For When Your Type P Corsair Just Isn't P Enough

These do make landing more difficult and of course can only be for cargo whereas with a clamp you can swap cargo pods for a ship.

There are also Jump Nets of course.
With mounts, clamps or nets - unless you have a ship attached or a shuttle in a bay, you need a high port, because you are not landing with that.
*Assumes sanity*
 
With mounts, clamps or nets - unless you have a ship attached or a shuttle in a bay, you need a high port, because you are not landing with that.
*Assumes sanity*
Ships with clamps become unstreamlined when the clamps are in use. This makes even transiting the atmosphere a challenge. That is why use cargo launches rather than just pods as they can land independently and once detached the mother ship can land without difficulties. It also allows more flexibility as the independent ships can take their own paths.

External Cargo Mounts cannot be used on streamlined ships and make landings Difficult rather than Routine. As you can at best be partially streamlined you are at -2 as well making the difficulty (but at least this is only for the landing). You might be able to land safely but you risk loosing a significant portion of your cargo if you don't. Not a great option.

Jump Nets make the ship un-streamlined which is a Bad Thing.
 
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Ships with clamps become unstreamlined when the clamps are in use. This makes even transiting the atmosphere a challenge. That is why use cargo launches rather than just pods as they can land independently and once detached the mother ship can land without difficulties. It also allows more flexibility as the independent ships can take their own paths.

External Cargo Mounts cannot be used on streamlined ships and make landings Difficult rather than Routine. As you can at best be partially streamlined you are at -2 as well making the difficulty (but at least this is only for the landing). You might be able to land safely but you risk loosing a significant portion of your cargo if you don't. Not a great option.

Jump Nets make the ship un-streamlined which is a Bad Thing.
I pretty much said the same thing, but only used one line to do it.
 
On the issue of the Corsair being specifically designed as a pirate ship in universe I believe in an earlier edition it was in narrative meant to be some type of pocket petrol ship that was suspiciously good at piracy.

On the issue of the Corsair swallowing smaller ships I think the adjustable hull is meant to allow it handle various footprints of 100 ton ships though personally I not so convinced.
 
No, it was specifically designed as a corsair. GT introduced the converted rescue/patrol ship but I would have to check.

S:4 where it first appears says:

"Pirate characters may receive a corsair: an armed raiding ship. The referee may specify if the ship has a crew, or if it needs one.

Corsair (Type P): Based on the type 400 hull, the corsair is fitted out with jump drive-D, maneuver drive-F, and power plant-F, giving it a capability for jump-2 and 3G acceleration. A Model/2 computer installed, and contains a standard software package. Most important to this ship are the three triple turrets, although each turret is equipped with only one beam laser. Ten staterooms serve as quarters for the crew (pilot, navigator, three engineers, and assorted thugs and cutthroats numbering up to five more); twenty low berths are available for emergency use, or to hold captives. The ship is not streamlined, and there are no ship's vehicles or boats. Fuel capacity is 120 tons, and cargo capacity is 160 tons.

Notable features on the corsair are large cargo doors and variable identification features. The large clam-shell doors can open to reveal the entire cargo bay; the ship can accept a 100 to ship into its cargo bay. The ship has several centrally controlled identification features which can alter the shape and configuration of the ship at a moment's notice; fins retract or extend, modules appear or disappear, and radio emissions alter frequency and content. The ship's transponders can be altered to identify the vessel as having any of a variety of missions and identities.
The approximate value of the corsair is Cr180,000,000, but this price would be difficult to obtain on the open market, as the ship is of a noncommercial type, and its lineage and paperwork are of uncertain origin. It could probably bring about one quarter its value."
 
I tend to think that lots of things would not transport well in the absence of gravity, heat, and atmosphere.

A 100 ton cargo pod needs 20pts of power for basic systems. That can be a power plant on the pod or an oversize powerplant on the mothership. But it does need to exist, imho. And it does need to be clarified in the rules whether or not Ship A can provide life support to ships clamped to it in case you are clamping a ship that has no power of its own due to damage or malfunction.

And, of course, if a clamp is (or must be near) an airlock, that's also something that needs to be specified. Because airlocks take up 2 dtons for every airlock beyond the 1 free one per 100 tons of the ship and the class I docking clamps aren't that big. Also, external cargo mounts specifically state that you have to leave the ship to access that cargo. So that clearly has no airlock.
 
Powered cargo pod.

If it needs life support and gravity.

Whether the inertial compensation field extends into it, is another issue.
 
Sorry I was thinking of the larger cutlass class pirate cruiser from the traders and gunboats supplement pg 62.
 
Powered cargo pod.

If it needs life support and gravity.

Whether the inertial compensation field extends into it, is another issue.
If the drives are powerful enough to move it, they are powerful enough for inertial compensation. I gather this as there is no rule for it not being covered. Your nominally thrust 2 drive might drop to thrust 1, but just as the thrust is being spread out, so it the associated inertial compensation.
 
With mounts, clamps or nets - unless you have a ship attached or a shuttle in a bay, you need a high port, because you are not landing with that.
*Assumes sanity*
I do tend to think that once you start getting into traders using clamps/external cargo, you are assuming a level of infrastructure exists to support it. Tugs and interface craft that you see in 2300, but not generally in Charted Space materials. It is one of the reasons why I think LASH may be more viable in Charted Space than its maritime equivalent was.

On earth, railways are efficient and available. And ports have vastly more storage space than any ship could have. So it makes sense to go to the port and unload cargo, then reload it onto other ships/railways to go to secondary destinations.

