Help! Starship Design 1: Long Liner

[phavoc]

Fellow ship designers,

Here is a long liner, designed using the core book. This ship is built for patrolled and possibly escorted routes, and is basically a "business-class jet" kind of ship, so the stock model has no offences or defences, but it does assume that most of the passengers will be flying High -- any Middle passengers would likely be servants, ehrm, hired stewards, of the High passengers.

Your suggestions and critiques are most helpful.

Thanks in advance.

Barilaan-class Long Liner

Using an 800-ton hull, the Barilaan-class Long Liner is a corporate business and government luxury passenger ship. The Barilaan requires a crew of eight: pilot, boat pilot, navigator, two engineers, and three stewards with combined Steward skill levels of 8. The pinnace is an added luxury for making side trips and for ferrying passengers remotely.

Routes Served

Barilaan liners operate along the xboat route, typically jumping as many hexes as possible. Scheduled flights will often skip stops in order to better connect more important worlds; however, less important stops along the route can of course be chartered.

Riding Barilaan

Passengers aboard Barilaan liners are not idle while aboard. Just the opposite: the passengers' space is designed for planning meetings, breakout sessions, think tanks, and times of intense focus, problem-solving, and even confrontation, compromise, and deal-making. There is a lounge, several meeting rooms, and a library. The four largest staterooms are double suites with an attached office. Twelve more staterooms are one-and-a-half suites, and the remaining twelve are standard size.

To balance out these intense sessions of work, passengers are subjected to excessive luxury. Stewards dote on guests, personalizing each room to relax its occupant, preparing classical shugiili-quality Vilani meals, selecting music and reading material to suit the guest's taste, and organizing various entertainments in the dining lounge, including booking guest lecturers on topics of interest, popular performers, star authors, discussion groups and workshops, games, and so on. Luxury supplies of a bewildering variety are stocked in each stateroom.

Because these liners are for corporate and government use, costs are absorbed by the company or government. If a civilian had the opportunity to fly Barilaan, it would be because a friend or associate had an extra ticket.

Hull           800 tons                             MCr  96
               Streamlined
               Self-Sealing
Armour         None
Jump Drive N (Jump 4)                          70t  MCr 130
Manoeuvre Drive G (2G)                         13t  MCr  28
Power Plant N                                  40t  MCr 104
Bridge                                         20t  MCr   4
Computer       Model/3bis                           MCr   4 
Electronics    Civilian                         1t  MCr   0.05
Weapons        Empty (8 hardpoints)
Fuel           One jump-4 and 4 weeks' power  372t
Cargo                                          42t
Crew Staterooms (8)                            32t  MCr   4.0
Passenger Space (28 rooms)                    144t  MCr  17.5
Luxuries for 16 passengers                      8t  MCr   0.8
Extras
Pinnace                                        40t  MCr  20
Escape Pods    One for every stateroom         19t  MCr   3.8
Software       Intellect                            MCr   1
               Jump Control/4                       MCr   0.4
               Manoeuvre/0
               Library/0
               Expert/3 (Pilot)                     MCr   0.1
               Expert/3 (Astrogator)                MCr   0.1
Maintenance Cost (monthly)                          Cr 345,000
Life Support Cost (monthly)                         Cr  ??,???
Total Tonnage and Cost                        800t  MCr 414.25

Some more thoughts on your design

1) You have the hull listed as streamlined. There's no need for that for a passenger ship. You may, on occasion, land at a down-port. And if so you don't need the added cost that comes with streamlining because you won't be needing to do anything in-atmo that would require it. However, one could justify the extra expense by making the ship more aesthetically pleasing, so in essence it's more about luxury than anything else.

2) I believe you need a computer/4 rating to do jump 4. But I don't have my books in front of me.

3) As it was pointed out, you could free up additional space onboard and assume the bulk of your jumps will be J-2 and J-3. That way you have the ability to do a J-4 with your J-drive, but you don't have to allocate space for the fuel for jumps that you rarely take. You should be able to easily squeeze in a few more staterooms for the extra space that will give you.

4) As far as your 2G M-drive goes, think about some of the tonnage savings from reducing your jump fuel tankage and upgrading your M-drive and Power Plant to say 4G's. This will double the speed in normal space, which is not necessarily inconsequential. Most liners on scheduled runs are going to drop off their passengers, take on fuel and supplies and then immediately move back out. A ship in port is losing money. Most of us don't deal with that mentality, but any shipping, trucking, rail or airline company knows it all to well - which is why you see planes and trains and ships being constantly run and the 'weak' link is the crew.

5) For your escape pods, I hope that the crew gets a few too! At a minimum you need pods for every person on-board. Since cabins CAN be double-occupied (even High-passage people have bedwarmers sometimes), you need to doublecheck the design and insure every crew member and the max number of people the ship will carry will have an escape pod available.

6) For small craft, you probably should still carry at least a launch. Something that will allow your crew to shuttle passengers somewhere, not to mention that a ship in orbital port will need to take their 'truck' over to a station or somewhere to pick up supplies, drop crew off, etc. It's a relatively small amount of tonnage if you keep it reasonably sized. Launches would be the most basic, but a 30 Dton craft would probably fit your needs.

Finally, you may want to think about designing this as a 'family' of ships, and make variants instead of trying to cram all this into one design. You might have a variant that is totally self-sufficient for J-4 (like this one). You might have one that's just a J-2, but it's designed as a government VIP transport. So it may carry armaments. And maybe there's a variant optimized for delivery of very VIP people and it's very much heavily armed (all turrets occupied). Etc. Things are much easier once you have the basic design down.

 

[AndrewW]

2) I believe you need a computer/4 rating to do jump 4. But I don't have my books in front of me.

A bis model is specialized for jump and has a +5 rating just for jump.

5) For your escape pods, I hope that the crew gets a few too! At a minimum you need pods for every person on-board. Since cabins CAN be double-occupied (even High-passage people have bedwarmers sometimes), you need to doublecheck the design and insure every crew member and the max number of people the ship will carry will have an escape pod available.

Rules state escape pod as per stateroom, this would seem to indicate an escape pod will hold two passengers. Although this is never clarified.

 

[pasuuli]

Since this ship runs on the "main routes" (Otherwise it won't get the passengers it needs), does it really have to travel "in system"?

For the big systems (Most likely Class A/B ports) this type of craft caters too, I could see an "100D annex" of the main starport. Ships know where it is sitting, just a little inside the 100D zone so no one jumps into it by accident and go there. PAX transit to/from this in 6g shuttles that make regular runs to/from the main port. The station takes higher than normal berthing fees for all services but is part of the port.

The highliner jumps in, refules, changes PAX and jumps out again. Minimum travelling time in N-space

As Sr. Havoc and others have suggested, there are variants on the books for this sort of thing, as well as the lower budget "meet the shuttles partway there, refuel in situ, and you're off" setup.

 

[pasuuli]

You guys are awesome! You have given me a lot of good suggestions to think about on this design, and I appreciate it.