A question of style

All Art critics,
I have a new deck plan but a few questions.
* Should a deck plan have large machinery in the engineer spaces or is a note that this room is engineering good enough?
* How about the Low Berth room? a note or filed with symbols?
* Is a deck plan better with a numbered key or with labels?

I have been doing deck plans for 40 years and I must say I have for most of that time done plans with equipment other furnishings, but I am not sure.

 

[Badenov]

I have barracks, and have thought of making ships with open areas (cargo) for PT and games. Just as an idea though. Kind of violate the rules as written.

Well, kind of. The 4T per person, or 2T per person at double occupancy, is not necessarily all staterooms. It covers life support, as well as passageways and common areas. I'm sure a small ding in per person space would net a decent PT area. Maybe not enough for the full crew at once, but something, to be sure. The real catch is life support is per person and never defined as to how much of that tonnage it takes.

I'm not sure if Striker contains rules for berthing for people in vehicles, MgT Book 6 does, and you can totally make berthing spaces much more like one would expect on a ship, in terms of space. You of course need galley and support facilities also, which adds yet more space, and life support, which has to cover all the space on the ship because Book 6 life support covers the volume of the vehicle indepenent of how many people it serves (minus the fuel spaces, of course, and possibly the armor spaces - and it makes sense that you also count out actual 2T/person spaces, as that already has life support supplied). You also need to allocate 100kg (or .1T) per person, which covers baggage and personal gear that would normally be allowed under Middle Passage, as the bunks in Book 6 presumably only give you a place to sleep. The life support is the long pole in this tent, because you need the highest grade for the air not to go stale a day or two into jump and negatively affect performance significantly. (If it wasn't significant, I would advocate for it under the amusing idea that Navy berthings smell like socks because life support is made by the lowest bidder). But this all falls apart because except with the smallest ships or with disproprtionately large crews, in normal-sized ships and crews, the per-person space is not significantly below 2T per person and it's massively more expensive.

Example: a 29-person berthing in an 800T SDB would be 58T and 14.5MCr using standard MgT1 rules. Using the strategy described above generates a 35T berthing, but it costs almost 69MCr. Most governments would cringe at essentially paying 54.5MCr for 23T of available tonnage, though some gamers would. It depends on what resources are available. I had toyed with the idea of military ships using this for enlisted berthing and normal staterooms for officer berthing, but it doesn't work out in most ship configurations.

 

[Dragoner]

Well, kind of. The 4T per person, or 2T per person at double occupancy, is not necessarily all staterooms. It covers life support, as well as passageways and common areas. I'm sure a small ding in per person space would net a decent PT area. Maybe not enough for the full crew at once, but something, to be sure. The real catch is life support is per person and never defined as to how much of that tonnage it takes.

I'm not sure if Striker contains rules for berthing for people in vehicles, MgT Book 6 does, and you can totally make berthing spaces much more like one would expect on a ship, in terms of space. You of course need galley and support facilities also, which adds yet more space, and life support, which has to cover all the space on the ship because Book 6 life support covers the volume of the vehicle indepenent of how many people it serves (minus the fuel spaces, of course, and possibly the armor spaces - and it makes sense that you also count out actual 2T/person spaces, as that already has life support supplied). You also need to allocate 100kg (or .1T) per person, which covers baggage and personal gear that would normally be allowed under Middle Passage, as the bunks in Book 6 presumably only give you a place to sleep. The life support is the long pole in this tent, because you need the highest grade for the air not to go stale a day or two into jump and negatively affect performance significantly. (If it wasn't significant, I would advocate for it under the amusing idea that Navy berthings smell like socks because life support is made by the lowest bidder). But this all falls apart because except with the smallest ships or with disproprtionately large crews, in normal-sized ships and crews, the per-person space is not significantly below 2T per person and it's massively more expensive.

Example: a 29-person berthing in an 800T SDB would be 58T and 14.5MCr using standard MgT1 rules. Using the strategy described above generates a 35T berthing, but it costs almost 69MCr. Most governments would cringe at essentially paying 54.5MCr for 23T of available tonnage, though some gamers would. It depends on what resources are available. I had toyed with the idea of military ships using this for enlisted berthing and normal staterooms for officer berthing, but it doesn't work out in most ship configurations.

