Mating Airlocks to Cargo Hatches

[Vormaerin]

Airplanes don't use large shipping containers either. They are also general cargo style transports.

You can design your own starships that are belly hatch orientated, certainly. None of the published small traders are.

 

[swordtart]

Airplanes don't use large shipping containers either. They are also general cargo style transports.

You can design your own starships that are belly hatch orientated, certainly. None of the published small traders are.

None of the published deck plans say they are, but otherwise they are a list of components and cargo doors are not a listed component

 

[swordtart]

If so then the crane is more or less useless on most PC ships, the loading belt might still have some use. Might just be a conveyor belt running down the centre of the hold that they move things on and it runs them to the hatch where locals can pick them up.

A crane will still be useful for those 1DTon containers. 14 cubic meters is still larger enough that a crane would be useful. Even something only 1 meter on a side could be heavy enough to benefit from a crane if it were machinery. The advantage should be that it would allow stacking containers internally (and that would be particularly useful if you had many cubic metre containers stacked.

It also allows grabbing something from anywhere in the hold (as log as it was on top) and dropping it into a waiting vehicle using the gib without needing to rely on any portside MHE That might be useful to expedite your unloading in low infrastructure ports or when making "less official" deliveries.

Alternately a single grappling arm would be useful (mounted by the hatch) as due to length it could reach anywhere in the hold and a large distance outside it so it could load onto a variety of waiting trucks or wagons or into a warehouse the ship was landed beside. At 2 tons it is a weight and price savings compared to the crane.

The grappling arm is useful in space. My read is that it cannot be used on land (and it needs the non-gravity to move things). I am also not convinced it can be used to reach into the cargo bay to garb things (whether in gravity or not). At best you might be able to push things out of the hatch and have it pick them up from there.

A Ripley style exoskeleton (similar outfit in the 1960s movie The Ambushers with Dean Martin though simpler) would also do the trick especially if they had telecoping legs. Otherwise a simple towmotor.

You can use the RH to design one of these, but the STR of the equipment would be the limiting factor.

 

[Condottiere]

You have to figure out what makes sense, even if only in the context of your version of the setting.

In terms of, what I'll term true containerization, and in context of our deckplans, the smallest standard I have would be a cube, a tad short of three metres by three metres by three metres; internal dimensions vary.

Next would a fortyish footer, which will, of course, accommodate anything what our twenty footers would.

You can probably customize any other size, with laser drills cutting sheets of metal to be assembled.

 

[swordtart]

I don't have the SOP and my presumption was that containers were the future equivalent of TEU. To make them more compatible with Travellers DTon and deck plan conventions I had them as 2 DTon with the 10ft and 40ft versions being 1 DTon and 4 DTon. All of the real world versions are intermodal shipping containers. It is more efficient to lift them with purpose designed cranes from above, but they can be moved b y forklift if necessary and I don't see the Traveller ones designing that flexibility out.

I still see these as containing sub-packages of either homogenous goods or even random items that have been packed by a shipping company from a variety of sources that only have a destination and broad physical compatibility in common. That I class as the break bulk element. In extremis you with even low capacity MHE you could unload container and move that break bulk and then move the empty container, but in doing so you are then operating in the shippers domain rather than the carrier.

I glossed over the specific dimensions as 14 cubic metres is a terrible number to work from. I also gloss over the cargo deck height as it is not specified. I am going to assume that it is high enough to allow enough space to allow the container to be manoeuvred with MHE available in any port other than possibly Class E.

I think we were talking at cross purposes as I hadn't considered shipping containers in the 5-10 DTon range and they are, in my opinion, out of scope for the 200 Dton merchants and so IMTU they are irrelevant.