CT Only: Fixing the Type T Deck Plans?

[Spinward Flow]

this detail from the Kinunir:

No offense, but the Kinunir deck plans are probably literally the first set of deck plans ever created for Traveller ... and it shows (now). The tools for making those deck plans (back then) were hella primitive by today's computer art standards. In other words, we can do better than that now.

Also, the Kinunir drive room was laid out that way so that you could have shootouts in the drive bays (theoretically), and for that you need plenty of open space for sight lines and the like during a boarding action tactical wargame scenario on a tabletop.

Of course, a better perspective on the idea is, well ... something more like this ...

Many deck plans are fairly open and airy in the engineering compartment

It's better to think of starships as being more akin to "space submarines" where internal volume is at a premium (go figure, right?). That means (to me) that engineering spaces ought to be more full of "drives 'n' stuff" than, you know ... AIR.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Hmmm.

If I trim down the remote weapon stations that I've got near Engineering from being 2x2 blocks (with lots of wasted space) into being a 1x1 circular "pod" space with a hatch instead of an iris valve, I could reorganize the aft crew section to have a different cross section (6 wide instead of 8 wide), which would then help with tapering the fuselage towards the bridge and the nose cone with the avionics better. However, making such a revision would necessarily involve a LOT of reshuffling forward of the drive room ... which is as good an opportunity as any to stop what I'm doing and move on from the 2nd draft to a 3rd draft instead.

The overall hull length may need to increase beyond the 60 meters (40 squares) that I was currently budgeting for, but if it yields an overall better looking outer hull outline from stem to stern, that's a good enough reason to start over from scratch using previous research to inform the next iteration.

And back into Starship Geomorphs 2.0 I go to prize out some more snippets for use ...

 

[AnotherDilbert]

No offense, but the Kinunir deck plans are probably literally the first set of deck plans ever created for Traveller ... and it shows (now). The tools for making those deck plans (back then) were hella primitive by today's computer art standards. In other words, we can do better than that now.

We can easily make prettier deck plans, but better is questionable.

The Kinunir plans have several good ideas, such the access shaft through the entire ship, a large "cargo" lift throughout the ship that descends to the ground, dedicated ammo lifts from the magazine to the missile mounts, stores, workshops, different types of accommodations, an aux. control room, offices, galleys and wardrooms, etc...

It shows some thought to actually using the ship, and creatively using the system without breaking it.

I haven't bothered to check, but I guess the living accommodations are grossly over-sized, yet that is hardly unusual among early designs.

All in all I think they are pretty good.

Also, the Kinunir drive room was laid out that way so that you could have shootouts in the drive bays (theoretically), and for that you need plenty of open space for sight lines and the like during a boarding action tactical wargame scenario on a tabletop.

I'm not the author, so I wouldn't know why it's made as it's made.

It's better to think of starships as being more akin to "space submarines" where internal volume is at a premium (go figure, right?). That means (to me) that engineering spaces ought to be more full of "drives 'n' stuff" than, you know ... AIR.

Sure, but maintenance access is still needed.

Here's the machine room for a current small warship, so the ship is pretty packed, yet there is still plenty of room to service the machinery:


Even the machine room on submarines are not completely packed, but do allow access:

Of the entire volume, most of it look like empty air to me.

 

[Condottiere]

Space is at a premium, because a cubic metre has so much overhead on it.

 

[Rigel Stardin]

Late to the party as usual. I've been busy with another project, I hope to post soon. I took a break to with this little puppy up. Hope you are inspired and enjoy them plans. I still have work to do it and it's not complete. Want to enlarge the wings and do some minor touches to the engineering sections.

I took the design posted by I've added a Grav Moped a few things. A Lounge for the crew, Mess Hall and Med-Bay. I plan to do a proper Ship's boat to match the Deckplans. So it a work in progress...

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Late to the party as usual. I've been busy with another project, I hope to post soon. I took a break to with this little puppy up.

Certainly more beautiful than anything I have ever made.

You added a pair of air/rafts?

A square grid would make it easier to read, and perhaps some labels?