The barracks rules I used I think are from mgt1 unless I changed them. Life support is the issue, you are right. Plus the extra staterooms can be repurposed and bunks printed for quarters in the cargo hold, or demountable barracks, same as demountable fuel tanks, a cargo hold is a real advantage for a military vessel. C'mon everybody, we're cramming a bunch of crud in here and flying to another star system - groan. Don't worry about sleeping next to that pile of nukes, totally safe. Though low berths make sense if transporting a bunch of marines, just to not have them underfoot.

 

[Dragoner]

Convertible roof would be nice.

Until you own one, then it's happy and having fun, sitting in traffic, baking in the sun.

 

[Spinward Flow]

(If it wasn't significant, I would advocate for it under the amusing idea that Navy berthings smell like socks because life support is made by the lowest bidder).

Funny you should say that ...

LBB S7, p16:

 

[Badenov]

The barracks rules I used I think are from mgt1 unless I changed them. Life support is the issue, you are right. Plus the extra staterooms can be repurposed and bunks printed for quarters in the cargo hold, or demountable barracks, same as demountable fuel tanks, a cargo hold is a real advantage for a military vessel. C'mon everybody, we're cramming a bunch of crud in here and flying to another star system - groan. Don't worry about sleeping next to that pile of nukes, totally safe. Though low berths make sense if transporting a bunch of marines, just to not have them underfoot.

So, IMTU, the Modular Cutter sparked a much broader range of standard 30-ton modules for things like marine berthing to small fighter hangars. So you technically need to pay the cost of defining the space as 'modular' (which is super cheap), and that presumably gives you all the fittings to shove things in and out with a minimum of fuss and time expended.

 

[Dragoner]

So, IMTU, the Modular Cutter sparked a much broader range of standard 30-ton modules for things like marine berthing to small fighter hangars. So you technically need to pay the cost of defining the space as 'modular' (which is super cheap), and that presumably gives you all the fittings to shove things in and out with a minimum of fuss and time expended.

There is a pretty cool ship that carries cutter modules, I think from Gurps Traveller. Once one starts thinking of all this, it becomes fleets of ships, numbered fleet, support fleet, etc.. That details down to the bunk on a regular vessel, because it would be operating in that fleet.

 

[atpollard]

Yea, but here's the thing.

Just to show how much of that space is taken up by a routine piece of furniture (not to advocate that this is something you'd put there), but anyone who's bought furniture, especially for small rooms, knows how fast it fills up.

Don't need to cram 32 low berths in there like a pack of batteries, but even routine furnishings takes up space.

Furnishing is a two-edged sword.

To really do it right, you require Interior Elevations of the room to really show the 3D nature of how spaces function on things like Ship's or Pullman Coaches. I started to address that in my design just a bit in the staterooms. You should be able to identify the BED with its rounded corners. Below the bed would be storage draws that slide out and the bed itself lifts to reveal under-bed storage behind the draws. To the wall side of the bed is a storage unit of built-in shelves and cabinets and cubbyholes. Next to the bed is a narrow wardrobe locker and a fold-out desk. All this would be impossible to detail in plan.

There is a fundamental "functionality" issue with adding furniture. More "line work detail" adds both realism and clutter to the drawing, making it less generic and harder to identify the layout of spaces. In a sense, you cannot see "the forest for the trees". So how much is too little and how much is too much? That is both HARD to know and very individual taste. Better line weight hierarchy can help ... dark black walls and light grey furniture makes the rooms pop and the furniture fade into the background ... but it means more work. Color tends to work against you by making the Background the visually important part.

There are real houses with moving walls that transform the space. Incorporating that level of transformative design into a "commons" would require multiple alternate plans of the commons that it could be reconfigured between at the touch of a button. That is beyond most simple CT line drawings.

 

[Spinward Flow]

There is a fundamental "functionality" issue with adding furniture. More "line work detail" adds both realism and clutter to the drawing, making it less generic and harder to identify the layout of spaces. In a sense, you cannot see "the forest for the trees". So how much is too little and how much is too much? That is both HARD to know and very individual taste. Better line weight hierarchy can help ... dark black walls and light grey furniture makes the rooms pop and the furniture fade into the background ... but it means more work. Color tends to work against you by making the Background the visually important part.

