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K'Kree Starship Design questions...

"Nope. Not supported by extant canon. K'Kree have sufficient females, and even servants often have wives." Haven't been paying attention to the ongoing discussion? Don't care about broken canon.

"If designed using Book2…" Where is it that LBB2 describes stateroom and other space requirements for non-humans? ;)

If we merely triple the human space requirements in LBB2, a 100dT ship can't be built and a 200dT can barely fit the 60dT bridge and 12dT staterooms for a crew of 4 (+ 4 wives), 156dT. With J1/M1 and fuel, about 10dT is left over for cargo and turret systems. If merely tripling is sufficient.
 
"If designed using Book2…" Where is it that LBB2 describes stateroom and other space requirements for non-humans?
Click to expand...
It doesn't, but Alien Module 2: K'kree does present rules for adapting LBB2 to Alien species' ships, as do all of the other CT Alien modules for their respective races.
The K'kree system is a bit hybridised with LBB5 for drives, but the weaponry (aside from being double the tonnage and cost) and write-ups are pure LBB2.
K'kree ships start at 1000dt and their standard hulls are in multiples of 1000 up to 10000dt.
Bridge space and computers are identical to LBB2, and accomodation is 48dt per K'kree, double occupancy only on female-less military ships.
 
The Imperial Atlantic-class 75k-dton heavy cruiser has a crew of 60 officers, and 432 ratings.

Granted, a handful of officers (the captains, the heads of each department, and the like) will have private staterooms, but for simplicity's sake, let's just assume that they're all in double occupancy ones (2 dtons each). That means 984 dtons for everyone aboard.

Let's be equally generous with the equivalent K'kree warship, and assume "double occupancy" (24 dtons each). That means a whopping 11808 dtons for everybody aboard! Subtracting 984 dtons yields a 10,824 dton "claustrophobia penalty."

That's 14.432% of the total volume of a 75k dton ship! Just reducing the jump drive's rating by one will save 11%, but that still means you have to scrounge up another 3.432% to get everything aboard. Reducing the maneuver drive's rating by one would just about (but not quite) cover the difference.

Okay... perhaps "lumbering target-shaped tub" might be a *slight* exaggeration -- but there's no denying losing that a parsec of jump-range *and* a Gee of acceleration, and getting absolutely *nothing* in return is a pretty big penalty to pay.

And that's for a warship. I'd hate to try to design a sensible troop transport for K'kree!
 
And I might add that I think that canon is being extraordinarily kind to the K'kree in allowing their ships to use the standard damage allocation tables. The K'kree are known to be very reluctant to divide their ships up with internal partitions and solid airtight bulkheads. Aboard a warship (particularly one that is going to be taking meson-gun fire, and thus experience internal explosions!) this is going to cause a lot of trouble!

And would K'kree be able to "close the blast doors" and let fellow crew-members suffocate in depressurizing compartments after a hull breach, anyway? I genuinely don't know the answer to that one. On the one hand, the pitiful (but sadly diminishing) banging on the hatches (and pleas for help over the intercoms) might be unbearable for them, but on the other hand, they identify so closely with the herd as a whole that it might be easy to shrug off such losses. Probably not a factor, I guess.
 
Re the previous. I do recall from somewhere that Kkree combine staterooms into a single volume so that rather than having 4 crew staterooms on that free trader they have one 16 dton area with holo walls etc to make it seem larger and tonage like bridge ets is added in because the bridge consoles are in the living area. There was an article about traveling on a Kkree ship some time ago which if my old and failing memory recalls correctly had the family crew living in a grass floor'd dome in the middle of the ship with all the consoles in the open area and the central life support column was made to look like a tree.
If you take one 4 dton stateroom per passenger and crew then you have a single area of 40 dtons on a free trader. The kkree being happy in herds aren't bothered by crowds, you can pack a lot of them in a small area and they will be happy to be part of the herd as long as the small area they are in is big enough not to trigger thier claustrophobia. A nightmare if you get holed but otherwise above a certain size it becomes a less significant problem.
 
In design of K'Kree starships (Especially in the early development stage) compartmentalization is a major factor. Now if they are big disks is the engine perpendicular to the plane of the disk? Or is it more like half the starship designs in Traveller Cannon where the accelleration vector is Parrallel to the floor. (In other words does it come at you edge on or as a big round target?) The lack of compartmentalism, especially for someone claustrophobic is a major negative in ship design. If it isn't edge on then atmospheric operations would be impossible. But it if is edge on and your inertial compensators went offline you could be in for a very nasty fall. Now if your ceiling is 2M off the floor and you stand perpendicular to the plane of acceleration (In otherwords your ship is laid out like the Lightning or Broadsword deckplans) then even under 6G acceleration the farthest fall you could have is equivalent to about 12 meters. If you are standing at the bridge door of a 100T Scout, (The original canon scout ie Sup-7) and have no inertial compensation you could fall, under just 2G acceleration, the equivalent of 36 meters. (117 Feet.) And that is a small compartmentalized ship. Make the ship larger, remove compartmentalization and you could wipe out the entire crew with a component failure. Even with the ship designed with the floor perpendicular to the direction of travel with high domes you can get into serious trouble.

