Opinion: Is this a Close Structure or a Needle

[PFVA63]

Hi, here's my thoughts...

Hi,

Here's a couple of pictures of what I tried to explain above, showing my thoughts on what a bay might look like.

In the 1st picture the module (in blue) is shown extracted from the bay (which is shown in red). The module itself houses most if the actual weaponry with only a relatively small turret (shown in white) sticking above the deck.

In the 2nd picture the module is shown inserted into the bay as it would be in normal operation.

Regards

PF

 

[atpollard]

That works for me.

IMTU I design the 'hole' at 50 dTons and the 'turret' above the hole as another 50 dTons. Thus the 1 bay per 1000 dTons no matter its size. A 50 dTon bay would plug into the hole like a WW2 ball turret with very little sticking out of the hole. A 100 dTon turret would have 50 dTons of stuff in the hole and another 50 dTons in the WW2 Battleship-like turret above the hole.

The CT plans and text description leave the matter open to a lot of personal interpretations, which always seemed like a good thing to me. Viva creativity.

 

[Icosahedron]

These diagrams are more like what I imagined for turrets, with their 1dT of 'fire control' within the ship. You can take the turret module out and replace it with another, or just use the empty 'hardpoint' for storage space. I always saw bays as a 'Guns of Navarone' style slot-hangar type emplacement in the side of a ship containing either one huge rail-mounted gun or a battery of smaller weapons. I'll see if I can find a picture.

 

[aramis]

For me, I usually use a 90% rule for bays: 90% of the bay displacement is internal to the hull; the remainder is the oversized turret, or is an otherwise exterior space.

 

[Moose]

Very nice design all round, first time I've seen this. Close Structure in my book, and very I'm impressed with the dedication applied in trying to calculate the volume and the reasoning about whether the vessel is military or civilian and so forth. I can see my ship design ideas have a lot of catching up to do!

On bays I've always taken the Icosahedron's approach that a bay is a literal opening within the hull structure - that's how I interpreted High Guard p.30, anyway, but the beauty of much CT was the flexibility of interpretation it allowed.

 

[Valarian]

I've pictured bays in Traveller as being very much like submarine missile bays, with the bay being predominately internal but with bay doors covering the missile tubes. I've also tended to assume 10 missile tubes per bay (the number of hardpoints taken up by the bay), with the rest of the bay being additional internal missile storage.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

I used to use the sub method, but the AHL clearly has honking great turrets. I expect both are used.

 

[PFVA63]

hi, I hope...

Hi,

I hope this is OK. I took a page from the CT CD showing a small scale deckplan from Azhanti High Lightning, and removed most of the detail except the bulkheads and some other stuff to better describe what I tried to explain above.

I went ahead and colored in what I think are bays/modules in blue, with the turrets being colored white.

[Adapted from a figure on pg 24 of Supplement 5 - Lightning Class Cruisers]

Here you can see big spaces, offset from the rest of the deck by heavy bulkheads, which might be weapon modules which fit into sockets/bays (as defined by the heavy bulkheads) in the ship's hull.

Regards

PF

 

[aramis]

Yes, it's within reasonable fair use, especially colorized as you have done.

 

[PFVA63]

Hi

Yes, it's within reasonable fair use, especially colorized as you have done.

Hi,

Cool, thanks for the quick response from both yourself and Mr. Boulton on my questions.

Regards

PF

 

[Andrew Boulton]

We aim to please (although sometimes our targetting is a little off...)

 

[Theophilus]

I'm not sure if it's a close structure, but my vote goes for modular.

 

[Kharum1]

How long did it take you to model it?

 

[Thunderbolt]

How long did it take you to model it?

Hmm, difficult to say, as it has been built in stages, stopping and starting. I'd hazard a guess at three or four weekends and a string of evenings. I'm not very efficient at all at modelling, I always end up spending a whole evening on one piece and then dropping the feature.

I am very envious of the real modellers out there, who come up with beautiful curves and detail in the blink of an eye.

 

[Kharum1]

It is far from a blink of an eye. Most have to do a balancing act between detail and poly count. I know that I am far from a professional modeller and I have to be concerned with it. I'll create a scaled down model thinking it should render without a problem and once I get it into Vue, with a scene, my poly count goes through the roof (millions of poly's). If you are not rendering on a render farm or don't have the top end computer you will get an out of memory error or it will take days to render. I think my longest render time was 26 hours (great detail and color). Anyway, it is a great ship and I was also wondering if you where going to use dispacement mapping to add more detail or to replace some of the detail to cut back on the poly's?

 

[Thunderbolt]

I will certainly be hoping to get more detail and noise from textures, but the whole UV mapping exercise gives me the raving hee-bee gee-bees, so I'm counting on the high poly count to do some of the heavy lift.

I find Vue 6 isn't quite the bag of nails that it was back in the earlier releases 5.x, so higher poly counts don't hold the same level of concern.

Having said that, put more than handful of Poser figures into Vue and it will happily roll into a corner and explode.

 

[RockViper]

I really like this design. I already have several ideas that I could use it for.

 

[Thunderbolt]

Thanks for everyone's feedback.

Presenting revision 1 of the design.

Changes include offset weapon bays at the rear, and a new skeleton to allow the cargo pods to detach. In these views, all the starboard pods have been removed.

Hmmm, something tells me this baby is starting to look like a dispersed structure....

YOU MAY NEED TO REFRESH YOUR BROWSER CACHE TO SEE THE NEW VERSION

 

[mike wightman]

Very nice work.

Unloaded then yes, dispersed structure. Fully loaded it still says close structure to me

 

[far-trader]

Good update. I think it still qualifies as a close structure, at least with all modules loaded. If some are missing then I'd downgrade it to unstreamlined but still classed as a close structure. For dispersed structure think the ISS. Configuration is partly for streamlining but in some rules for combat effects such as the to hit mods for meson attacks. Best to stick to one configuration and simply impose a penalty in another way.

A couple observations/suggestions for consideration.

Offsetting the weapons. Good idea, looks better and makes it more workable. Though my first thought when you originally posted the design was "wouldn't it be cool if those weapon donuts rotated" which would mean you need more space in the center maybe. It'd be an extra complication and thing to go wrong (i.e. great plot hooks) but it fixes the line of sight issues.

Seven thruster groupings bugs me, I prefer numbers that work into the rated g-rating just for my personal damage system. If (for example) this ship is 3G with six thruster packages and it takes one hit dropping it to 2G then I can say thruster packages 2 and 3 are damaged and point to it on the picture and deckplan. Unless this ship is rated for 7G

My suggestion for the above would be loose the center thruster package. In it's place allow a small craft, perhaps a modular cutter type of craft to handle the modules. In an unstreamlined or partially streamlined design a small craft capable of atmospheric landing is practically a requirement. One that could also handle the modules would be very practical.

Just all my opinion of course, not reasons to change a thing