Whether that is still true with a highport is not at all clear to me. There's no comparables to railways and trucks. So anything unloaded at the highport (except supplies for the highport itself) has to be loaded onto another spaceship. So the question becomes where is it most efficient to have the infrastructure? A Jump Tender type ship hauling non jump freighters between systems that go directly to the downport, secondary spaceports or having a highport big enough to directly unload a large freighter and reload the material to its various destinations.

Either answer could be true, because we don't know the economics of space trade.
 
If the drives are powerful enough to move it, they are powerful enough for inertial compensation. I gather this as there is no rule for it not being covered. Your nominally thrust 2 drive might drop to thrust 1, but just as the thrust is being spread out, so it the associated inertial compensation.
MgT2e doesn't specify where the intertial compensation happens IIRC. It does say that the rating of the maneuver drive is the rating of the associated ship's inertial compensation, so you could infer that the maneuver drive itself is magically compensating for the inertia it is producing.

In Fire, Fusion, & Steel, inertial compensation for higher than 1G was part of the life support apparatus and took up power/volume/mass/credits to have.
 
MgT2e doesn't specify where the intertial compensation happens IIRC. It does say that the rating of the maneuver drive is the rating of the associated ship's inertial compensation, so you could infer that the maneuver drive itself is magically compensating for the inertia it is producing.

In Fire, Fusion, & Steel, inertial compensation for higher than 1G was part of the life support apparatus and took up power/volume/mass/credits to have.
Yep, it's magic and that is where I think it is assumed to flow from.
 
I do tend to think that once you start getting into traders using clamps/external cargo, you are assuming a level of infrastructure exists to support it. Tugs and interface craft that you see in 2300, but not generally in Charted Space materials. It is one of the reasons why I think LASH may be more viable in Charted Space than its maritime equivalent was.

On earth, railways are efficient and available. And ports have vastly more storage space than any ship could have. So it makes sense to go to the port and unload cargo, then reload it onto other ships/railways to go to secondary destinations.

Whether that is still true with a highport is not at all clear to me. There's no comparables to railways and trucks. So anything unloaded at the highport (except supplies for the highport itself) has to be loaded onto another spaceship. So the question becomes where is it most efficient to have the infrastructure? A Jump Tender type ship hauling non jump freighters between systems that go directly to the downport, secondary spaceports or having a highport big enough to directly unload a large freighter and reload the material to its various destinations.

Either answer could be true, because we don't know the economics of space trade.
High Guard has Utility Pods that move smaller cargo and come with a Type I Docking Clamp, and it claims they are all over the place. That implies that 30-ton cargo pods could be easily handled in orbit. While there are no designated larger Utility Pods to move something bigger, it's not much of a stretch to imagine they exist.
 
You either assume that a Class A Starport and/or the associated brokers and corporations have the infrastructure in place to deal with external cargo, or you (as GM) tell your players that they cannot use those features because the area they are in is a backwater that is underdeveloped and incapable of the basics needed to support itself as even an interplanetary polity.

A basic small high port, with an M-0, can maintain a geostationary orbit in LEO, thereby allowing grav trucks to play space elevator with your cargo.

Brokers eager to take cargo off the hands of space truckers at a discount are going to have the equipment capable of doing that.
 
I'm pretty sure external cargo can survive two gravities of acceleration.

Presumably.

As regards to the inertial compensation field, if it's like the jump bubble, you could stroll along the hull.
 
I'm pretty sure external cargo can survive two gravities of acceleration.

Presumably.

As regards to the inertial compensation field, if it's like the jump bubble, you could stroll along the hull.
With magnetic boots you can stroll along the hull, but different versions of jump physics make that varying degrees of suicidal in jump space.
Especially the version where the jump bubble shrinks until it can no longer maintain the bubble and deposits the ship back into normal space.
That said, I do like the adventure where you aren't supposed to jump on a certain day, because Bad ThingsTM happen.
 
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I don't recall seeing the Utility Pod in High Guard, but I don't know that this is relevant to my point.

The point is that there is nothing defined in Charted Space about how this is handled. So any solution is one devised by the referee. There are LOTS of possible solutions.

There are lots of features in MgT2e High Guard that have little or no support in published material for Charted Space.

Personally, I think there should be large quantities of space infrastructure that isn't in evidence. So I put it there. But there are other viable solutions depending on what you want your Charted Space to look like.

Very very few MgT2e starships do anything with Fuel/Cargo containers, External Cargo, LASH type carried freighters, or many other options available to the game rules. You might take that literally and assume those things are a rarity and support for them is negligible. You might design your own ships that do use those features. You might decide that they are rare, but support exists if you do have one.
 
Or you might deduce that those types of ships are not fun for adventurers, so many authors ignore them.
 
I don't recall seeing the Utility Pod in High Guard, but I don't know that this is relevant to my point.

The point is that there is nothing defined in Charted Space about how this is handled. So any solution is one devised by the referee. There are LOTS of possible solutions.

There are lots of features in MgT2e High Guard that have little or no support in published material for Charted Space.

Personally, I think there should be large quantities of space infrastructure that isn't in evidence. So I put it there. But there are other viable solutions depending on what you want your Charted Space to look like.

Very very few MgT2e starships do anything with Fuel/Cargo containers, External Cargo, LASH type carried freighters, or many other options available to the game rules. You might take that literally and assume those things are a rarity and support for them is negligible. You might design your own ships that do use those features. You might decide that they are rare, but support exists if you do have one.
Sorry. It was in the Small Craft Catalog. It's relevant because it tells what it does and how common it is. If you don't choose to use it, that's fine, but it's a listed craft and admirably suits what we were talking about. Charted Space doesn't speak to it one way or the other, so there's no reason it shouldn't be in use as pods make economic sense.

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