Explosive decompression is another nightmare and since there may be some consoles but it is fairly open how far are you from something you can grab to keep your self from getting sucked out of the hole? Also, with a big open plain and grass floor where are the vacc suits kept?

As far as K'Kree soldiers on a modern battlefield. Many chemical agents don't have to be inhaled. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination claustrophobic but being in an NBC suit makes you feel isolated and closed in even out in the middle of the Mohave desert. Putting on an NBC suit is time consuming and while they may be well trained for a race that doesn't put on clothes and with only two hands but 4 legs, putting on and sealing a suit would be rough without being claustrophobic. Vacc Suits, Combat Environment suits, Combat Armor and Battledress would be about the same. You don't even need to use anything all that nasty to kill a K'Kree invasion force. VX would certainly do the job. And that is nothing more than an overly concentrated Insecticide. Normally NBC warfare is ineffective against a military target but more useful against a civilian target, but in this case....
 
I would surmise the K'Kree could keep suits on quickrelease tethers, handing from the ceiling in designated areas of the ship... it would asume they have devloped some methodology behind getting in an out of them quick, perhaps a "Bootjack" type system, putting the forlimbs in a sort of "Stocks" an simply rearing up out of the suit...

What about having concentric Hulls? Shells within Shells? Sort of like submarine design? It would be a radical move from the standard deckplan layout, but coupled with ample holographic and pheromonal comfort devices, could just do the trick. 5 meters between "decks" would be plenty of room.

Would they be so ready to trod on the Articles of War? Isn't Ecological constancy a strong motivator for them as a people?
 
In addition Lords, if in some of the previous examples, A Meson Attack can be counted as a regular occurance in a game, Does not the Question of "Superior" or "Inferior" starship design become moot? I always considered them awesome, but very costly in many ways... reserved for the most advanced navies... besides, wouldn't the K'Kree have developed counter tactics? Sending in thousands of drones to destroy that capability first? A meson gun works fine on a Plankwell, but a cloud of robots?
 
The Baron makes a good point about multi- hull design. It makes sense to have an outer hull and an inner hull, the gap between filled with compartmentalised fuel tanks and machinery of various types. Many CT ship designs have a "double hull" since they have this hull-fuel-bulkhead configuration.
 
Question, which version(s) of Traveller have ship combat damage tables that even allow the inertial compensation or internal G-field to fail?
 
I haven't seen one, at least not explicity. It could be argued that it is includd in the Crew Casualties section of the tables. Just one more unpleasant way to get hurt in a Starship.
I have only seen it happen in one series of Novels set in Space. (The Honor Harrington series mentions compensator failure.) Though I have seen a PC do that to someone, by simply telling the computer to turn it off, on the aforementioned Scout Ship. While it isn't in the damage tables perhaps it should be.
Body Armor wouldn't really help much in those circumstances either.


The ship damage tables don't really cover explosive decompression explicitly either. In all of these cases having a big open deck is a bad thing. Perhaps increasing the amount of crew casualties on a K'Kree ship?

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Question, which version(s) of Traveller have ship combat damage tables that even allow the inertial compensation or internal G-field to fail?
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by Baron Saarthuran von Gushiddan:
Wouldnt a good Power plant hit cover all of that? or are the more passive systems somehow? (Unobtanium plates, coupled with a reverse Inertia cragometer?)
Click to expand...
If your power plant is slagged then your maneuver drive isn't working either, so no need to worry about Inetial Compensators or Grav Plates causing you to "fall" ;)
As for whether these systems need power in the first place, the question is once again answered with "it depends on the version of Traveller" ;)
file_23.gif
 
Originally posted by Bhoins:
The ship damage tables don't really cover explosive decompression explicitly either.
Click to expand...
They do in book2 ;)
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; which, if applied to a K'kree ship, could kill everyone who doesn't make it to a vacc suit.
 
MT: A Hull Inop decompresses the ship. (also renders it nonfunctional... Many GM's declare that a HiPen result is actual round-through (and LoPen is Spall)... No specific HG/Bk5 results decompress the ship explicitly.

AG and GComp can be damaged using the vehicle combat rules in MT. Both are under the accomodations section; normally no hits are figured, but for purposes of damaging them, one can figure the hits, and use a task to traget them.

AG & GComp can both be inferred to go out under CT/HG/MT as part of the PP (AG) and MD (GComp)

T4 does not include any of them on the damage tables.

TNE: If either is more than 5 % of the ship, they can and will get a damage location...

T20: No explosive deompression, AG is a specific damage effect, and GComp again can be presumed to be part of the MD. One could assume decompression....

Note: MT, TNE, and T4 all recuire that AG & GComp be installed. MT and TNE have ways of figuring out the damage they can take based upon tonnage (MT fairly accurately, TNE, well... )

TNE's damage tables are a nice thing. They make designs a pain and slow down combats, but they ARE nifty. (And, IMO, Realistic.)

TNE/T4 have limits on compensated G's...
 
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