PsiTraveller said:
Nice application! Battle Tenders would work well at this as well. Any heavy lift really. Oversize the Collector to match the Jump Drive. So you 400 Ton ship with staterooms and living space has Jump Drive and Collector sized for a 1000 or 2000 movement. Add in a Docking Clamp and you haul large SDB's without having to have a huge amount of fuel.
Let's figure a 2000 total movement at J3. 7.5% of 2000 Tons if 150 tons, plus 5 tons is 155 tons of Jump Engines. 1% Collector per ton moved will be 20 tons time J3 is 60 tons plus 5 for 65 total. So 235 tons of Jump Engines and Collectors.
Normally 2000 J3 would need 600 tons of fuel for the J3 engine, so you save a 535 tons of space.
235 tons of space will likely need a 500 ton hull to fit the M-Drive, bridge and other gear like a Type 4 docking Clamp. So you could offer a J3 shuttle service for up to 1500 Tons of ships.
If you had external Cargo mounts your Jump could be worth 4.5 Million Credits per Jump. That is pretty good income. 9 Million a month would pay off a 500 ton ship pretty quick.
I might be able to squeeze everything into a 400 ton hull and save 5 Million in Hull Cost. I will have to check. I am just typing this stuff in on the fly. I may post a version on the Collector Shuttle in a little bit.
Modify you're assumption, your max carry weight with that type of clamp is 2,000 Tons so assume your shuttle will be carrying at least that plus it's own weight. with at 400 Ton you're looking at 7.5% of 2400 so (180+5) 185 Tons of Jump Drive. It's not going to need the most powerful M drive since it needs to spend at least a week of it's journey spooling up the collectors so if we give it Thrust 2 just to kick it off towards the jump the point or back towards the plannet. We're looking at 2% of the 400 ton hull so another 8 Tons bringing us up to 193.
Powerplant we could go with 12 Tons for a TL 12 fusion. brining us up to 205, (and now 2 tons of fule for the Plant) 207
20 Ton bringe (though we can squeeze that down if we need to) 227
5 staterooms (20 Tons) 247
Common Area (5 Tons) 252
Type 4 Clamp (20 Tons) 272
Sensors... wouldn't need any better than Military Grade so (2 Tons) 274
Now when we come to the collectors themselves this is where I'm running into the issue... it's 1% of the ships tonnage... So do we assume that we need to have it 1% of the Max Tonnage that the ship can jump, or just 1% of the 400 Ton ship. Because that is a big difference.
If we go by the size of the Jump Shuttle. It's 25 Tons of collectors(Assuming we build the Drive at TL-14) Which would make sense to do as it would allow the shuttle to move up to J-5 carrying lighter loads. All Keeping the Ship at TL-14.
If the collector size is calculated by the size of the ship they are on rather than the ship they are jumping the whole thing could be stuck into te 300 Ton hull I think. as you'd know another 9 tons off the drives and 5 Tons off the collectors by doing that.
If we go by the Max Jump Tonnage it's 77 Tons of Collectors. Again keeping the drives at TL-14 we can do all the same stuff as above and we've got another 51 Tons to play around with.
I'd probalby throw Some kind of small craft to roudn it out. possible some extra staterooms.
Edited to fix Collector mistake that AnotherDilbert made me aware of.