Mgt2 200 ton Frontier Trader

[phavoc]

Nice animation.
The tail-sitter means it's not as convenient to load as something along the lines of a free trader,with it's cargo deck closer to the ground.
Other than, things look very interesting.

A cargo crane is mentioned in the description, which in my mind would be an industrial side-loading cargo lift ... but I agree with you Phavoc. My all time favourite is the Type R Subsidized merchant with fore and aft cargo ramps!

Having had to experience the joy of using a crane to load cargo (in my case it was an M985 HEMTT loading 5,200 lb rocket pods - and it really WAS fun... usually, except in the mud), and having drive a forklift to load things, I can tell you that driving something around, rather than using a crane, is a much quicker way of doing things. Yes, the crane works, but it's faster, safer, and easier to do the lifting with the loader. In the future I would suspect there would be a grav-forklift version.

There's no question about a crane being able to do the job, but recall the craft description - it's a frontier ship. So that means your cargo has to be dropped extremely close to the hull, thus your cargo vehicles have to also get very close to receive the cargo from the extendable crane. I dunno if anyone else paid attention years ago, but flatbed trucks in the US used to mount a crane in the middle to pick up palletized cargo, like bricks, when the truck was meant to drop off the cargo at a site that didn't have a forklift. That went away because it's quicker and more useful to carry around a forklift on the back of the flatbed than to use the crane. While you probably wouldn't hang your loader off the side of your spaceship (thus your loader needs to always consume cargo space), having a portable loader means you can unload you ship and move the cargo anywhere you need to externally. Again, from experience, easier to move those things you carry around that way than move your truck (or your spaceship) to accomodate your fixed position crane.

And I'm still liking the ship.

 

[Condottiere]

Anti-grav lifter.

 

[wbnc]

Nice animation.
The tail-sitter means it's not as convenient to load as something along the lines of a free trader,with it's cargo deck closer to the ground.
Other than, things look very interesting.

A cargo crane is mentioned in the description, which in my mind would be an industrial side-loading cargo lift ... but I agree with you Phavoc. My all time favourite is the Type R Subsidized merchant with fore and aft cargo ramps!

Having had to experience the joy of using a crane to load cargo (in my case it was an M985 HEMTT loading 5,200 lb rocket pods - and it really WAS fun... usually, except in the mud), and having drive a forklift to load things, I can tell you that driving something around, rather than using a crane, is a much quicker way of doing things. Yes, the crane works, but it's faster, safer, and easier to do the lifting with the loader. In the future I would suspect there would be a grav-forklift version.

There's no question about a crane being able to do the job, but recall the craft description - it's a frontier ship. So that means your cargo has to be dropped extremely close to the hull, thus your cargo vehicles have to also get very close to receive the cargo from the extendable crane. I dunno if anyone else paid attention years ago, but flatbed trucks in the US used to mount a crane in the middle to pick up palletized cargo, like bricks, when the truck was meant to drop off the cargo at a site that didn't have a forklift. That went away because it's quicker and more useful to carry around a forklift on the back of the flatbed than to use the crane. While you probably wouldn't hang your loader off the side of your spaceship (thus your loader needs to always consume cargo space), having a portable loader means you can unload you ship and move the cargo anywhere you need to externally. Again, from experience, easier to move those things you carry around that way than move your truck (or your spaceship) to accomodate your fixed position crane.

And I'm still liking the ship.

Pne of my many jobs was as a forklift driver..When I worked at a brickyard each delivery truck had a small lift on the back.I hadn't even thought of adding a compact loader to the equipment.
adding a cargo loader wouldn't take up much space...and since you can get a Grav Loader that can "fly" in and out of the cargo bay it would be a good addition.

 

[Mithras]

There must be something wrong with my brain, but I fall asleep when reading discussions about pintles and spinal mounts, armour values and drive sizes... but I absolutely live talking about cargo loading techniques. :0 And no, I've never driven a forklift. I guess its a really practical discussion. I like that.

 

[wbnc]

There must be something wrong with my brain, but I fall asleep when reading discussions about pintles and spinal mounts, armour values and drive sizes... but I absolutely live talking about cargo loading techniques. :0 And no, I've never driven a forklift. I guess its a really practical discussion. I like that.

cargo handling and warehouse work is something I think every high school kid should do...best cure for not wanting to go to vocational school, or college I know of...right up there with retail work, and food services. honest work but boy it ain't exactly a career I'd recommend.

The dirty and dull day to day working of a ship or transport system pays for all those big shiny warships and delivers the supplies to keep them running. A crewman on a ship with 20k or more crew is just a number on a worksheet. but the day to day aspects of a working ship are more personal, easier to grasp.

 

[phavoc]

There must be something wrong with my brain, but I fall asleep when reading discussions about pintles and spinal mounts, armour values and drive sizes... but I absolutely live talking about cargo loading techniques. :0 And no, I've never driven a forklift. I guess its a really practical discussion. I like that.

cargo handling and warehouse work is something I think every high school kid should do...best cure for not wanting to go to vocational school, or college I know of...right up there with retail work, and food services. honest work but boy it ain't exactly a career I'd recommend.

