Are the ratios in the rules for Docking Bay and Hangar Bay correct as they don't match High Guard Ratios.
Currently as written:
"A docking bay consumes a number of Spaces equal to 4.4 times the Shipping tons of the vehicle carried."
"A hangar bay consumes a number of Spaces equal to eight times the Shipping tons of the vehicle(s) to be carried."
A 5-space Grav Drone stats as 2.5t Shipping Tonnage, this means it takes 11-spaces (5.5t) to carry in a Docking Bay! and the Hangar Bay would then be set at 20-spaces (10t).
Current High Guard on page 61 has the ratio as Docking Space: 1.1x carried vehicle, Hangar Bay: 2x carried vehicle. Wouldn't the correct ratio be 2.2. times Shipping tonnage (Docking Bay), and 4x shipping tonnage (Hangar Bay) instead to match?
Except... and here's the rub.
A Space is an internal measure of how much 'stuff' you can put in a vehicle: people, cargo, options, but the vehicle itself is twice as big as that to account for the exterior structure, standard engine, fuel, transmission - let's call it the pre-allocated 'guts' of the vehicle - and that scales with the Spaces you have available, so by default the vehicle is half
stuff and half
guts.
Vehicles (and robots) have unaccounted for
guts, but this is not true of spacecraft, where all the
guts and
stuff need to be allocated. You can tweak the ratio of
guts:stuff in vehicles, using Speed modifications, fuel capacity, and non-standard power supplies, but it defaults to one Space of
guts for every space of
stuff.
If you look at an air/raft, for instance, you have 8 Spaces of
stuff to work with, but the air/raft itself is 4 shipping tons, which is 8 Spaces stuff + 8 Spaces guts = 16 Spaces of volume for the vehicle as a whole. On a starship, the hangar for the air/raft would be a simple 8 dtons, because a starship has no hidden
guts, but on a vehicle, the 8 dtons of hangar Space is 16 for the vehicle for the 4dton vehicle, doubled to make a hangar out of it to 32, so that's 8 x 4 (shipping tons) = 32 Spaces.
Let's take a fictional 16 dton spacecraft with an 8 ton hangar bay as an example. Let's put in engines, fuel, etc, to use up the other 8 tons (and call it spaceship
guts). The available part of the spacecraft of extra
stuff in this example is 8 dtons, all allocated to the hangar bay (yes, I'm ignoring accommodations and sensors in this example to make it easier).
If we treat the spaceship like a grav vehicle and reverse-engineer the total Spaces, the whole 16 dton vehicle would give you 32 Spaces of
stuff to work with ( 1/0.5 or basically twice the dtons), just enough for that 8 dton hangar that fits the 4 shipping ton air/raft. And you'd be out of Spaces - which matches the imagined spacecraft. When the hangar bay is in a vehicle, the vehicle has a Space of
guts backing up every Space of
stuff.
Yes, I know it would be easier to image if we used real units for everything, and it did take me nearly half an hour to work through the example to make it (hopefully) understandable. The idea is that abstracting away the standard
guts part of the vehicle makes it easier to build a vehicle, but if you think of a Space of
stuff on the inside of a vehicle as the equivalent a quarter dton, it might be a little simpler.
