you call seldom? Mind youAfter that, it was mostly used as a training vessel for Engineers and New pilots, Although I seem to recall a bit of running around in her myself.

Well, granted. But in a two year+ campaign, that doesn't amount to a great deal of time percentage. We did use it a bit after poor Roger died at Kelthladi, but the thing never saw combat.

I suppose the relevance here is the quality of the plans. What I sketched out was (in my opinion) just enough to allow for play, but not so much that the project took me forever to finish. While its important to a degree to have these details correct, its still only a game. A good balance needs to be struck between how much time you have to devote to a project without infringing on your real life stuff, but still be realistic/reasonable/usable enough to enhance game play.

After all, once all is said and done the deckplans you produce should enhance game play, not detract from it. If deckplans are something you enjoy as an end in and of itself... then by all means throw the kitchen sink at the project. For our purposes, a cursory "think through" of where stuff should logically be was enough, and three hours of photoshop work did the rest. Oh, the scale is eyeballed as well.

So I guess the whole issue of how detailed or accurate a set of plans needs to be depends on two things. 1) The needs of the group using it. and 2) How much effort the archetect wishes to put into it. If you are going to post something on the internet for wide scale usage, then it should probably be as accurate as you can manage, because other users will have different needs. If the project (like the 'Fish) is not intended for use outside your group, then your own analysis of how "good" the thing should be is up to you.

YMMV.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

One other reason to do decent deck plans: your group has a techie type that has a habit of saying things like, "You couldn't possibly fit a TL14 Meson in that hull!" Of course, if you follow the CT design specs, you might end up agreeing with them.

 

[Falkayn]

Originally posted by Fritz88:
One other reason to do decent deck plans: your group has a techie type that has a habit of saying things like, "You couldn't possibly fit a TL14 Meson in that hull!" Of course, if you follow the CT design specs, you might end up agreeing with them.

Yeah, I had once had an engineer friend quickly work out on the back of a napkin the required size of the 4 air ducts I had specified for the underground warehouse they were being held in - he worked out that each one would be around 6 feet diameter - so I let them use them travel in them (not originally a possibility in my mind).

Only the fact that he was pretty much full-time designing air-con and other services stuff for hospitals and shopping malls made me trust him. To this day I still don't know if he was pulling my leg or not ...

(I do however now pay a great deal of interest to the size of air ducts in buildings I am in)

 

[Falkayn]

Originally posted by Rhys Trask:
The 'Fish was part of the ISS Ursula campaign for a good portion of its run, but seldom actually got used. From what Bryan tells me the original "statistical design" was done by Shane McLane. Bryan Gibson did the external design. All I did was figure an approximate scale based on hull volume and overlay things by freehand in Photoshop. (After an initial hand sketch that is.) Someday I'll get around to actually laying things out in AutoCAD, but for game purposes, it was sufficient.

Is there a larger file available?

 

[gardclan]

Originally posted by Falkayn:
Is there a larger file available?

Sure. The original is in Photoshop, and what I posted was a JPG file that runs roughtly 1.2 megs. The MSN site automaticaly downscales things for display to save space. Its a tad larger, and more clear than the site, but the quality isn't any better I'm afraid. I can email it to you if you like. Shoot me your addy by private message or something and I'll send it over.

 

[Drakon]

Originally posted by flykiller:
when the ship has a high jump number, you can fit straight-line boxes into the spheroid hull and just say the gaps between the living space and the hull are filled with fuel.

Well, yeah, but that is cheating

 

[Tanuki]

Originally posted by Drakon:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by flykiller:
when the ship has a high jump number, you can fit straight-line boxes into the spheroid hull and just say the gaps between the living space and the hull are filled with fuel.

Well, yeah, but that is cheating

</font>[/QUOTE]Works for me. All that fuel is there to provide padding to shape the hull as desired.

 

[Chuck Anumia]

Do Jump Drives have to be placed in the rear of the Ship?

 

[far-trader]

Ah there it is

I knew this thread was floating around somewhere. Now that I found my contribution to it that I meant to add a while back, maybe even back to Crow's beginnings of it. Here's my old take on the subject, not what to use but how I tackled the contents...

