AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
I agree, minor problem, move the boat forward or make a notch in the engineering bulkhead.
CT Only: Fixing the Type T Deck Plans?
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More progress. Drive bay and the attic were giving me fits.
Still a bit yet to do.
Quite self-satisfied about figuring out that the attic "clamshell" is meant to be an exact fit for the GCarrier. (Probably not canon dimensions, but whatever.)
Major realization was that the lower deck doesn't have much of its lower corners beveled away; the wing is full-thickness at the wing root and the wing root aligns with the lower deck, not halfway up the fuselage (lower two decks) side. Puts a bit more space into the downstairs drive room and the cargo hold, but the latter is still distorted by the ship's boat dock.
The exterior artwork really doesn't align with a sensible layout -- I've had to do some serious rationalization to make it kind of line up.
Still a bit yet to do.
Quite self-satisfied about figuring out that the attic "clamshell" is meant to be an exact fit for the GCarrier. (Probably not canon dimensions, but whatever.)
Major realization was that the lower deck doesn't have much of its lower corners beveled away; the wing is full-thickness at the wing root and the wing root aligns with the lower deck, not halfway up the fuselage (lower two decks) side. Puts a bit more space into the downstairs drive room and the cargo hold, but the latter is still distorted by the ship's boat dock.
The exterior artwork really doesn't align with a sensible layout -- I've had to do some serious rationalization to make it kind of line up.
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Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
Welcome, to my world. Were you use real world examples and common sense. 
Seems to be a bit of this going on here.Welcome, to my world. Were you use real world examples and common sense.
I'm deliberately trying to make "The Deck Plans that the ACS Vol II Type T Should Have Had."
It's harder than it has to be, because I'm pretty sure that the artist didn't have a concrete idea of how the insides fit together in the first place. Then it collided with the constraints of 16"x22" paper and a publishing deadline and.... oops.
Not sure that what I'm doing counts as definitive, but I like to think it's an improvement.
Almost done. Need to reorganize the arrangement of the decks on within the image.
Three forward Staterooms (SR) are for the Pilot, Navigator, and Chief Engineer.
Upper mid-deck SRs are for Gunnery Officer (lead gunner) and Medic; the other two engineers and three gunners are double-occupancy.
Lower mid-deck SRs are 3- or 4-man barracks, and a single room for the Troop Commander.
There's a shared head for the rest of the troops.
Tire-kicking welcome
ETA: caught one already. I've got the wing leading edges showing on the main deck, but they're entirely in the lower deck.
(That's why the wing airlocks come out of the lower cargo hold deck, and open to both the upper and lower wing surfaces.)
Three forward Staterooms (SR) are for the Pilot, Navigator, and Chief Engineer.
Upper mid-deck SRs are for Gunnery Officer (lead gunner) and Medic; the other two engineers and three gunners are double-occupancy.
Lower mid-deck SRs are 3- or 4-man barracks, and a single room for the Troop Commander.
There's a shared head for the rest of the troops.
Tire-kicking welcome
ETA: caught one already. I've got the wing leading edges showing on the main deck, but they're entirely in the lower deck.
(That's why the wing airlocks come out of the lower cargo hold deck, and open to both the upper and lower wing surfaces.)
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AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Purely esthetic:
I would move the fresher down-left into the corner in the bulkhead?
The passenger airlock from the boat and the half-height access to the marine bilges are a bit awkward?
Make the cargo hold fully one and a half deck high, move the bulkhead back a square to get the passenger airlock in the passenger area (not the cargo hold)?
Make a full height stairs from the passenger airlock down to the marine bilges, make the airlock between the crew deck and the midwall cargo hold into a notch for the stairs (perhaps with an emergency hatch)?
Perhaps something like this?
Or even widen the stairs and have up and down stairs side-by-side?
I would move the fresher down-left into the corner in the bulkhead?
The passenger airlock from the boat and the half-height access to the marine bilges are a bit awkward?
Make the cargo hold fully one and a half deck high, move the bulkhead back a square to get the passenger airlock in the passenger area (not the cargo hold)?
Make a full height stairs from the passenger airlock down to the marine bilges, make the airlock between the crew deck and the midwall cargo hold into a notch for the stairs (perhaps with an emergency hatch)?
Perhaps something like this?
Or even widen the stairs and have up and down stairs side-by-side?
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
Yeesh. Those staterooms look like something that anyone would be glad to reassigned out of ...
Good catch.
Yes, extremely awkward.
Not bad. Not sure I want to force passengers to enter though the troop quarters though.
Some potential there.
That's kind of the solution I declined to use for the foredeck/mid-decks split.
Some of this goes back to my idea of keeping the same topology as the original. In this case, it's to provide two separate pathways from the living space to the drive room. I did overdo that, though -- there's a chokepoint (single iris valve) at the front of the cargo hold, while I provided two exits from the living space. And that's because I wanted to have a path to the drive room that was sealed off from the cargo bay, so having the cargo bay in vacuum wouldn't cut off access without vacc suits.
I think I have a way around that.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
What about port/starboard airlock(s) for boarding actions in support of customs inspections?
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
I wastes a lot of space.
How about a foldable stairs combined with your idea of a low-gravity shaft:
The stair can connect to either Crew or Marine decks. With low gravity people can jump to the Crew deck when the stairs are down.
Not perfect, but somewhat compact?
Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
My take on that picture is there is only 1 central deck, there is an upper and launch docking area. At most 3 decks stacked on top of each other. There is no need ro offset decks.
You're thinking in two dimensions.
No need to go sideways -- the over/under wing airlocks (lower deck) could just as easily include "extendable jetway tubes". And there's the loading bay hatch (a few meters ahead of the GCarrier bay door hinge at its high point) in the attic.
Ideally, you'd do customs inspections/boarding ops with the Ship's Boat to reduce risk to the ship.
The deck offset is to recover the space in the double-height section of the gooseneck and back into the space between the wings.
Conceptually, there really are only three decks: the attic; the center deck that has a downward kink halfway along the gooseneck, and the bottom deck with the troop quarters and jump drive.
I'm considering using the lower half of the lower deck's cargo bay (that is, the area that surrounds the ship's boat intrusion) for fuel to give the cargo bay a flat load floor, and providing a crawl-space through it to provide access to the drive bay that bypasses the cargo hold.
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Ok, maybe not. Remember, the wings are 3m thick at the root where the ship's boat's cargo door aligns. If I move a chunk of Jump Drive over, there's room in the wing to slide a 4.5m wide chunk of cargo sideways out the door with clever use of a two-way loading ramp/platform. Maybe. I'll have to sketch it out, and I'll end up matching it on the other side.
Or maybe I'm just getting too clever. I'll sketch and see...
Yeah, no.
This is the section about midway through the cargo hold.
The top view from the illustration gives you the upper surface profile. Those steps and notches are mandatory, so the upper surface of the wing has to be where it is. Moving it down another 1.5m makes the hull edge/wing joint inconsistent with the illustration.
The lower surface profile is not defined by/in the illustration. If the wing tapers from 3m to 1.5m toward the tip, you get the section shown in the first drawing.
If it tapers from 4.5m to 1.5m toward the tip, you get the one in the second drawing.
I'm not sure that a 4.5m wing root thickness is plausible; this will take a little measuring and math.
I hadn't considered making the lower deck a mirror of the middle one (same bevel but upside-down, instead of the diagonal from the wing root to the ship's boat hull). This would add another 1.5m of level deck on each side, but it's not clear that's supported by illustrations.
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I want airlocks from quarters into the cargo hold, and a pressurized pathway from quarters to the drive bay that bypasses the hold.
The original design didn't have either (and I'm pretty sure that's not unusual for designs of that period).
I think I'll just include a crawlspace into the attic, then a hatch down into the drive bay near the front of the power plant. Wouldn't be the primary access path, but it'd be available if needed.
The original design didn't have either (and I'm pretty sure that's not unusual for designs of that period).
I think I'll just include a crawlspace into the attic, then a hatch down into the drive bay near the front of the power plant. Wouldn't be the primary access path, but it'd be available if needed.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
There's a fundamental fallacy at work here ... that 2D artists are AWESOME aerospace engineers.
They're not.
They draw whatever "looks good/looks cool" and sell it for publication.
Trying to make a 3D deck plan a PERFECT MATCH to a 2D artist's impression is a Fool's Errand.
In other words, you can be inspired by the appearance of the 2D art for your deck plans, but relying on that 2D art to constrain every aspect of your deck plans is a first principles mistake.
Getting "close enough" works just fine ... see the LBB S7 Scout/Courier as an example of the deck plan not being a "perfect match" for the 2D perspective drawn artwork.
I think you're painting yourself into a corner.
To be fair, as long as everything else about the lift surface scales, it should be fine.
Normally you don't want "thick wings" because it's a weight and material problem.
But, this is Sci Fi in the Far Future, and having megawatts of power on hand and at the ready solves many problems compared to today where the goal is to reduce power as much as practical.
I honestly have no problem with this. "Looks cool" should be line item number 1 of the "design evaluation" step. "applicability to role", "cost", etc. are all secondary.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
Gravity control/engineering solves SO MANY problems in aerospace ... especially when combined with heaping helpings of fusion power.
Neither do I, honestly.
If all you're seeing is the outside ... then only the outside needs to look good/look cool and you can do that in 2D NO PROBLEM.
But once you start seeing the inside and needing to "fill in" all the spaces made available by the 2D outline ... that's when you start having 3D problems (or even just 2.5D problems like with deck plans.
When you only have to look at the outside, it's all fun and games as far as the artwork is concerned.
As soon as you need to look at (and live in!) the inside ... all kinds of problems start to rear their ugly heads and make scratching noises on the chalkboard because the inside doesn't "fit" all that conveniently/neatly into the outside.
Cart vs Horse
Round 1
FIGHT!
Oh, it's obvious the design isn't informed by actual aerodynamics or much consideration for engineering -- it's art.
On the other hand, it looks like they tried to make it match, and the artist had a vague idea of where everything was supposed to be. The constraints of publication forced concessions, and in the end they just winged it.
Most of what I'm doing is to reverse those concessions. The rest is to make the living quarters somewhat more plausible. Aside from the weird layout forced by the narrow fuselage, it simply isn't arranged for people to live in for weeks or months at a time.
My guess is that they didn't think in those terms. Then again, they didn't have to -- the Type T isn't usually a PC party's ship, and PC parties won't likely be spending much time aboard one. It's a stage set and a tactical battle map, not a workplace/home. That's why it gets away without having staterooms for the gunners, for example. Who's going to take the time to count staterooms while you're fighting a boarding action or trying to escape?
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