Sometimes I get hung up on unimportant details. I don't actually need deck plans for a Star Guard cruiser. But having them adds depth to the world. It lets me refer to it in a story and have everybody visualize what I mean.
This is just a rough first draft. We've already talked this through and come up with multiple improvements.
The key was getting the scale right. This is a ship where a team of Type-A personalities is going to live together for weeks on end, often isolated from contact with the rest of the universe. You need plenty of personal space. So each crew member gets a suite of rooms with about 60 square meters. You also need plenty of recreational areas, including a large area to train and hone your super powers.
With this scale decision made, the first problem is deck height. Because the ship is a sphere, making it that far across made it, obviously, the same height. This suddenly made each deck four metres high, which sounds ludicrous.
But in the best tradition of turning a problem into an asset, a four metre ceiling clearance means you've got space to accommodate extra-tall alien races, plus room for any crew member with the growth super-power to exercise it.
It's all coming together...
Totally with you. A scenario I never ran I spent months designing ships that had little use in the scenario, but impacted on how the sociaty worked and taveled. So it sounds good to me.
ReplyDeleteMajor crisis in how you load the air raft into the cutter. It's all going wrong...
ReplyDeleteLaunch cutter. Launch air raft. Open cutter cargo bay door, load air raft.
DeleteAir raft isn't pressurized. Needs to be a way to load it while the cutter is in its bay. It's solvable by moving the air raft bay a few degrees around the hull. I've put one of my top engineers on it.
DeleteEngineering here, the air rafts have been reworked, and now can be auto loaded on to the cutter cargo bays with only minor scratches and dents. I call this a win. Had to double up on raft bays, small loss of fuel storage, but whats a little radiation leak between friends?!
ReplyDelete