 

[Rigel Stardin]

I hope this helps with figuring out what rooms are what. This is a work in progress and designed for another thread I'm working on but it should give a general idea of what is what. AS far as grids go, I can't find a background color that would standout and not interfere with the drawing templates I use.

And yes there are 2 Air/rafts, there is a 6 seater just forward of them but it has to fit in sideways.

 

[Rigel Stardin]

A few hours later and I've upgraded the engines, designed a ship's boat, added fuel scoops and put in a workshop. I'm now going to take a nap. afterwards I label the room not on the lisr you've already seen. However, if you follow the Deckplans Grav Moped posted, you'll see I kept to the orginal plan. I did add crew because 6 to operate a starship? That some High Tech... well, let's say I don't believe everything the Imperium says. Oh, I put the six seater Air/raft in the air/raft bay.

 

[Spinward Flow]

So I'm working on my next revision of my version of the deck plans and have worked out what looks like a pretty decent compromise that gives a nice linear taper to the hull planform from stem to stern that looks a lot closer to what the artwork for the Type T is promoting. It's slow going though since I have to do all of my workup in sections now to prevent the Preview application from unnecessarily blurring everything out when I add "too much stuff" to a single image. Fortunately, I can work using PNG files which let me use the alpha transparency to place "objects" where I want on the grid background and then delete the background to the only thing(s) I need to crop down to are the compartment section that I'm working with.

That will then let me "snap together" all of the components at the end and not wind up with a blurry to the point of useless image to post.

 

[Grav_Moped]

In the FASA plans in plan view, I see the hull tapering from the aft end until a few meters aft of the bug-eyes, then being a rectangular prism (give or take rounding the sides off for aesthetics), then tapering from the flight deck to the radome. What's odd is that the upper and lower surfaces of the main deck seem to be parallel until forward of the flight deck bubbles, so the only vertical taper happens in that radome, unless there's more taper hidden between the bubbles. Doesn't look like it though.

Probably ought to start in on drawing my own plans... LOL

 

[Rigel Stardin]

As requested, the rooms that were not listed in the Legend. I also modifed the lower deck. Instead of a cabinet next to the Access Ladder in the cargo is now a full Storage Room. I've thrown about some 1.5 Meter Squares (squares in pink) and layout the Cargo Bay with some cargo to show you how I figure out cargo. On the center deck, I have laid out bothe cargo and grid. I will always tell you the full tonnage in cargo because, who am I to tell you how to fill your Cargo Bays. The left side of the drawing shows you 1 Ton Cargo Containers (Actually, they take up one Ton of floor space.). This is the regulation stowage configuration, the leave a passsage to every entrance to the Cargo Bay, thus reducing the Cargo tonnage. Where the cargo space is 30.5 Tons, by regulation you can only carry 18 Tons in the upper cargo bay.

The Next Time you'll see this Deckplan is when I get around to doing the math and the write up. I'm doing something else at the moment and want to do another 'Ted Talk' about my ship creation so you have a better understand of designs verses Traveller before I start posting more ship deckplans.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Your power plant uses ... a big wind up key ...?

 

[Rigel Stardin]

....It's part of the (insert technobabble) which controls the fission going on inside the main reactor (the oval gray thingy). Boy, you Imperial really need to brush up on your Innerempire Tech....

(In the real world) It suppose to represent a top down view of the reactor which is two deck tall. I just didn't want to cut copy and paste the center deck depiction to the lower deck. I had that peice of (art work) equipment in a file and I slapped it on there. If you want it changed, I'll do it but you'll have to wait for the finished product because, I'm two or three ships away from completing my major project.

 

[whartung]

Your power plant uses ... a big wind up key ...?

It's similar to the rubber band powered spinny thing in Firefly.

 

[kilemall]

Your power plant uses ... a big wind up key ...?

Don’t you recognize a muonic injector when you see one?

 

[Grav_Moped]

It's similar to the rubber band powered spinny thing in Firefly.

Rubber-band powered? It uses an escapement on single channel pulse radio control?

