Lifeboats

[Pwyll]

One day i got irate about how much space was being wasted by lifeboats in my military ship designs so i created some standard lifeboat designs to increase efficiency.

Design considerations:

Commercial Lifeboats

increase the profit margin of potential pirates and reduce the ship's cargo capacity. if the ship isn't within several hours of assistance, being on a lifeboat won't help much anyway, in most cases. lifeboats with emergency sleep berths might be helpful if the ship is lost in a poorly-traveled, uninhabited system with no facilities. otherwise, couches give greater capacity than low berths.

Military lifeboats

increase efficiency by using different sizes.

Private lifeboats anyone who can afford a yacht can afford the lifeboat as well. cargo space usually is not a concern, so ships vehicles are less of a waste of space.

=======================================

Class: Micro-lifeboat
Type: Lifeboat
Architect: Pwyll
TL: 15

5 tons
Crew: 1
MCr 3.39825
Cost in Quantity: MCr 2.7186

Maneuver: 1g
Power: 90Mw
Computer: Model/0
Couches: 8 (includes crew)
Cargo: .006 tons
Fuel: .448 tons
Agility: 1 (1.099)
Configuration: streamlined cylinder
1 heads-up holodisplay
1 airlock

=============================

Class: Mini-lifeboat
Type: Lifeboat
Architect: Pwyll
TL: 15

10 tons
Crew: 1
MCr 4.09344
Cost in Quantity: MCr 3.274752

Maneuver: 1g
Power: 108Mw
Computer: Model/0
Couches: 23 (includes crew)
Cargo: .0004 tons
Fuel: .448 tons
Agility: 1 (1.5698)
Configuration: streamlined cylinder
1 airlock

=============================

Class: Lifeboat (Standard)
Type: Lifeboat
Architect: Pwyll
TL: 15

20 tons
Crew: 1
MCr 6.31438
Cost in Quantity: MCr 5.051504

Maneuver: 1g
Power: 126Mw
Computer: Model/0
Couches: 50 (includes crew)
Cargo: .24341 tons
Fuel: .448 tons
Agility: 1 (1.3508)
Configuration: streamlined cylinder
1 heads-up holodisplay
1 airlock

=============================

Class: Lifeboat (Medium)
Type: Lifeboat
Architect: Pwyll
TL: 15

30 tons
Crew: 1
MCr 7.17768
Cost in Quantity: MCr 5.742144

Maneuver: 1g
Power: 144Mw
Computer: Model/0
Couches: 81 (includes crew)
Cargo: .193 tons
Fuel: .448 tons
Agility: 1 (1.3175)
Configuration: streamlined cylinder
1 heads-up holodisplay
1 airlock

=============================

Class: Lifeboat (Large)
Type: Lifeboat
Architect: Pwyll
TL: 15

50 tons
Crew: 1
MCr 8.64112
Cost in Quantity: MCr 6.9129

Maneuver: 1g
Power: 180Mw
Computer: Model/0
Couches: 143 (includes crew)
Cargo: .0523 tons
Fuel: .448 tons
Agility: 1 (1.2473)
Configuration: streamlined cylinder
1 heads-up holodisplay
1 airlock

 

[PVernon]

Out of curiosity which design system did you use?

 

[Pwyll]

megatrav. i keep some of the concepts from HG, but i don't think that affected these designs.

 

[Jame]

Actually, I've kinda wondered how prominent escape craft are in Traveller, especially aboard merchants.

 

[Anthony]

Probably not at all. The safest place after a starship accident is usually still on board the ship -- spaceships can't sink, and usually don't blow up either.

 

[Pwyll]

i generally leave lifeboats off my commercial designs

perhaps a luxury liner or noble yacht design might include lifeboats for the psychologial effect on the passengers, generating a feeling of safety

 

[EvilDrGanymede]

Originally posted by Anthony:
Probably not at all. The safest place after a starship accident is usually still on board the ship -- spaceships can't sink, and usually don't blow up either.

Though they can suffer from decompression, or be flooded with radiation, or other such fun things. I guess they are more like submarines (which IIRC don't have escape capsules) than surface-going vessels though.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by Evil Dr Ganymede:
Though they can suffer from decompression, or be flooded with radiation, or other such fun things.

Yes, but simply creating a hardened compartment within the ship is just as good as creating an escape vehicle; the odds of your escape vehicle surviving, and of your survival compartment surviving, are comparable (a bit higher for the compartment, since it doesn't need to be near the surface).

 

[The Oz]

I usually equip my larger ships with small craft that also double as lifeboats for the entire crew. In HG2 it says that emergency low berths can act as couches for one conscious person for several hours, so I equip my launch/lifeboats with two crew couches and as many emergency low berths as they will hold. These can act as personnel shuttles in normal service and as escape capsules if necessary. I have two TL-9 designs: a 10dton pod that carries 22 people and a 20dton launch that can carry 62. They're cheap too, both less than MCr10.

One question I have: how long does it take to put a person into cryosleep in TRAVELLER? If it takes too long, using emergency low berths to get people out might not be practical.

