Vehicle Dtonnage (for placement in ships)

Z

zero

Mongoose
At the moment I am building up a 600 dton (formerly 400dton) vessel for my players to gad about in.
I have some space free and I was wondering about putting some vehicles for my crew in the ship to make journeys in. As I have a Darrian vessel, I decided to use Darrian vehicles. :)

Basically I have a maximum of 23 dtons to play around with now the main engineering, armaments, bridge + electronics, staterooms, fuel, armour etc are sorted.

Imagine my dismay at seeing only m3 sizes were listed, not tonnage! :o

I need to know how much tonnage these cycles take up;

Monocycle (3m3) - Being a 2.5m disc shape, I'd call it roughly 1dton.
Grav Bike (6m3) - no description, apparently can change shape
Grav Bike - Military (10m3) - same as Grav Bike

I'm not taking any Sphere tanks aboard due to the 3m height of the decks (these are apparently 6m around - 100m3)

Also if anyone knows a good formula to translate m3 into dtons, that'd be much appreciated :)
 
The standard conversion mentioned works perfectly well BUT for your case, you really want to know how much floor space in your cargo bay the item will take up.

You're on the right track - the bay is probably 3 meters high, but unless you can stack your items or the items are too tall, that's irrelevant.

Time for some hand-wave calculations:

The monocycle, assuming it's a 2.5m vertical disk, will take up 1dt in your hold, as you say. (2x1 floor squares) But that assumes you won't need to walk around it or anything.

The two bikes might be estimated as 1m tall and are somewhat reshapeable so might be 4 squares for the standard and 6 squares for the military (which is 2 and 3 tons respectively), allowing for some access room between bikes. You could probably pack them in at 3 and 6 squares on average (two bikes in 3 tons, etc.)

So in other words, if you set aside an average of:

Monocycle: 2 squares
Grav Bike: 3 squares
Military Grav Bike: 5 squares

If you want the vehicle area to be more of a garage than a storage rack, I'd add another square to each vehicle's footprint, which maps nicely to 1dt, 2dt, 3dt storage.

I'd consider a 20 ton vehicle bay. That way you can include some bikes, air/rafts and even a G-Carrier or ATV (or even a fighter!), whatever the mission calls for. It would give you enough room to be fliexible and probably give you a little extra cargo space in a pinch. If you don't find another use for that 3dt (maybe a workshop/laboratory for repairing your vehicles?), add that to the bay.
 
Remember to think in 3D and not 2D. With grav plating you can control the room's gravity, and you can easily secure vehicles to the walls or ceilings to keep them out of the way, and then lift them down then you need to. With an anti-grav vehicle, you have the ability to maneuver as much as you need to in your vehicle bay.

So you'll be able to utilize most of the space in there, limited only by the configuration of your vehicles. You'll want to probably keep some free space to work on / board your vehicles though.
 
Supplement 5: Civilian Vehicles (page: 4) said:
If it is necessary to determine the overall displacement of a vehicle, calculate displacement as 1 dTon for every 10 M3 of internal volume the vehicle has.
Click to expand...
 
phavoc said:
Remember to think in 3D and not 2D. With grav plating you can control the room's gravity, and you can easily secure vehicles to the walls or ceilings to keep them out of the way, and then lift them down then you need to. With an anti-grav vehicle, you have the ability to maneuver as much as you need to in your vehicle bay.
Click to expand...

True enough for storage. So you could bring them down into a loading/launch area (probably just an empty piece of floor the right size), though that would of course reduce the rate at which you could deploy them. I don't get the idea that the OP was going for a launch tube system though :), so stacking grav bikes up on the walls makes sense if they are indeed less than 1.5 meters "tall".
 
AndrewW said:
Supplement 5: Civilian Vehicles (page: 4) said:
If it is necessary to determine the overall displacement of a vehicle, calculate displacement as 1 dTon for every 10 M3 of internal volume the vehicle has.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

As a minimum, sure.

One of the good bits from earlier editions was the sizing of subcraft facilities. For actual spacecraft you could install a docking ring that added no further volume to the ship. For a non-spacecraft bay you could range from just a rack box at 1x the subcraft volume up to a full garage at 4x.
Note that even 4x is pretty cramped.
 
My personal experience from the back of a deuce & a half... the military has no issue with cramped spaces. Or at least ordering low-ranked non-coms into them.

Come to think of it I don't recall many E-5's or higher in the back with me. Co-winky-dink? I think not! :()
 
phavoc said:
Come to think of it I don't recall many E-5's or higher in the back with me. Co-winky-dink? I think not! :()
Click to expand...

