Deluxe 1600 ton Lab Ship

[Tom Kalbfus]

Here are the 3rd Imperium stats for my Deluxe Lab ship, it started out as a 1200 ton ship, but when I counted all the squares to determine hull tonnage and added the required fuel, it expanded to a 1600 dton star ship. I'm going to submit the deck plans for the ship shortly. I just want to look it over a bit to make sure there are no mistakes. The fuel tanks aren't shown, as they are under the floor or outside the inhabited ring of the starship. The ship rotates 3 times a minute to provide a full Earth's gravity of centrifugal force, it also has grav plating, the tech level 8 version of this ship does not.

Deluxe Laboratory Ship Tons Price (Cr.)
Hull 1600 tons Hull 24 MCr160,000,000
Structure 24
Armor None
Jump Drive L Jump 2 60 tons MCr110,000,000
Maneuver Drive L Thrust 2 21 tons MCr44,000,000
Power Plant L 34 tons MCr88,000,000
Bridge 40 tons MCr8,000,000
Computer Model 2 Rating 10 MCr160,000
Electronics Advanced Sensors +1 DM 3 tons MCr2,000,000

Weapons Hardpoint #1 Triple Turret (empty) 1 tons MCr1,000,000
Hardpoint #2 Triple Turret (empty) 1 tons MCr1,000,000

Fuel 338 tons One Jump-2 338 tons
and two weeks of operation
Cargo Bay 4 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 5 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 6 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 7 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 59 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 60 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 61 (22 tons) 22 tons
Cargo Bay 62 (22 tons) 22 tons
Staterooms 12 - 54 172 tons 172 tons MCr21,500,000

Extras Luxuries 12a-54b 219 tons 219 tons MCr21,900,000
Elevator Shaft 27 tons 27
and ladder shaft
Docking Ring 111 tons 111
Lab 1 (74 tons) 74 tons
Lab 2 (74 tons) 74 tons
Lab 3 (82 tons) 82 tons
Ship's Locker
Air/rafts (4) 16 16 tons MCr1,100,000
95 dton Shuttle 95 tons 95 tons MCr33,375,000
(with Fuel Scoops
and 2 Fuel Processors 2 tons MCr100,000
60 tons of fuel tanks 60
Air/raft) 4 tons 4 tons MCr275,000
Software Jump Control/2 MCr200,000
Maneuver/0
Library/0

Maintenance Cost (monthly) MCr410,196
Life Support Cost (monthly) MCr86,000
Total Tonnage and Cost 1544 tons MCr492,235,000

 

[Infojunky]

MCr160,000,000

Choose a Credits notation, either Cr or Mcr... MCr1 = Cr1,000,000

Starships are usually use Megacredits as their standard notation.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

MCr160,000,000

Choose a Credits notation, either Cr or Mcr... MCr1 = Cr1,000,000

Starships are usually use Megacredits as their standard notation.

I see, well it is a rough draft. I meant them all to be in credits Cr/ MCr1,000,000 is a lot of money, so pay no attention to MCr and substitute Cr and that is the price. As it is this starship costs half a billion credits. I have an idea of how the PCs might come into possession of this starship. I am thinking of Treasure Island as an example. A patron learns about a treasure on a planet, he happens to be a rich scientist, the "treasure" is something of value to the scientist, something he has been after for a long time.

The patron hires the PCs as part of the crew of his starship, and then in the course of this adventure, the patron dies, leaving the PCs in charge. Maybe he dies, and maybe he doesn't, but he does put himself in danger as a hands on patron.

 

[Infojunky]

The ship looks fine, my comment was only for cleanup and presentation.....

 

[phavoc]

Most PC's, unless they are from the uber-rich class, will struggle to afford any starship. That's realistic as most people struggle to own a home and a car, pay for college, etc. So don't let the cost issue affect things. And just because the players aren't going to be buying one doesn't mean a clever ref doesn't need one to add flavor to the game. And who knows, maybe they don't own it, but get jobs as crew, or stumble upon a darkened derelict, or whatever.

Playing the game requires a certain suspension of disbelief to become with. Things like this just go hand in hand with it.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Most PC's, unless they are from the uber-rich class, will struggle to afford any starship. That's realistic as most people struggle to own a home and a car, pay for college, etc. So don't let the cost issue affect things. And just because the players aren't going to be buying one doesn't mean a clever ref doesn't need one to add flavor to the game. And who knows, maybe they don't own it, but get jobs as crew, or stumble upon a darkened derelict, or whatever.

