I'm thinking it's more of an aerodynamic problem, but the same principle applies.
And of course it's Sci-Fi so none of it really matters, just optimizing it for the "That Looks About Right" factor.
CT Only: Fixing the Type T Deck Plans?
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And of course it's Sci-Fi so none of it really matters, just optimizing it for the "That Looks About Right" factor.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
Agreed.
Yeah, the Configuration of Things™ to put into internal spaces dictates a LOT of things ... like staterooms. There are certain "shapes" that staterooms can assume that Work™ while other "shapes" of the exact same area don't. So there's a "puzzle pieces" factor involved with arranging bits and pieces into the form factor of the hull.
And yeah, I prefer to think of things first in terms of crew quality of life (and traffic flows) rather than in terms of just shoehorning stuff into any available crevice (well, except for medical beds, I guess).
Exactly.
Rigel Stardin
SOC-13
I don't see how you can call it a 'stage setting' when the crew spends 7 days in Jump aboard the ship and when it docked. Things do happen onboard a ship.
For the crew and any passengers, sure. My point here is that this set of FASA deck plans are not designed for the crew and passengers!
They're designed (in an outside-the-game sense) for the PCs that will only briefly interact with the ship as visitors (for whatever reason), and for that they're "good enough". Any issues the ship's crew might have are "off-stage".
This is part of the problem I'm trying to fix here.
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WINGS:
Semi-span ex fuselage (wing root to tip): 12 squares (18m)
Root Chord: (longitudinal, not angled): 18 squares (21m)
Tip Chord 3m.
Mean Chord: 11.5m
Area (entire wing ex fuselage): 11.5m x 36m = 414m^2
@ 1.5m mean thickness: 414m^2 x 1.5m = 621m^3, or 46Td
@ 2.25m MT (taper from 3-1.5m) = 931.5m^3, or 69Td
@ 3m MT (taper from 4.5m to 1.5m) = 92Td.
The ship needs 160Td of fuel. Oops.
It has to be at least 4.5m thick at the wing roots... and the wingtips are probably thicker than 1.5m, too.
This is a quick and dirty estimate, and probably underestimated things a bit. Still, it suggests that a 4.5m thick root wing section isn't unreasonable.
It's all fun and games until someone tries to go inside and starts bumping their head.
Also, the tip fins (top half) are 8 deck squares (12m) tall and 6m wide where they join the wing, thickness undefined. Which means the deck plans' tip chord length is incorrect, too.
I had assumed all along that they got the wings "close enough" that I wouldn't need to mess with them as well. *sigh*
(Did they slice out some of the hull in the middle of the wing too so it fit, and not just part of the nose section?)
I had assumed all along that they got the wings "close enough" that I wouldn't need to mess with them as well. *sigh*
(Did they slice out some of the hull in the middle of the wing too so it fit, and not just part of the nose section?)
I think that's what they did. Shorted the cargo hold to make it work out, then shifted the wing trailing edge and wingtips to make it work.
Note that the triangles in the wing are similar (but flipped).
The lavender boxes at the aft end match the "fantail" and protruding drives in the illustration.
Stretching the wing lengthwise at a 4.5m mean thickness adds another 48Td fuel, but the trailing edge trim clips a little out of that (maybe a couple of tons, tops). Puts fuel back up to 140Td.
Adds about 11-ish Td to the main hull (5 in upper cargo, 4 in lower cargo/drive bay, 2 in the attic), bringing it really close to stated volume -- it was 14Td short in my previous estimate.
I'm beginning to think that's darn close to the dimensions originally intended for the deck plans, before they had to make it fit onto paper. And IIRC, first edition LBB2 had a typo for the fuel capacity, so it might well have been drawn with 140Td fuel...
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Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
Correct.
3 parsecs for 400 tons = 120 tons of fuel
Standard drive power plant 4 = 40 tons of fuel
Total: 160 tons of fuel (errata corrected value)
And back to the drawing board I go...
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
Here's a delicious bit of irony for you.
Reviewing this image helped me realize that in my Patrol Corvette deck plans I was putting the mid-ship airlock too far forward.
It's more like a short distance forward of the wing root.
I was putting it about halfway between the wing root and the bridge bubbles.
So I'm currently working up yet another deck plan for this 400 ton form factor (albeit modified further to fit my latest Five Sisters Clipper design that I needed to repost to correct some oversights and errata that I only found after posting, of course) and decided to rearrange the crew quarters arrangement from what I've done in previous versions. This time, I've got the arrangement (moving forward from aft) as engine room, port/starboard access corridor, medical+lounge and fuel arms ... then the mid-ship port/starboard airlock ... and then forward of the airlock is where ALL the crew quarters are in the long neck (all 8 staterooms together on a single corridor) before reaching the computer room, the bridge and avionics.
The rearrangement of keeping the crew quarters together with the crew lounge and medical areas separate aft of the mid-ship airlock actually "cleaned up" some issues that I had previously been having and yielded a better "look" as well as traffic flow for everything. Just one of those things where you need to keep iterating and trying out different arrangements in order to keep polishing up the overall philosophy of What Goes Where inside a defined form factor ... because art is never finished, merely abandoned.