Starship Deckplan Guide

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by cweiskircher:
Do Jump Drives have to be placed in the rear of the Ship?

Tricksy question

I don't think so and kinda like the idea of burying them deep for protection. But you do have to have some rationale for heat dissapation and jump field connection. So I usually place my entire engineering section in the aft and together, with the maneuver sticking out the rear, the powerplant radiators on the top and the jump drive radiators on the bottom.

In fact you don't even need the maneuver drive in the rear in some Traveller versions/visions.

 

[RandyT0001]

If your maneuver drive uses a reactant such as HEPLAR then you want to place them so as to provide thrust to your ship. Jump drives and power plants should be located close to the maneuver drive in order to lessen the length of power cables coming form the power plant to the drives. Jump drives and power plants could be located anywhere in the ship IMO.

 

[daibaka]

If you didn't care about cable length from power plants you could even put the jumpdrive machinery in a pair of pods on the end of rather long booms off the main hull... or is that idea taken?

 

[Uncle Bob]

I tend to lump the drives at the rear of the ship so I have hull-space available for the (poorly defined) radiator needs and the engineers have a comon workspace. I define "maneuver drive" by LBB as something like the "Dean Drive" of the 1960s (or maybe a Woodward/Mach's principle drive), which doesn't need grav plates or HePlar nozzles. So it usually ends up nearest the middle of the ship. I like the Jump drive to touch the hull, since it is processing enormous amounts of hydrogen that must go somewhere.

The power plant usually goes at the very back, as I assume the glowing "rocket nozzles" on most pictures are actually venting waste heat from the PP.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Ohhhh! Goody.

Are we going to talk about the need to radiate heat now?

 

[RandyT0001]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
Ohhhh! Goody.

Are we going to talk about the need to radiate heat now?

Let's not and say we did. The neccessity of radiating heat is best left for the individual referee to determine for his TU. I would hate to see this thread corrupted into a useless flamewar about the need to have heat radiators on ships.

 

[far-trader]

My bad, I should, I do know better than to even touch on that issue. I apologize for bringing it up, however...

As I have brought it up and no one's been burned yet I think we can all agree it deserves a nod but we needn't obsess about, well, all of it that's been done to death on the TML and elsewhere. Let us just accept that with some of the science comes fiction, or science so advanced that to us it seems magic, and not worry about heat and specific radiator requirements beyond a passing nod. Or as Randy Tyler says, just leave it to the individual referee.

 

[RainOfSteel]

far-trader,

"You are provisionally forgiven."
-- Liosh, from either Jhereg, or Yendi

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Randy Tyler:
Let's not and say we did. The neccessity of radiating heat is best left for the individual referee to determine for his TU. I would hate to see this thread corrupted into a useless flamewar about the need to have heat radiators on ships.

Yes, it's already been done several times on the TML, and at least once here on CotI (a topic, I don't know whether it was a flamewar, I avoided it).

But should any feel the need for continuing on that subject, there is already an appropriate topic available: How to cool ships, or, Why is my fuel tank so friggin huge?

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by cweiskircher:
Do Jump Drives have to be placed in the rear of the Ship?

If you take CT Supplement 7: Traders and Gunboats, CT Adventures 1, 4, 7, 10 &13, even Azhanti High Lightning, the jump drives are always shown in the rear of the ship.
On most of the deck plans the jump drive appears to have some sort of exterior mounted "vent" or "thruster nozzle".

 

[veltyen]

On most of the deck plans the jump drive appears to have some sort of exterior mounted "vent" or "thruster nozzle".

Odd. I'd always assumed that the only external part of the engines was the thruster plate for the maneveur drive. The jump drive needs to be connected to the jump grid which is on the outer skin of the vessel, so being near the external hull is a good idea. It tends to be in the same space as the maneveur drives though, which means it is generally towards the rear of a ship.

I quite like the heart arrangement for deckplans with critical systems such as the jump drive and computer near the core of the vessel, with less critical areas arround it, so I might be biased