The dirty and dull day to day working of a ship or transport system pays for all those big shiny warships and delivers the supplies to keep them running. A crewman on a ship with 20k or more crew is just a number on a worksheet. but the day to day aspects of a working ship are more personal, easier to grasp.

Yeah, but REAL kids would be moving ammunition! Lol.

 

[wbnc]

There must be something wrong with my brain, but I fall asleep when reading discussions about pintles and spinal mounts, armour values and drive sizes... but I absolutely live talking about cargo loading techniques. :0 And no, I've never driven a forklift. I guess its a really practical discussion. I like that.

cargo handling and warehouse work is something I think every high school kid should do...best cure for not wanting to go to vocational school, or college I know of...right up there with retail work, and food services. honest work but boy it ain't exactly a career I'd recommend.

The dirty and dull day to day working of a ship or transport system pays for all those big shiny warships and delivers the supplies to keep them running. A crewman on a ship with 20k or more crew is just a number on a worksheet. but the day to day aspects of a working ship are more personal, easier to grasp.

Yeah, but REAL kids would be moving ammunition! Lol.

Yeah probably so.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Yeah, the trouble with a cargo ship of this type is that it would be better to have all the cargo on the bottom, for ease of loading and unloading... arguably, a round-nose bullet would be better for this purpose, with a flat bottom for loading and so on.

Putting the Maneuver Drives on the edges of the Middle Deck would certainly have maneuverability advantages of the kind that Traveller traditionally ignores... but everyday human activity takes up a lot of consecutive space, and I’m not convinced the remaining space on higher or lower decks are all that viable for everyday life; hence my initial reluctance to put those drives there.

Good luck, wbc.

 

[Condottiere]

Instead of top clamshell doors, have a ramp at the bottom.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

There must be something wrong with my brain, but I fall asleep when reading discussions about pintles and spinal mounts, armour values and drive sizes... but I absolutely live talking about cargo loading techniques. :0 And no, I've never driven a forklift. I guess its a really practical discussion. I like that.

It’s really a shame that Traveller has no logistical model...

I would start with 2.5 m^3 cardboard boxes, up to 2 per square per level of Cargo Bay. Make the 30 dT Cutter Module rectangular, and not quite 4 squares wide by 2 levels high by 7.5 squares long... shrunk just enough so the Modular Cutter has a spine large enough to be traversed by people for the sake of repair mid-flight, and so the Modular Cutter can fully enclose the container within hull (eliminating the need for those pointless fuel modules, and eliminating the requirement of cargo modules, but not the benefits of them). Modular Cutter modules would fit very well in the usable height of a 2 deck high Cargo Bay, in spite of the ceiling limitations, due to the previously mentioned dimensional shrinkage. Cargo Modules can still take the 2.5 m^3 cardboard boxes, but they have to be carefully packed, due to the tighter tolerances of the narrower volume; Cargo Modules are best used when a full Module’s worth of cargo all has the same multi-stop destination; fiddling with partial delivery of a Cargo Module’s contents is something that dock working teamsters should do, and not Starship Captains... unless the pay is just that good. Of course, sometimes a Cargo Module will be pre-inspected, and have a security tampering detection label applied... at which point, the pay to tamper with it had better be very very good...

 

[wbnc]

I'll get back to logistics in a second.

Okay, I had to get creative with some math, and a few online volume calculators. the upper dome of the ship is 44 Dtons..if my math is right. That is enough to put the tankage, weapons, munitions storage and bridge in as displayed...with the bridge protruding through the tanks.

that's approximately 55 tons


using the center belt for crew passengers and such, I can insert the cargo bay in a cylinder that extends from the central belt to the base of the ship with the hardware for drives and power plant arrayed around it. I can arrange it so that the entire lower deck lowers to the ground allowing direct pickup by ground crews...by basically combining a cargo ramp/airlock and a cargo crane to arrive at proper tonnage and costs. this way the ship can tail land, or dock flush with a space station or other vessel using airlock built into the cargo deck floor/elevator.

a secondary hatch at the top of the open area multilevel cargo well would allow for unloading by the cargo crane system at the top of the stack.of course falling off the catwalks at the top of the stack would be a bit unhealthy.there would be issues with managing dead space in the cargo hold but that's where a good cargo master comes in handy.

I want to put the tankage up front since it makes a very good radiation buffer...being filled with liquid hydrogen most of the time.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

The math you are looking for is called the Spherical Cap.
You start with half of the sphere, and then you subtract the cap starting one inch above it, and multiply that by 2; that’s your “middle deck”. Decks above the middle will be the Spherical Cap starting from the bottom of the deck minus the Spherical Cap starting from the ceiling. Reverse for below the middle. Subtract out the smaller cylinder to get the compromised volume to turn into pie wedges.

All numbers rounded by Wolfram Alpha
For a sphere of 6", 9m; Cubic Inches, dTons:
Half-Sphere: 452.389, 113.09725
Spherical Cap, 5": 340.339, 85.08475
Difference: 112.05, 28.0125
Middle Deck: 224.1, 56.025
Spherical Cap, 3": 141.372, 35.343
Deck Adjacent to Middle Deck: 198.967, 49.74175

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I want to put the tankage up front since it makes a very good radiation buffer...being filled with liquid hydrogen most of the time.

