Ship Design Philosophy

[Condottiere]

Inspiration: Thunderbirds Are Go!

Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQwgIZ__WrY

Thunderbird Two certainly resembles a modular Far Trader, and the ambiance of the show feels Travellerish. Never saw the appeal of the original, and the reboot doesn't really feel updated enough in terms of concept, story or characters, nor the option to parody it like Danger Five.

But the sets and the CGI vehicles make it worthwhile studying it.

 

[Condottiere]

Armaments: Sandcasters

The canisters could be used as packing material for mini-missiles, whose range and damage is lower than the lower shipboard missiles, but handling is simplified and fairly fool-proof.

 

[Condottiere]

Armaments: Sandcasters

Seems perfect for ortillery, or gravity munitions in general, like dumb bombs.

Or smart bombs, if you attach a pop up guidance kit in the rear.

 

[Condottiere]

Inspiration: The War In Space

Besides the fact that everything tends to look derivative and has a non-Travellerish Nipponese vibe that seems prevalent in all Japanese life action scifi movies, the spaceship itself has a unique feature that you can't observe on the cross-section, but will note in the film, starting from the fifty-ninth minute.

It's a revolver launching facility, which later doubles as a Gatling energy gun.

http://filmix.net/fantastika/19320-voyna-v-kosmose-wakusei-daisenso-1977.html

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceship: Hangar Space

Apparently, Space Stations allocates three hundred percent for hangar queens. That actually makes more sense for servicing, maintenance and repair than one hundred thirty percent. Because you do need space for personnel and equipment to move around and access various points on the craft.

In my opinion, the smaller the object, the more space percentage-wise you need to service it. Which means that capital class vessels need less space percentage-wise.

You can push the other smallcraft together to achieve three hundred percent.

However, this complicates traffic, so that operations are slowed down.

Smallcraft would be in crated, parked, servicing, in pieces or ready, each state requiring differing amounts of space.

 

[Condottiere]

Armaments: Sandcasters

Unlike missiles, sandcasters are unguided and unpowered by default. In order to intercept missiles or beams, having installed them in turrets seems the only real choice, rather than in fixed mounts, compared to missiles, who can change direction after launch.

Unless the sandcasters are used purely to coat the defending ship with a clinging cloud of sand, or fire chaff to distract enemy sensors.

 

[Condottiere]

Starships: Ballast

Ballast on a starship is additional volume added to a starship to stabilize a jump bubble during a hyperspace transition.

This is a critical issue for jump drive enabled hulls whose total volume falls below a hundred tons.

 

[Reynard]

Ballast... oh, is that what they're calling external cargo.

 

[Condottiere]

Ballast is anything to make up the numbers.

 

[Infojunky]

Armaments: Particle Accelerators

1. I recall once reading a proposal that a variant would be in a race track configuration.

Gee, you just described Bay Weapons and Turrets/barbettes...

 

[Condottiere]

As I understand it, PAWS in Traveller are linear, not Hadron Colliders.

 

[Condottiere]

Hulls: Unisectional and Adventure Class

You could reconcile the differences between the Core and HG books based on TL, and expected increased structural strength:

TL - Tons

6 - 800
7 - 1000
8 - 1200
9 - 1400
10 - 1600
11 - 1800
12 - 2000
13 - 3000
14 - 4000
15 - 5000

It's a pretty simplistic solution, and would probably have a knock-on effect on capital class sectionalization tonnage.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Grappling Arms

Need to be able to scale up the carrying capacity of grappling arms, though I suspect a reach of two hundred fifty metres does tend to complicate that; to be clear, I meant scaling up in terms of handling weight, not reach.

So some form of arm/crane would be nice to deal with smallcraft and/or cargo, though cargo could normally dealt with with contra-grav lifters, though not too sure how that would work in zero-gee space with a forty ton fighter.

 

[Reynard]

I'm assuming those are ship grappling arms. I could see space stations having much larger structures comparable to those massive cranes in terrestrial shipping and construction yards.

 

[Condottiere]

Shipyards could use tractor and pressor beams. If they wait long enough.

Elevators could solve the issue of getting something inside the hull, but you want something that can grab and manipulate heavy objects to place on the elevator.

 

[Reynard]

As far as I know, there are no Tractor/Pressor beams in Traveller. You did give me inspiration to check Space Stations and that's where I remember the big grappling arms called Docking Arms that deal with starships.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Workstations

There are probably three types:

1. For security concerns, those that are hardwired to specific ship systems, like flight controls, engineering, life support, and fire control.

2. For supervision, where a group of similar systems are repeated on a master console, but could be directed from there.

3. Software as a Service, where you could access any ship system, but subject to lags and hacking attempts, and overridden or excluded from either the computer core or the hardwired workstations.

 

[Condottiere]

Armaments: Sandcaster Packs

1. Based on the same principle as the missile pack, it's a set of twenty canisters embedded directly into the hull of a ship. Each sandcaster pack takes up a turret hardpoint and weighs one ton but fires all loaded canisters at once and uses the Gunner (bay) skill. However they can only be reloaded in a starport. The cost of a sandcaster pack is twice the cost of one ton of the loaded canisters.

2. Or, with fire control, you can launch each canister individually, reloading can be done at anytime, whether in vacuum or in a hangar, but time adjusted for the any additional difficulties in doing so, and the cost is the base canister launcher times twenty, plus any canister.

 

[Condottiere]

Armaments: Torpedo Bays

1. Darrians states that a torpedo bay has revolving launchers, fires five salvoes of three and five torpedoes respectively.

2. This would imply that launch equipment covers twenty-five percent of the bay.

3. But it's stated that this particular arrangement is specific to the Darrians.

 

[Condottiere]

Armaments: Torpedo Bays

1. Actually, on taking a second look, I've discovered that Darrians have six weapon upgrades, three each on the torpedo and the torpedo bay.

2. As I understand it, the torpedo and the torpedo bay are one weapon system, rather than separate ones. That means a maximum of three weapon upgrades and/or size reductions.

3. Unless the Darrians are the exception to the rule, it would appear that the author made a fundamental mistake in ship design.