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Tiny staterooms

Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
I am putting up some floorplans for early 20th century railroad cars.
Very cool. Must dig out my Call of Cthulhu (etc. Space 1889 and Castle Falkenstein might be useful as well) 1890's and 1920's books for more examples! I'm pretty sure they used other (public domain?) sources for the railroad car layouts.

'Sides what Authenticist or Solomani noble wouldn't want to outfit his personal spaceship like the Orient Express? :cool:


Casey
 
Originally posted by mandelkubb:
A railroad cabin doesn't need much in terms of life support.
A spacecabin doesn't take much, either. In the 1960s a closed air/water LSS for a six man crew could fit in a large closet. I assume TL A+ can do better.

These railroad facilities are primitive (in the sense of minimal facilities), but they provide another datapoint for designers.
 
Anyway, there's little question that Traveller staterooms are extremely large.

Looking around at some figures, WWII troop transports seemed to average 3-4 tons (probably less than more than 1 Traveller ton) per trooper onboard; I can't find a number for how much of the ship was passenger area rather than other purposes, but more than 50% is unlikely, so that leaves 0.5 dtons or less per person.
 
The tonnage for staterooms accounts for the necessary life support and part of that tonnage is used for passageways and common areas used by passengers on the ship. The full 4-tons is not actually open space within the stateroom itself. The actual amount of usable living space in a stateroom is about 2.5 dtons, and that can easily accomodate 2 occupants.

Hunter
 
Yes, 2 dtons for the room, assuming a comfortable 2.5m ceiling, is 11.2 meters square, or about 3.5m on a side.

The actual personal spaces in the transports I mentioned were on the order of 2m x 0.6m x 0.6m, stacked 4 high. Including spaces between rows, actual volume per person would be around 1 cubic meter. Total volume per person is probably on the order of 3-4 cubic meters, or 0.25 dton.

Yes, you could fit 16 people into a single stateroom. It wouldn't be very comfortable, but it can be done.
 
Canon is 4.5 m2 deckspace per dton The canon 2.5 dton stateroom for one passenger or two low-rank crew compares to 1 dton for a double-occupancy pullman berth.
The pullman is very close to officers quarters on a submarine, except the sub officers have a desk but have to go down the hall to the head. On a SSBN nine enlisted men sleep in a space of about 1.5 dton.
OTOH, the 1st class stateroom alone on a modern cruise ship is 4 dton or more, 10 dton or more for an "owners suite."

Canon assumes 3m per deck. IMTU that amounts to 2.25m headroom and 0.75m overhead for "subsystems". That leaves lots of room for ventilation ducts, wiring conduits, and life suport processing
 
Actually, it depends on WHICH canon you're talking about. As I recall, MT uses 1.5 meter squares, and says 2 squares equals a Dton. That's a ceiling of 3 m. That's with 13.5 kl Dtons.

I think TNE and T4 use 2 meter squares and 14 kl Dtons, which means a Dton is 1 square, 3.5 meters high. (If we go with the true value for a Dton, though (13.5 kl), it's a much more reasonable 3.375 m.) :D

Having lived on a ship for several years, I can tell you that a distance between decks of 3-3.5 meters is not as crazy as it sounds. There's lots of ducting and wiring all over the place (and if its military, there's no plastered walls to cover it up, either) and you usually not touch the ceiling, except when you're going through bulkheads (walls). I forget the technical term, but the openings (some covered with hatches/doors) require you to step over a lip and duck at the same time, unless you're really short, and then you only have to step. They're made like that to contain flooding and smoke, btw.

I think civilian luxury staterooms are designed around the motel room concept. I have no doubt that cruise ships will offer these large rooms.

Crewmembers and even officers will not have this much room. (Exception: If the ship is big, any commanding officers, executive officers, and fleet commanders will have large staterooms, but half of that space will be occupied by an office that they work from. On my ship, the CO, XO, Admiral, and the CO and XO of the Marines had large staterooms like this. This was a large amphib, with lots of Marines.)

Regular ship's officers shared something smaller than a small stateroom with another officer. (The top 5 or so - the command crew - had their staterooms all to themselves.) Marine officers had the same size room, but squeezed 4 people in the same room.

Crew didn't get that luxury. We had berthings. Each ranged in capacity from 20-300, and you slept in the same berthing as your department. (A department would be Combat Systems (big), or Navigation (small), or Engineering (really big).) Image a bunk bed, but with three beds on it. The stack was about 7-8 feet high; the top bunk at eye level for me. Most people had to stand on lower racks to get into top-racks. These bunks are placed close enough together that you cannot sit up in them; you've got about 1 cubic meter to sleep in.

These are called "coffin racks", btw, mostly because of the confined space. Put two of these 3-packs close together, maybe 18 inches of space between them, and you have a 6-pack. It takes up about 4 square meters of floor space and as I said, reaches about 8 feet high. They don't touch the ceiling, but they do often bump into deck-bracing for the upper deck and for the ventillation and wiring clusters.

The Marines had it slightly worse; their racks were stacked four high in most places, but the deck they were on had a higher ceiling to accommodate that. Still, to get to the top-most rack you have to climb for a minute. Bring a harness! (And don't fall out of your rack either! Some ships had a little catchstring for you, but ours didn't!)

Okay, feeling cramped yet? Think Traveller asks way too much for sleeping space? Well, I'll add to the above a set of toilets and showers (the Head), about 1 stall of each kind for each 20 people in my berthing. Smaller berthings had at least 2 stalls apiece. There's also a small "common area", where we could watch TV or play Spades. Enough for a couple dozen people to enjoy.

DON'T consider all that extra space Traveller says you should have as life support. It's not. Life support is already paid for. For the most part, you can ignore plotting LS on your maps.

But what the remaining space MIGHT get taken up with is things like the Mess Decks, the Galley, and the passageways and ladders in and out and around the berthings. We had a big mess decks, capable of handling about 200 people at a time. There's also food storage, but that could be considered LS, since there's just so much of it.

Anyway, this should help you in designing deck plans.
 
(If we go with the true value for a Dton, though (13.5 kl), it's a much more reasonable 3.375 m.)
liquid hydrogen has a density of about .07099 grams/liter so 1 kiloliter would weigh 70990 grams or 70.99 Kg. 1000/70.99 gives a ratio of ratio of 14.086:1 so a metric ton of hydrogen would mass 14.086 cubic meters.
 
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