Beastttt said:
the extra space is for maintaince and minor repairs only
your not going to be able to do major repairs
if the hull is warped or bent you could not get into the tube/bay any way
and I ment rotating it in the tube
anything sticking out can be cut off or that piece of the hull plating can be removed
if the vehicle is bent then the keel is whacked and the vessel would need to be stripped of useful parts and dumped
if say 10 ton fighter needs 13 tons of space so maintaince can be done then what if you had say 10x 10ton fighters that would be 130 tons
you allocate 10 tons to place each fighter(snug fit)you have a 30 ton space to do what ever needs to be done to the fighter or 2
in an emergency you could hold 2 extra fighters but you cannot work on any others as there is no swap space(to be used should the other 2 fighter's mother ship where destroyed or the bay wrecked)
and just because the boat may be oval does not mean the tube has to be
there could be cradles that the boat rests on and then you can rotate it
All of these ideas only work *before* you start working with actual spaces, or in the case of that last, before you do the math.
A strictly cylindrical bay big enough to rotate the oval MGT Cutter in will have a cross section of roughly 44.2 m2, while the cutter itself has a cross section of 26.5 m2. So the cradle is already 167% of the size of the craft, and you still don't have a flat floor to work on. Presuming that the bay goes for full floor space under the cradle (so repairs happen "up", like the craft was on a jack stand) that increases the cradle bay's cross section to 57.6 m2, or over twice the size of the craft being parked there.
Note that this arrangement also happens to be three decks high.
You can't just look at volume. You must also look at shape, especially if you are doing deckplans. I've been doing Traveller deckplans for many years, so some of this stuff is second nature to me.
As for "stacking" fighters, the ability to do so in a way that unifies their 30% surplus implies that you already have a lot more than that 30%.
Best case for your approach would be a craft we shall call "the brick". One deck high, 6 m wide, 15m long, and as squarish as we can manage, for 20 displacement tons. If we stack five of these either atop each other or side by side, and "steal" the extra 30% (6 dtons each) for a single repair bay in front of one of them, that gives us a 30 dton bay. Very cramped, but doable for many, if not all, external repairs. One bay per ten would be better, but that's a quibble. The point is that, unless you can shuffle the other four around, only one of them will have access to the repair bay itself. Two others will (assuming this is a unified bay and you put the repair bay in front of the middle one) have a single side exposed (which makes a good argument for stacking the bricks vertically, as this gives better access to hull exteriors). But you still can't shuffle them.
So we go to a two-by-three arrangement, with the repair bay off of one of the sides. This is best done with six or more craft, as you need to use the "magic square" shtick and need the repair bay to be large enough to do actual work, so four isn't enough. You can't simply pad the space around one of the six, because then you can't use the magic square effect to shuffle craft into the repair space. That said, if you have enough extra volume to play with you'll probably want to pad that corner anyway in addition to the dedicated repair bay, as you can then work on two at once. Note that you'll need to get the ratio of craft per repair bay up a lot higher before you can work on the tops of the bricks (assuming a horizontal Magic Square).
Good lord, just give the craft more room to begin with. This sort of arrangement is not going to be installed in anything small, so you'll probably have the displacement to burn. Really.
The Magic Square also stops working immediately if the craft isn't a brick, as the ability to shuffle rounded forms around a combined deck is already eating your 30% and then some.