Reviewing this image helped me realize that in my Patrol Corvette deck plans I was putting the mid-ship airlock too far forward.
It's more like a short distance forward of the wing root.
I was putting it about halfway between the wing root and the bridge bubbles.
So I'm currently working up yet another deck plan for this 400 ton form factor (albeit modified further to fit my latest Five Sisters Clipper design that I needed to repost to correct some oversights and errata that I only found after posting, of course) and decided to rearrange the crew quarters arrangement from what I've done in previous versions. This time, I've got the arrangement (moving forward from aft) as engine room, port/starboard access corridor, medical+lounge and fuel arms ... then the mid-ship port/starboard airlock ... and then forward of the airlock is where ALL the crew quarters are in the long neck (all 8 staterooms together on a single corridor) before reaching the computer room, the bridge and avionics.
The rearrangement of keeping the crew quarters together with the crew lounge and medical areas separate aft of the mid-ship airlock actually "cleaned up" some issues that I had previously been having and yielded a better "look" as well as traffic flow for everything. Just one of those things where you need to keep iterating and trying out different arrangements in order to keep polishing up the overall philosophy of What Goes Where inside a defined form factor ... because art is never finished, merely abandoned.
As such boarding fights and brig escapes are paramount. Suggests that should be the design goal. Particularly the path to small craft and opportunities to disable the ship.
This is "leaning into the weirdness of docking the Ship's Boat sideways".
Left two plans are just the cargo bay (top, then bottom deck) rotated nose-to-left.
Beige area has no floor.
Right plan is the section view through it, with it's gravity aligned with that of the ship's boat.
MC Escher is my Loadmaster.
Offload the cargo from the boat to the "floor" (boat's perspective) and strap it down.
Switch the gravity from "sideways to match the boat" to "normal for the ship", and take the cargo off the "wall" (which was the floor) and walk it to its storage location.
Left two plans are just the cargo bay (top, then bottom deck) rotated nose-to-left.
Beige area has no floor.
Right plan is the section view through it, with it's gravity aligned with that of the ship's boat.
MC Escher is my Loadmaster.
Offload the cargo from the boat to the "floor" (boat's perspective) and strap it down.
Switch the gravity from "sideways to match the boat" to "normal for the ship", and take the cargo off the "wall" (which was the floor) and walk it to its storage location.
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Yeah, sure -- let's put the low berths (used for prisoner transport) right next to the bridge. What could possibly go wrong?
Direct access to the drive bay from the cargo hold? Of course.
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I was thinking more engineering opportunities plus control lines have to run between bridge and all elements. Maybe disabling fire control/ turrets.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
A safer assumption would be a null-g gravlock type of arrangement (inside of which there is no "down" direction), where each respective craft has their own internal gravity nadir orientation, but between them (when docked) there is a zero-g microgravity zone allowing crew/passengers/cargo to be reoriented for transfers between the two craft. Such a feature could be styled as part of an airlock on the starship side, but doesn't necessarily require atmospheric pressure cycling in order to operate. Being able to combine airlock and gravlock into the same feature would be ideal, of course.
An even more ideal arrangement would be an airlock/gravlock for the crew access airlock behind the bridge of the ship's boat (the reason why the boat needs to roll 90º in order to dock) and have the payload bay door just open directly into the cargo bay for cargo transfers (the cargo bay could be set to zero-g or microgravity during the transfer). Under those conditions, you would ideally want to be able to "load" the G-Carrier into the ship's boat for orbit to surface transfers ... except the G-Carrier is stored on the dorsal top deck as far away from the ventral lower deck as possible, making a grav lift structure to transfer the G-Carrier through the hull for loading into the ship's boat as impractical as possible.
To be honest, the G-Carrier ought to be loaded into the ship's boat by default, with the option to move it into the cargo bay if a "switcheroo" is needed to transfer other cargo contents using the ship's boat.
To be even more honest, I'm of the opinion that a better "fit" would have been a 50 ton Modular Cutter, with the G-Carrier loaded into the module, instead of a 30 ton ship's boat plus 8 ton G-Carrier (38 tons). Doing that would reduce the cargo bay size by -12 tons, but you would have a far more capable combination of craft. The only advantage the ship's boat offers is 6G performance, which is "nice to have" since the Type-T is a 4G starship ... so the ship's boat can operate as a "pursuit craft" (of sorts). The problem with such an approach is that a ship's boat makes for a remarkably lousy fighter combatant, poorly suited for the pursuit role. There's a kind of "dog catches car" feeling involved when pressing an unarmored ship's boat into the role of being a fast fighter. Sure, the quarry can't escape from you easily ... but as an unarmored small craft it isn't that difficult for them to disable your ship's boat either (assuming the target has offensive weaponry).
The canon GCarrier (as well as the non-canon one I'm custom-fitting into the top deck dock) won't fit into the Traders and Gunboats version of the Ship's Boat. Tonnage says it does, measurements say it won't.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 1K
And hilarity ensues ...
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Is there a "canon" GCarrier, better specified than "8 t"?
Profile view in LBB3 '81, p. 20. No dimensions given, but I suppose you could use the Air/raft picture in the same image for reference.