 

[Pwyll]

heheheh here's the real catch: standard ship launching facilities only launch one vehicle per turn.

hmmm, launch tube for lifeboats, so the entire complement can evacuate within 20 minutes.

NIMTU! (not in my traveller universe)

 

[flykiller]

lifeboat deckplan. HG2, 20 tons, 34 emergency low berths.

http://members.aol.com/exog/pictures/lifeboat.gif

substituting lifeboats with "safe rooms" assumes that the vessel in question will fail in a tenable manner, and that some rescuer eventually will come along. a lifeboat provides independence from such requirements.

 

[flykiller]

In HG2 it says that emergency low berths can act as couches for one conscious person for several hours, so I equip my launch/lifeboats with two crew couches and as many emergency low berths as they will hold. These can act as personnel shuttles in normal service and as escape capsules if necessary. I have two TL-9 designs: a 10dton pod that carries 22 people and a 20dton launch that can carry 62.

sixty-two? I suppose the strict tonnage listings would fit, but you might have some accessibility issues.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by flykiller:
substituting lifeboats with "safe rooms" assumes that the vessel in question will fail in a tenable manner, and that some rescuer eventually will come along. a lifeboat provides independence from such requirements.

At a vast penalty in space and cost, which if spent on making the ship itself more reliable might well prevent the problem in the first place.

Also, in most cases if your ship can't make it to safety, neither can a lifeboat.

 

[flykiller]

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />substituting lifeboats with "safe rooms" assumes that the vessel in question will fail in a tenable manner, and that some rescuer eventually will come along. a lifeboat provides independence from such requirements.

At a vast penalty in space and cost, which if spent on making the ship itself more reliable might well prevent the problem in the first place.</font>[/QUOTE]begs the question. some problems occur despite preventions, and the cost of lifeboats in space and money doesn't seem to be appropriately described as a "vast penalty" - depending on the ruleset used, of course. losing an entire crew because they lived or died with one vessel, however, would be a vast penalty in any ruleset.

Also, in most cases if your ship can't make it to safety, neither can a lifeboat.

doesn't follow.

 

[kaladorn]

Ships can and do founder within reach of shore in the real world. A ship may well have an emergency that could destroy the ship but lifepods could well be rescued within hours or days.

Examples:
Power plant problem
Misjump (into an inhabited system, but with the ship headed for a moon or the like)
Mutiny/Piracy
Terrorism
Problem with cargo

It may be impossible for the ship to get to help quickly enough, but once the pods are out, they may well be able to, or at least survive for a day or so until help arrives with their EPIRBs screaming.

Take all of these cases and add the psychological value (even if it had no actual value, which I do not concede) of the lifeboat to the passengers and you have all the justification you need for them to exist and perhaps even be mandatory.

 

[Anthony]

Of your examples:

Power plant problem: fusion power plants don't have meltdowns. If you have enough time to get into lifeboats, you have enough time to turn the power plant off.

Misjump: there's on the order of a 0.01% chance of being on a collision course in a misjump. The risk of simply disappearing outright is higher than that. Given this, it's not worth the price of a lifeboat.

Mutiny/Piracy: while it may be useful to pirates to have a place to put extra people, it's not very useful to the people onboard.

Terrorism: if you have time to get to the lifeboats, you probably don't need to.

Cargo Problems: may I suggest dumping the cargo instead?

 

[flykiller]

for some perspective, perhaps we can evaluate some actual examples. consider two ships, both 4000 tons, HG2. The tech 10 passenger liner has 312 staterooms, and carries 10 lifeboats for a total of 260 tons or 6.5% of total ship volume. the tech 15 scout cruiser has 95 staterooms, and carries 3 lifeboats for a total of 78 tons or 2.0% of total ship volume. the monetary cost of the lifeboats is of course inconsequential in light of the cost of the ships.

1) can the lifeboat tonnage cost be described as a "vast penalty"?

2) if the lifeboats are discarded, can the recovered tonnage be used to make the ship itself more reliable? if so, how much more?

 

[Pwyll]

heheh this is getting amusing

if your ship gets pirated, its subcraft WILL be taken. its a given, since those are generally the highest value items on the ship that may easily be removed.

in any case, all ships OUGHT to have life bubbles enough for everyone on the ship plus many extra.
my point was, the difference between being rescued from the lifebubble and being rescued from a lifeboat is negligible in most circumstances. and since commercial ships do not face the hazards of say, military ships, a commercial captain could reasonably hope to go their entire career without being in such a situation. a lifebubble will keep a person alive for several hours. i contend that if help doesn't arrive within hours, it's because it will not arrive for a very long time.

tonnage spent on commercial lifeboats is tonnage that is not spent on payload (passengers or cargo). can't get away from that without a tesseract

 

[kaladorn]

Originally posted by Pwyll:
if your ship gets pirated, its subcraft WILL be taken. its a given, since those are generally the highest value items on the ship that may easily be removed.

Ummm, no. I think not. You are correct that an expended lifeboat may have some value (compared to that of the ship itself, it pales to insignificance... compared to the value of weapons systems, etc, it may as well, depending on what the vessel taken is.... electronics may also be very valuable). However, you are not correct in your assumption that piracy == taken small craft.