At any given time, your ship could be facing any direction. In general, you should have tankage everywhere around the ship...

Given how much curvature you’re fighting, you shouldn’t assume your tankage is in any particular place, until you’ve found a convenient use for those compromised regions... and this helps your radiation coverage too.

 

[phavoc]

You really don't need to worry about radiation exposure with the magical hull materials of Traveller. At some point "high" radiation will penetrate the hull, but that's never really been defined. For basic stuff that your cargo ship is going to encounter the hull is sufficient protection.

Location of the fuel along the outer shell isn't a necessity unless you want to use it as such.

 

[wbnc]

You really don't need to worry about radiation exposure with the magical hull materials of Traveller. At some point "high" radiation will penetrate the hull, but that's never really been defined. For basic stuff that your cargo ship is going to encounter the hull is sufficient protection.

Location of the fuel along the outer shell isn't a necessity unless you want to use it as such.

I am trying to lay the ship out to allow for some issues, not in the rules such as running headlong at high velocity into solar winds.....and such.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

You really don't need to worry about radiation exposure with the magical hull materials of Traveller. At some point "high" radiation will penetrate the hull, but that's never really been defined. For basic stuff that your cargo ship is going to encounter the hull is sufficient protection.

Location of the fuel along the outer shell isn't a necessity unless you want to use it as such.

wbnc is a pro who, like myself, cares about the engineering considerations that make a ship viable. The extra effort proves itself out as a superior quality product worthy of spending money on. Realism has value, both as a product, and in play. Handwaving is corner-cutting; period. It’s only as acceptable as the people at your table agree that it is.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I am trying to lay the ship out to allow for some issues, not in the rules such as running headlong at high velocity into solar winds.....and such.

Remember, you have to reverse thrust at some point, and when you do, you’re probably going to be closer to the star rather than further away, and facing more radiation as a result. As such, in that sense, it may make more sense to prioritize radiation protection on the lower half... but...

When orbiting a planet close-in to a star that has no magnetic field (and yeah, that does happen), unless you’re determined to spend fuel correcting the ship’s attitude for radiation, it’s better to just cover the ship equally. Perturbations in local gravity due to the object being orbited and the asymmetric shape of the ship are going to (slowly) pull the ship into a specific orientation relative to the gravity well, which pretty much means the ship will be irradiated from all sides over the course of the orbit. So better to shoot for equal coverage.

 

[phavoc]

You really don't need to worry about radiation exposure with the magical hull materials of Traveller. At some point "high" radiation will penetrate the hull, but that's never really been defined. For basic stuff that your cargo ship is going to encounter the hull is sufficient protection.

Location of the fuel along the outer shell isn't a necessity unless you want to use it as such.

wbnc is a pro who, like myself, cares about the engineering considerations that make a ship viable. The extra effort proves itself out as a superior quality product worthy of spending money on. Realism has value, both as a product, and in play. Handwaving is corner-cutting; period. It’s only as acceptable as the people at your table agree that it is.

This is pretty funny. I didn't realize we had professional jump-capable spacecraft designer here on Terra. Wow! The things you learn on the Internet.

But if you think you are up there with Alice Cooper, somehow I don't see anyone bowing down to you...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjaqrPpdQYc

wnbc - There are some things that make sense to create better detail and background, and others not so much. The hull materials of Traveller are pretty wonderful compared to modern material science - we'd be hard pressed to create such things using today's metallurgy. But the game mechanics rely upon acceptance of them, so I do. By doing so I don't affect the gaming aspect of things at all. It's always nice to try and reflect logic and common sense into a design, but sometimes the amount of effort isn't worth the payoff. Placing 1m of fuel around the outer hull as a buffer to radiation seems to make a lot of sense.

However, since you are making a jump-capable ship, much of your fuel is required for jump purposes. So if the fuel buffer is necessary for the safety of the crew, it's only going to be useful, most of the time, when the tanks are full. Otherwise there will be insufficient fuel onboard to provide the protection. Hence you are better off using rad shielding for the crew areas and not having to depend on something that isn't always going to be present. Traveller hull materials protect against "standard" solar radiation, which should be sufficient enough for the majority of ship designs.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I meant “pro” as in “published designer of roleplaying materials”... dumbass.

Actually, the hull and armor materials are yet another category where Traveller is grossly outdated. Designing around those materials would be better practice, generally.

While it is not a truism that gas giants tend to be towards the outer orbits, you can certainly plan around keeping a safety layer of fuel.

 

[phavoc]

I meant “pro” as in “published designer of roleplaying materials”... dumbass.

Actually, the hull and armor materials are yet another category where Traveller is grossly outdated. Designing around those materials would be better practice, generally.

While it is not a truism that gas giants tend to be towards the outer orbits, you can certainly plan around keeping a safety layer of fuel.

Not even worth my time. Maybe when you get some maturity we can discuss Traveller stuff again. Till then it's just easier to put you on ignore so when you spew your anger I don't have to see it. Enjoy yourself.