What type of ships are GMs/PCs looking for?

[coolAlias]

How about an in-system racing ship? No jump, no guns, just pure thrust. Like the Razorback from The Expanse series.

Also, and I'm sure they've been done in one or more of the existing published works, but cheap and scrappy pirate (or bounty hunter / police / etc.) ships focused on ambushing and boarding/capturing mostly intact the 100-400T free trader type ships our Travellers love to use. Always useful to have a few types of these on hand.

 

[ottarrus]

Everybody has their best player ship ever but virtually nobody agrees on what it is.
What we all do agree on is that nobody likes being stuck on a J-1 /1G meat can with Civilian sensors and only one or two turrets, one one of which is filled.
Really, it depends on what the crew is doing with it. A corvette looks a lot different than a cargo ship, right? And the higher performance your ship, the more you need a patron /boss... which kinda defeats the whole 'free agents for hire' theme. You can get away with being a starmerc [a mercenary that operates a warship rather than a ground unit], but even that relies on consistently hunting up tickets.
The 'most perfect' ship for freelancers [in that it's pretty cheap to operate and has not-bad performance] is probably the Type S Scout /Courier. If you pick it up as a Detached Duty Scout the maintenance and fuel are free at IISS bases. The price for that, of course, is that the ship's logs are examined and PCs are debriefed by the Scouts regularly. Yes, it's true that most PCs want better performance and more room, but that's not the ship the Emperor is handing out.

 

[Endie]

A J3 Hercules can carry 35 50,000-Ton pods. Each of the AutoBerth pods can carry 143,454 people. That’s 5,020,890.

How do you get 143,454 low berths into 50ktons when HG has them at half a ton each?

 

[Terry Mixon]

How do you get 143,454 low berths into 50ktons when HG has them at half a ton each?

These are AutoBerth clusters, my own design from the Robot Handbook. I’ll post it here once I get home. It fits three people in one ton of space.

 

[ottarrus]

These are AutoBerth clusters, my own design from the Robot Handbook. I’ll post it here once I get home. It fits three people in one ton of space.

Hot bunking in freezer

 

[Terry Mixon]

Hot bunking in freezer

Nope! Separate medical chambers! This is the Advanced version, but there are cheaper alternatives. This one guarantees you wake up, though.

As each 3-person cluster has a robot medic built in, they can be put into the AutoBerth as fast as they can board the pods. The pods come in models that are Not Self-Mobile and need to be moved, and in Self-Mobile ones that can fly down on their own, load up, and return to the ship once full, greatly speeding the process.

The self-mobile ones lose some space, but not as much as one might think.

Not Self-Mobile = 47,818 Advanced AutoBerths (143,454 people)
Self-Mobile = 47,078 Advanced AutoBerths (141,234 people)

 

[Terry Mixon]

If other varieties of robotic AutoBerth Cluster might suit you better, here is MixCorp's full line of them.

I've added the spreadsheet with all of the various models to my signature.

 

[Arkathan]

This, please

Can you beat Klomster at his own game?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/364119/barreller

Close. My Radeux Class 100 tonner can haul 144 tons of cargo along the mains for only ~ MCr1.3 more (18.7).
Bonus, it has a real M-Drive, so you don't have to be careful not to use up all your reaction fuel prior to slowing to an orbital insertion vector.

 

[mavikfelna]

I present the TL9 Haulmaster and the TL12 Vera for your light cargo needs. The Haulmaster costs an astounding 14.46MCr to move 63 tons of cargo at TL9, and the Vera freight tug is 23.4MCr to move 227 tons of cargo, or 27 tons over jump 3 at TL12. The Vera has a hamster cage mostly because I'd never built one before and after looking at the Barreller I wanted to try it out. The 1.2 tons that go into the hamster cage really don't mean much to the cost or capability of the ship but it was fun to put it in.