If the piracy is accomplished anywhere near any forces of law, then with lifepods scattering, the concern of the prize crew will be the capture or looting of the main target and its cargo. Sure, you'll snatch a couple of pods if they are nearby, but if they've punched out and are all heading in opposite directions and your crew is 'stuck-in' doing boarding ops against the remainder of the crew or trying to prevent the ship going 'pop' from a suicide rig, then I think that is hardly likely. Tracking down a whole pile of renegade pods just is not worth your time, especially if time is short.

Factor in non-ship-based piracy (that is the taking of the ship by on-board parties, quite the more common than the otherwise ludicrious external piracy) and you have another case where you may well benefit by debarking - the liner or merchant may be taken and the pirates may jump it out system to who knows where, but the passengers, etc. may well have abandoned ship and be fine in their bubbles, with no fear of being collected by the pirates.

in any case, all ships OUGHT to have life bubbles enough for everyone on the ship plus many extra.
my point was, the difference between being rescued from the lifebubble and being rescued from a lifeboat is negligible in most circumstances.

If you are refering to a 'rescue ball', I think they are sufficiently unsafe (not to mention problematic for normal hapless passengers to board) and also sufficiently unnerving (claustrophobic if opaque, agoraphobic otherwise) as to leave all sorts of post facto issues.

They are a good supplement, and probably a minimal standard legally, but aren't really an adequate replacement for life boats. For one thing, if the situation occurs in a system with planets that you could get to that would be safe but which may themselves not be able to mount a rescue, undoubtedly they come up as inferior to the lifeboat.

and since commercial ships do not face the hazards of say, military ships, a commercial captain could reasonably hope to go their entire career without being in such a situation.

I'm quite sure that's how the Captain of the Titanic felt and the designer....

a lifebubble will keep a person alive for several hours. i contend that if help doesn't arrive within hours, it's because it will not arrive for a very long time.

I imagine many times the help required may take up to 12 hours to arrive, a long time for a hapless and probably vastly panicked passenger to sit in a small clear, flexible, tearable bubble with no sanitation facilities and no companionship or communication.

I also further imagine that there will be cases where abandoning ship will leave you in a place where no local could rescue you, but you could survive if you flew to a planet in the system yourself.

tonnage spent on commercial lifeboats is tonnage that is not spent on payload (passengers or cargo). can't get away from that without a tesseract

Yep, and that's just the kind of logic that prevailed (corporate logic) in the design of the Titanic and a number of other places. That's why we in Canada now have a professional engineering body that puts public safety above ALL other constraints.

 

[kaladorn]

Originally posted by Anthony:
Power plant problem: fusion power plants don't have meltdowns. If you have enough time to get into lifeboats, you have enough time to turn the power plant off.

Maybe. Assuming everything works. They could have coolant system failures. They could have failures damping the reaction out. They could have other failures which actually exacerbate the problem.

Of course, since this is a fictional technology (to a point), discussions of how it works are a certain degree conjectural.

However, in any large and complex engineering environment, catastrophic cascade failures can happen. Doubly so in something that moves around and which may be exposed to various radiations, forces, and/or collisions with other bodies.

Misjump: there's on the order of a 0.01% chance of being on a collision course in a misjump. The risk of simply disappearing outright is higher than that. Given this, it's not worth the price of a lifeboat.

You maintain the vector you went in with. Assuming you are coming out with the intention to head to X, you could concievably end up headed for X with other problems (power surges, who knows what) that render you unable to normally manouver.

Additionally, you may get malfunctions in the various manouver drive systems or the computer control systems that create bad situations.

Mutiny/Piracy: while it may be useful to pirates to have a place to put extra people, it's not very useful to the people onboard.

I disagree, my reasoning is stated elsewhere although you are not compelled to agree with it.

Terrorism: if you have time to get to the lifeboats, you probably don't need to.

Rubbish. These situations often develop over a short, but not negligible, time. Getting either the target or innocent bystanders off the ship may well save them from becoming involved, injured and/or killed. And it will save them from being hostages.

Cargo Problems: may I suggest dumping the cargo instead?

Your approach to the whole issue of safety is "If everything works right, then we don't need lifeboats." Yes, you could *try* to dump the cargo. Many deckplans I've seen don't seem to make that an easily accomplished feat (in fact, in some cases, nigh impossible). Further, there may be failures in these systems.

Engineers and those who come up with the legislation that governs public safety issues don't design things for best case scenarios. They design them for worst case scenarios. Look at the requirements the FAA applies to things that go on planes and look at how extensively NASA scrutinizes things that are to go into space. There are good reasons - if everything works fine, a lot of things won't be necessary. If everything works terribly, everyone dies. If everything sort of works, some things working, some things not, there is a place for the safety gear to do its job. You build in such safety gear for the mid-range case where you don't instantly disintegrate but where you do get in trouble.

Now, you can design your liners without that regard. But I for one would never by a ticket on one. And if I owned a firm that did include lifeboats, whether they worked well or not, I'd sure advertise that distinction....

YMMV. This is just how it is IMTU. OVW.