mavikfelna
Cosmic Mongoose
In my current GURPS Traveller game I am a retired Noble Administrator, was the legal director for the Starport Authority on Duale, that is currently plying the space lanes in an upgraded Empress Marava as the 1st officer and part owner. But as part of my mustering out benefits I got a Yacht. At the time, I didn't have a use for it and couldn't afford to run it but we turned it into an investment by making it a charter yacht and leasing it to a charter company so I get a small income from it that mostly go to pay for the upkeep, maintenance and mortgage. We mostly forgot about it at that point and moved on but now we find ourselves acting as agents of the Duke of Lunion in an attempt to uncover why piracy is suddenly on the rise throughout the sector and people are disappearing. The Duke suspects some kind of conspiracy and we're on the sharp end trying to figure it out.
We were trying to figure out how we could catch some pirates but we're a little under gunned. We were talking about hiring some additional mercenaries when the GM kindly mentioned that we did in fact have access to another ship. So, we had to figure out what type it actually was and started looking through the GURPS Traveller Classic Starships book and low and behold there is the Prancing Poni, a 200 ton Charter Yacht derived from the classic Type K Animal class safari ship!
The GURPS design has 11 Luxury staterooms, but in GURPS, they are just standard 4 ton staterooms with extra fancy fittings and automation. In converting it MgT 2e, I obviously couldn't fit in 11 Luxury Staterooms, or even more than a couple of them if I went with luxury. So I stepped it down to just High staterooms and I could manage to fit in 6 of them. The Launch in GURPS is also only 10 tons so I lost some space there. The Type K Safari Ship also normally has only M-1 drive but the Prancing Poni is M-2, to help get those VIPs where they're going a little faster. The sensors in GURPS were better as well so I set to Military on the Poni. Over all, I like the design as a luxury VIP transport. It's actually pretty basic, but it can move 6 to 12 VIPs in decent comfort. It costs 316,039 Cr per month to run it, if you're buying unrefined fuel and refining it yourself, and I was earning a couple of thousand a month after the charter company took it's cut so it costs about 100,000 Cr per week to rent the thing.
So now we decided my sister, the Countess of Duale, uses the thing when she needs to travel about the sector on her duties and we decided she needs to travel with some of her household, rather than a bunch of other nobles. So made a refit. It upgrades the engineering spaces to TL15 specs, we had the work done on Mora, and added a deep penetration scanner, um, for reasons
, armed the turrets, gotta protect the nobility, put in a small armory, and replaced 2 of the high staterooms with 12 barracks. So now we have a protection detail and other staff accounted for and still enough space for a noble contingent. It is, however, twice the cost of the original ship, mostly from the upgraded engines and the purchase by Listern of the Boarding Launch. So now, instead of carrying his sister and her household around, it's going to carry a marine and scouting team of 12 that can board other ships effectively. To make a proper Q-ship it needs popup turrets but there are few spots in the sector that require jump-3 to reach so I need the fuel bladder in the cargo hold and there just isn't any other space to trim.
The Boarding Launch pretty much replaces the cargo space of the standard Launch with a forced linkage and breaching tube and add some armor. It's strictly short range, with a cockpit instead of a bridge. Oh, and good sensors to find the right spot to attach to the target vessel. I put a plasma gun in the firmpoint but I'm not wedded to the idea. I've never used them and not sure how useful they are. Might replace it with a sandcaster in a turret for close support of the marines.
Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome!
We were trying to figure out how we could catch some pirates but we're a little under gunned. We were talking about hiring some additional mercenaries when the GM kindly mentioned that we did in fact have access to another ship. So, we had to figure out what type it actually was and started looking through the GURPS Traveller Classic Starships book and low and behold there is the Prancing Poni, a 200 ton Charter Yacht derived from the classic Type K Animal class safari ship!
The GURPS design has 11 Luxury staterooms, but in GURPS, they are just standard 4 ton staterooms with extra fancy fittings and automation. In converting it MgT 2e, I obviously couldn't fit in 11 Luxury Staterooms, or even more than a couple of them if I went with luxury. So I stepped it down to just High staterooms and I could manage to fit in 6 of them. The Launch in GURPS is also only 10 tons so I lost some space there. The Type K Safari Ship also normally has only M-1 drive but the Prancing Poni is M-2, to help get those VIPs where they're going a little faster. The sensors in GURPS were better as well so I set to Military on the Poni. Over all, I like the design as a luxury VIP transport. It's actually pretty basic, but it can move 6 to 12 VIPs in decent comfort. It costs 316,039 Cr per month to run it, if you're buying unrefined fuel and refining it yourself, and I was earning a couple of thousand a month after the charter company took it's cut so it costs about 100,000 Cr per week to rent the thing.
So now we decided my sister, the Countess of Duale, uses the thing when she needs to travel about the sector on her duties and we decided she needs to travel with some of her household, rather than a bunch of other nobles. So made a refit. It upgrades the engineering spaces to TL15 specs, we had the work done on Mora, and added a deep penetration scanner, um, for reasons
, armed the turrets, gotta protect the nobility, put in a small armory, and replaced 2 of the high staterooms with 12 barracks. So now we have a protection detail and other staff accounted for and still enough space for a noble contingent. It is, however, twice the cost of the original ship, mostly from the upgraded engines and the purchase by Listern of the Boarding Launch. So now, instead of carrying his sister and her household around, it's going to carry a marine and scouting team of 12 that can board other ships effectively. To make a proper Q-ship it needs popup turrets but there are few spots in the sector that require jump-3 to reach so I need the fuel bladder in the cargo hold and there just isn't any other space to trim. The Boarding Launch pretty much replaces the cargo space of the standard Launch with a forced linkage and breaching tube and add some armor. It's strictly short range, with a cockpit instead of a bridge. Oh, and good sensors to find the right spot to attach to the target vessel. I put a plasma gun in the firmpoint but I'm not wedded to the idea. I've never used them and not sure how useful they are. Might replace it with a sandcaster in a turret for close support of the marines.
Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome!