They're just trying to build character. :lol:

My son is waiting for his ship assignment and then probably off to the gulf. Winter deployment hopefully.
 
DFW said:
phavoc said:
Come to think of it I don't recall many E-5's or higher in the back with me. Co-winky-dink? I think not! :()
Click to expand...

They're just trying to build character. :lol:

My son is waiting for his ship assignment and then probably off to the gulf. Winter deployment hopefully.
Click to expand...

I remember winter in Egypt. It was a lovely 95 in Cairo. Rather chilly for the locals I believe! I miss January in Egypt.
 
phavoc said:
I remember winter in Egypt. It was a lovely 95 in Cairo. Rather chilly for the locals I believe! I miss January in Egypt.
Click to expand...

What's the Persian Gulf like in winter? Egypt sounds a bit warm...
 
Ishmael said:
All 3 times that I was on gonzo station in the gulf, it was hot
Click to expand...

Sounds lovely. Well, here's to hoping they don't decide to train him as a medic and send him in country with the Marines...
 
zero said:
Grav Bike (6m3) - no description, apparently can change shape
Grav Bike - Military (10m3) - same as Grav Bike
Click to expand...
These data are nonsensical, the Grav Bike would be the equivalent of a
cube of 1.81 m per side, and the Military Grav Bike the equivalent of a
cube of 2.15 m per side. These are sizes for grav cars, never for bikes
without wheels. If a grav bike is 2.50 m long, 1.00 m wide and 1.50 m
high, it has just 3.75 cubic meters, and something much bigger than that
could hardly be called a bike.
 
Well, in all honesty, that might be to allow room to get around the vehicle too...

I think we need to remember that military vehicles need different considerations to civilian vehicles and sometimes, even with civilian vehicles, form follows function and no amount of higher tech can prevent the minimum volumes that result.

For example, the civilian grav-bike could be 1.8m high (you need to stand up while getting on it) x 1.95m long x 1.7m wide... this might include the room needed to sit on it while it's on its landing skids (and/or a roll-bar). That's about the size of a modern Honda Goldwing... but a little wider (I'm assuming that it needs stabilisers to help keep it upright as well as room to actually get on). Hardly that big... Considering that you have a drive to bear the weight of the whole machine and also to tilt, turn and propel the machine. If you don't like the width, increase the length and make the fairing a bit more streamlined. :)

And I'd put the military design down more as 3m x 1.7m x 2m, but the length might be even longer. Just remember that you're talking about a fully-enclosed armoured light aircraft - the width needs to be enough that the stabilisers will have enough leverage to keep the vehicle both upright and able to tilt quickly (more quickly (presumably) than the civilian equivilent - despite the extra weight of the armour). The lift drives need to overcome the weight of the armour, sensor and weapon systems. The posture of the driver/rider changes too - instead of being a sit-on bike, being a military bike, it'll need a lower profile, so probably be a recliner design (similar to the GW Eldar grav bike designs) in order to keep the overall height lower (since you have to have armour and (probably) a roll-cage (military forces do like their expensively-trained troops to survive if possible) - this design forces a longer design to accomodate both the drives and the rider's legs. You then also need to add in a second rider (in case of bringing downed riders back to base) or cargo space for weapons or similar.
 
BFalcon said:
For example, the civilian grav-bike could be 1.8m high (you need to stand up while getting on it) x 1.95m long x 1.7m wide... this might include the room needed to sit on it while it's on its landing skids (and/or a roll-bar). That's about the size of a modern Honda Goldwing...
Click to expand...
A Honda Gold Wing has a length of 2.64 m, a width of 0.95 m and a seat
height of 0.75 m, giving its body a volume of less than 1.90 cubic meters.
 
rust: you're not planning to sit on it then?? That volume includes actually using the vehicle... Also, a Goldwing 1,800 cc will fall over if leaned unless able to use the wheels and speed to offset the weight (ie using centrifugal forces). I'm a big guy and I could never lift such a beast... but an 800cc BMW I can do so no problem...

A Grav bike needs to be able to support its entire weight on its side stabilisers for low-speed sharp turns, including the rotational torque for a turn, so needs both width and strength.

Rust: what model were those specs for? There's a whole LOAD of different Goldwing models... I was going on observations of my neighbour's 1.8 litre Goldwing... (although I think I'd be pushing it to go measure it...) :lol:

Edit: Also, it shows that you're not a bike-rider, Rust... or you'd know that the seat is around half to 2/3 of the bike's total height in any case... depending on fairing or high back-rests etc.
 
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