The best answer to the question is that there's a "continuum of possibilities" ... rather than a singular cut & dried answer (that works for everyone).

As evidence, I'll quote a section of my own Pondering Starship Evolution (post #551) as a visual demonstration.

Cargo and Environment Boxes

Laboratory Box (regenerative biome life support type)

Stateroom Box (multiple types)

So the modification at the outer corners can barely be seen in the above images. The bevel/rounding of the outer corners is extremely easy to overlook, but it is there.

However, it gets a lot easier to discern and see when the Boxes get put into their proper context of a 3x2 double deck stack of them for loading into a hangar bay (or cargo hold) as a 6x16=96 tons combined "package" of Boxes.

 

[Grav_Moped]

My general approach is to include only fixed furniture, and even then only representative pieces (there's a bed, so it's a stateroom; there are control couches, that's a work station (bridge or engineering). Color codes (electronics, heavy machinery) mostly are present to indicate what happens when they get hit by gunfire.

On the other hand, I put machinery into drive bays (mostly) as coherent units, rather than blocks of covered floor and occupied volume. A jump drive isn't just "X tons, stuff it in there" -- it has a shape that may not line up with the grid, or even with deck levels.

For me, it needs to feel like something built around the required machinery, not a "haunted house set".

 

[mike wightman]

If I am going to use counters or minis on a map then I want it bare - I have loads of geomorph "furniature" that I can customise each room with.

 

[FreeTrav]

If I have a deckplan that's not at miniatures scale, I want it to be uncluttered - empty rooms with names or numbers is enough, with a legend if numbered.

Once it grows to miniatures scale, having representations of the contents is more reasonable, to give a better idea of lines-of-sight and lines of motion for action scenaria. Better than pre-printing the content would be to have punch-out representations that I can position myself - but that can get complicated and expensive to produce.

 

[RossWinn]

When it comes to (closed life support) submersibles/spacecraft/starships ... hull metal is NOT cheap (especially if streamlined) and displacement is anything BUT "free" (since the more of it you have, the more drives you need to push that displacement around, the more EXPENSIVE the construction costs get!). In a closed life support environment, volume (to put stuff in) is at a PREMIUM ... and crew spaces are no exception to that.

When you're talking about something on the economic level and power of the Third Imperium, what you're discussing in terms of space allocation and design isn't really addressed in Traveller at all.

With automated construction techniques, virtually infinite resources, and high technology; the act of construction becomes relatively extremely inexpensive. I believe that most of the value of a starship comes from the income that it can generate. It makes it a worthwhile investment. Much like the modern speculative stock market, if it can make you money then it costs money.

Technologically, spacecraft construction is extremely inexpensive. You have literally millions of robots creating a hundred thousand ships a year. Traveller doesn't even really discuss the idea of refitting a starship, which should be a core part of the construction system in my opinion. Furthermore, Imperium naval vessels are very significantly as much about showing the flag and controlling the populace as they are about interstellar interpolity conflict.

Generally spacecraft are designed as two-dimensional spaces which is problematic because I don't think it really represents any efficient design. As an example, there are no standard cargo modules in Traveller. There's no efficient use of three-dimensional space. There's no real room or rules for non-standard shaped cargo. Mankind has been in space for 3000 years and all of the successful ship designs, especially the naval ship designs, should be extremely optimized by experience, design principles, and increases in manufacturing technology.

Not to get off on a rant here, but this is just one man's opinion.

 

[whartung]

With automated construction techniques, virtually infinite resources, and high technology; the act of construction becomes relatively extremely inexpensive.

...and yet, a Free Trader still cost ~48MCr off the lot, and takes 11 months to build.

Go figure.

 

[RossWinn]

...and yet, a Free Trader still cost ~48MCr off the lot, and takes 11 months to build.

Go figure.