Playing the game requires a certain suspension of disbelief to become with. Things like this just go hand in hand with it.

Its a large ship, so part of the adventure is exploring it of course. I have in mind, having the PCs start from low berths, since its a beginning adventure, we'll just ignore the survival rolls, as characters that didn't survive aren't in the picture. The ship is a giant laboratory, the scientist who owns it is working on a particular invention, a bioprinter, most bioprinters are designed to print organs, bones, muscles, but this one prints whole bodies and brains. Lets just say that this scientist is the Traveller equivalent to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, except instead of creating his creatures out of body parts, he creates them out of living cells, in this case he is working on an improvement of low berths, as their is a chance the passengers won't survive the freezing and thawing process, something called ice crystalization occurs, or sometimes the chemicals used to prevent such crystalization cause damage, so low berths are tricky as the proper freezing thawing process requires a careful balance of chemicals for each tissue type, and a removal of those chemicals and replacement of fluids in the revival process. Well this scientist has skipped over that process, he buys corpses of people who didn't survive the low berths for scientific research, what his machines do is destructively scan each frozen body, an the data is sent to his bioprinter, where he prints the body from the frozen pattern of dead cells using cloned lining cells. A side effect of the process is the creatures created while having the cellular memories of the original, have bodies that are 18 years old physically or younger, but not older. Say for instance a 60 old man goes into a low berth and dies in the process, the scientist then buys his body, and destructively scans it with lasers, one slice at a time, the information on cellular connections goes into the computer, and then the bioprinter prints out a scaffold, and then attaches living cells to that scaffold allowing those cells to grow together, when printing a brain in this fashion, the memories and personality are duplicated, the body is of course of an 18 year old man, as their is no reason to recreate the 60 year old body, the cloning process resets the biological clock back to zero of each cell that is cloned.

The scientist who has done these experiments was shunned by the scientific community, and by religious groups that find what he is doing to be abhorrent and immoral. Some content that the bodies he is created aren't the originals, unlike the case of a cold berth where the original is frozen and thawed out alive if successful. The scientist therefore purchased this lab ship, specifically to get away from his critics and continue his experiments in a remote part of space, where he won't be bothered.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I'm working on the room descriptions, the plans for the ship are complete, I'm just making sure the little details are correct. There is a fuel shuttle, a 95-ton cargo shuttle, where most of the cargo space is taken up by fuel tanks, there is also 3 standard staterooms, as the shuttle has a crew of three, and I imagine the shuttle will be spending a couple days skimming a gas giant and processing fuel and storing it in its tanks, and then shuttling to the lab ship and transferring the fuel it had processed and stored to the lab ship, and then returning to the gas giant for another couple of days to get more fuel. The crew will need state rooms while the shuttle is doing this.

One use for this enlarged mobile space station is as a travelling hospital ship, it is a tech level 15 ship, and that means regardless of the tech level of the planet they are visiting, they can always return to the stip for state of the art medical treatments and to recover from injuries, even going as far as to clone and grow spare organs, limbs, muscle tissue, and even nerves.

I wonder, what do you think of the idea of a traveling hospital, visiting low tech worlds and offering high tech treatments to the citizens of those worlds? I'm going to work on this ship with room descriptions assuming it is a hospital ship, and think up an adventure later for it.

 

[pasuuli]

One use for this enlarged mobile space station is as a travelling hospital ship, it is a tech level 15 ship, and that means regardless of the tech level of the planet they are visiting, they can always return to the ship for state of the art medical treatments and to recover from injuries, even going as far as to clone and grow spare organs, limbs, muscle tissue, and even nerves.

I wonder, what do you think of the idea of a traveling hospital, visiting low tech worlds and offering high tech treatments to the citizens of those worlds? I'm going to work on this ship with room descriptions assuming it is a hospital ship, and think up an adventure later for it.

I really like this as a setting opening. It provides a rationale for the ship to exist; generates a patron by default; assumes a larger organization, which results in the usual politicking, squabbling, murder, smuggling, embezzlement, and other assortments of crime; allows for a cast of NPC crew with their own personalities, assets, and problems; and carries the player characters from world to world to encounter new situations and plot complications.

Yeah, I really like that.