Q-Ship Design

[Karl Tenh]

I'm thinking of working on some Q-ship designs and am open to suggestions on the starting hull, weapon configuration(s), and cover story.

 

[Rusty_Unycorn]

Start off with a merchant hull, my suggestion is the Free Trader, the Far Trader, and the Fat Trader. Make the turrets popups, light on the ammo usage, heavy on the damage. Throw out the deckplans except for the basic deck shape. Carve out some cargo space to keep ammo, brigs, and to provide some tonnage to add more armor. Redundancy is a good keyword.
Remember, this isn't going to be a merchant, it's an anti-pirate ship meant to be hired out as protection for convoys.
That's for anti-pirate q-ships. For covert/insertion ops, don't hide the weapons, but list one or more as down for repairs on the ship's papers, with "parts" being creatively broken. For that, you want that somewhat down-at-the-heels look, which is more cosmetic than anything.
Or, just have the "passengers" have good, but forged papers and just be an honest looking merchant.

 

[rust]

In my settings the (very few) pirates tend to have information
sources at the starports, agents who tell them which merchant
ships would make good targets because of their valuable and
easily sold cargoes (... not a good idea to steal 70 dtons of mi-
ning machinery when there is only one planet able to use it in
the entire region).

The Patrol's answer to this were two outwardly identical ships
of the most common merchant ship configuration and size, a
true merchant ship and a Q ship.
The merchant ship would load "interesting" cargo at a starport,
making sure that everyone who wanted to know about the va-
luable cargo could find out about it with a little digging. Then
the ship left the starport under escort and jumped, presumab-
ly to its destination world out on the frontier, but actually with
a microjump to the outer system, where it waited for a week
before it continued its voyage.
Meanwhile the outwardly identical Q ship, which had waited at
the outer system, jumped to the merchant ship's original desti-
nation system, hoping that a pirate ship would turn up to cap-
ture the merchant ship with the "interesting" cargo. If one did,
it usually went down in a salvo of smart missiles with nuclear
warheads.
About a week later the real merchant ship arrived in the system
to deliver its cargo, without any fear of pirates waiting for it.

 

[SSWarlock]

One of my favorite Q-ship designs is to take a fat trader and hide a couple of pop-up particle beam barbettes inside the side cargo hatches just behind the standard turrets. Or just turn the main cargo bay into a small weapons bay (along with a more powerful power plant or emergency power supply) with the front cargo doors providing the camouflage. In this last configuration, the bay could suffer the same negative effects as a fixed weapon mount.

 

[phavoc]

First ask yourself what kind of piracy is going on? Are the targets typically small merchants plying the outer systems? Or maybe they are well-organized gang and they hit merchant ships, small liners, etc.

Then you can start designing your ship. You'll want additional armor, heavy weapons, probably a dedicated squad or two of marine boarders, brigs, armory, etc. And you'll need to leave room to actually load cargo so no one gets suspicious.

Finally, who is the authority that is fighting the pirates? Is is a local planetary authority? The local merchanters guild? A megacorp? Or the Imperial government. The higher up the food chain, the more fun stuff you can play with. Imperials will build their ship to higher TL standards and can afford to mount/support things like particle beams. Other entities might have to offset the TL difference with say more armor, and just plain lasers for their offensive capability.

If you build a good backstory, the rest will generally fall in place.