(REALLY obsolete R/C control system --1950s-60s. You probably have NO idea how jury-rigged the early systems were.)

Quick summary: Send a single pulse (tap the transmitter button) and the receiver blips a solenoid that allows the rubber-band driven-escapement to jump to the next position. The escapement controls a linkage to the rudder. Your selection rotates through center, left, center, right, center, left... etc. Keep track of which direction you sent last time, it's important!

To get a left turn from straight, after having done a left turn previously, tap three times (once to "right" then again quickly back to "neutral" and once more for "left").

Paraphrasing one of the pioneers of the hobby, a successful flight was one where the plane crashed in a different spot than it would have without the radio control.

But, amazingly, you could get a plane with a system like this to do loops!

 

[Grav_Moped]

I did add crew because 6 to operate a starship? That some High Tech... well, let's say I don't believe everything the Imperium says.

The canon Type T has a flight crew of 10 (Pilot, Navigator, Medic, three Engineers, four gunners) and eight troops for boarding actions. I have no idea how they thought you could fit all 10 of the flight crew into six staterooms, even if the gunners were double-bunked. (Troops got double-bunked on the top deck.)

I'm guessing the main deck originally had 8 nominal staterooms (gunners doubled up in two of them, as per the listing in LBB2), but they cut out two staterooms of length to get the main deck to fit onto the paper, and overlooked that they didn't have enough staterooms left -- probably because the person doing the final review saw the "office" and "chart room" and mistakenly thought they were staterooms too.

 

[Grav_Moped]

After sketching out some reference lines over the FASA illustration, I noted some points where the plan deviated from the artwork.
- There's no "neck" behind the flight deck bubbles. From a top view, the deck is a triangle all the way to the nose. From the side, I think the mid-deck tapers slightly going forward; then, forward of the flight deck bubbles, the top and bottom of the deck converge to a point at the nose.
- They also cropped off the drives sticking out the back.
- And it looks like the leading edge of the wings are notched, so there's a small "balcony" just outside the over-wing airlock doors. Or a weird shadow, but I don't see anything else with a hatch.
- What's going on with the slightly raised panel just ahead of the missile turrets? One of the ships in the distance seems to have that panel raised even further, as though it might be a cargo door or something.
- The upper deck plan does not match the illustration. It should be narrower, and perhaps taller.
- I'm thinking that the ship's boat (Traders & Gunboats design, a long cylinder with rounded nose) is carried underneath in a docking cradle because its nose is visible just below the wing. Also, there doesn't seem to be much of a lower deck aside from the docking cradle. Maybe there are drive nacelles on either side of the boat, but the illustrations don't show that area very clearly. They could include the landing gear (lower tip fins fold under for landing; for jump, both the upper and lower fins fold parallel to wing to minimize the jump bubble volume).

I think I might borrow one of @AnotherDilbert's ideas and make the aft section of the main deck a "split-level house" -- it's a single deck back to the wings, then an upper/lower deck aft, plus the top deck with the troop quarters and GCarrier.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Yes, if the black marking between the bulges are the windows to the bridge, the bulges might be sensor domes?

Forward view for someone at a workstation between the bubbles.

But there are already too many seats (two per bubble)! Pilot, navigator, chief engineer... and an extra seat. That could go to the lead gunner, if we jump ahead to High Guard and consolidate the weapons into batteries. The "extra" gunner (the one who isn't the gunnery officer or the ones operating the laser and missile batteries) is then a floating loader/mechanic instead of manning a turret.

Or it could be for a troop coordinator (if that position existed!)

Maybe it's just there because someone wanted a window facing forward. (shrugs)


ETA: ... or just have one seat per bubble, and put the engineer in the middle front?

 

[whartung]

Paraphrasing one of the pioneers of the hobby, a successful flight was one where the plane crashed in a different spot than it would have without the radio control.

Funny, this (sorta) reminds me of a comment from a falconer. "A successful day is when you let your bird out to hunt and they come back."

And I can see how that worked. We visited couple that shared their birds with people. And the falcon they were showing, he was but a small spec far away. At least a 1/2 mile. Yet they were able to bring him back.