Suggested Blueprints
- Thread starter JMISBEST
- Start date
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Do you have the most excellent Chthonian Stars book? I go there for pirate ship ideas, that are hell-bent on harpooning the mother beast from the Black Star. The devourer of ships.
JMISBEST said:
Who did the converting? A pirate chop-shop or a 'professional' shipyard?
Any cargo ship with a displacement like that is almost certain to be of a "container ship" design like the one in 1e High Guard (or Han's freighter in The Force Awakens) - because a ship like that can't afford to be idle for long, and 'unloading' even ten percent of that volume (20,000 dTonnes!) of cargo is equivalent to unloading over seven thousand ISO containers (of the kind you see on trains or big container ships). To me, you would almost inevitably have them accessible in bulk from the outside - either attached to a hull or stored inside removable 'bolt on' holds which attach to the hull (like an articulated lorrys' trailers) when it sets off.
In that case, the easiest thing to do is to simply create one or more 'hangar deck' bolt on holds - a 2,000 dTon container (as described for the aforementioned High Guard 1e freighter) could easily pack in 50 or so 10-20 dTon fighters in open-space, maintenance-capable hangars, and still have room for a fair amount of stores for ordnance, fuel, etc.
That gives you a mobile fighter hangar, with repair and refit capability, and jump capability.
The question of weapons and armour.......a carrier that's a freighter conversion is never going to be armoured. It never should have to be - it fights with its fighter complement at a safe distance and uses boarding shuttles to loot its prey. A decent refit of defensive lasers/sandcasters to fend off long range missile shots might be worth it, but beyond that, staying somewhere safe and quiet whilst the fighters do their job is its best defence. Advanced sensors and a decent refit of probe drones would be a good investment, as would a few mid-weight gunships (in the 50-100 dTon range) with decent range and endurance.
steve98052
Mongoose
The only useful pirate facility I could imagine in that size range would be a space station, presumably attached to a rogue ice world somewhere in deep space, in a spot unknown to the authorities. Pirates could go there too trade their looted goods, make repairs, look for new crew members, and just relax without reading about the authorities recognizing you as a wanted pirate.