Well, the price does make sense when you look at it from the amount of money that it can generate, however The construction time makes no sense at all. The idea that the entire ship is built by craftsmen rather than robots and built in as slow a way as possible just doesn't seem to make sense to me.

 

[Enoki]

As to the OP:

It is important to fill the spaces with "stuff." This serves two purposes in terms of the game.

First, it gives you a feel for where and how you can move within a compartment and places to find cover in a gunfight. If the compartment is crammed with aforementioned "stuff" and the only way forward is a narrow passage covered by the enemy, you have problems. On the other hand, "stuff" gives you the ability to move cover to cover, that sort of thing.

Second, it gives an indication of what the compartment really looks like. You can better describe it to players, and they get a better understanding of their surroundings.

In terms of MTU, ship design takes into account social status far more than the generic ship designs in the game. This is because in MTU, social status is very important. You have to be who your social status says you are or it's going to change and probably not for the better. Going down in social status is pretty easy if you don't maintain the lifestyle, while going up is difficult to manage.

Thus, ship design takes that into account. 3I society is stratified as you'd expect in one with a defined nobility. Officers on ships get staterooms, crew bunks or crammed into cabins. Crew facilities are communal where officers get more privacy. A noble's yacht has yhuge (bigger than huge) staterooms for the noble, their family, friends, etc. The crew / "help" is crammed in somewhere that they can't be seen when they don't need to be seen. The officers that run the ship get more deference.

So, in designing a ship, it's with a setting and 'world' where knowing your place is important and you get treated as such.

 

[mike wightman]

Perhaps it is a limitation imposed by the materials the hull is constructed from. Steel and aluminium alloys just don't cut the mustard:

TL9 light weight composites - the layering and lattice structure has to be manufactured with great care
TL10 crystaliron - the hull is "grown", the crystal structure of the iron and the lattice work of elements added to strengthen the crystal structure
TL12 superdense - as per previous material types, the manufacture of superdense has to be carefully controlled as gravitics tech is used to increase the density of the hull material
TL14 bonded superdense - damper/meson tech is added to the above, it takes time to produce the hull forms.

 

[whartung]

Well, the price does make sense when you look at it from the amount of money that it can generate, however

If ships were cheap, travel and shipping would be cheap. Since the price of the ship and its monthly costs factor into the price of travel.

If the ship builders are gouging Captains (as in "you can make a lot of money off this, so I charge you a lot of money), there would be other, more scrupulous ship builders undercutting the market to drum up business.

And that works all the way down the supply chain until it bottoms out at either raw material extraction cost, or some corruption mechanic keeping prices artificially high.

 

[Enoki]

Perhaps it is a limitation imposed by the materials the hull is constructed from. Steel and aluminium alloys just don't cut the mustard:

TL9 light weight composites - the layering and lattice structure has to be manufactured with great care

These are already available today and in great variety.

TL10 crystaliron - the hull is "grown", the crystal structure of the iron and the lattice work of elements added to strengthen the crystal structure

The easiest way to do that is the hull is formed from powdered metal and then heated to a specific temperature to turn it into a solid. Crystal size is determined by the fineness of the powder used. This technology is available today.

Powder metallurgy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

TL12 superdense - as per previous material types, the manufacture of superdense has to be carefully controlled as gravitics tech is used to increase the density of the hull material

Gravitics isn't the only way to do this. You could also simply cast the hull material under extreme pressure to increase the density. This would also allow you to change the arrangement of molecules or atoms making it up such as turning graphite / carbon into diamond. This process is available today on a small scale.

TL14 bonded superdense - damper/meson tech is added to the above, it takes time to produce the hull forms.

There are various means to align the arrangement of molecules or atoms in a material available already like using magnetism for example. Other methods are theorized or possible to some degree today.

I would assume that ceramets and other non-metallic materials and alloys would be available in the future. There is no reason to assume that metal will remain the material of choice for a ship's hull. For example, I could see carbon nanostructures used with ceramets (ceramic-metal alloys) to build a hull.

Cermet - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[mike wightman]

These are already available today and in great variety.

Not to TL 9 standard though. TL7 composites are what we have today...

The easiest way to do that is the hull is formed from powdered metal and then heated to a specific temperature to turn it into a solid. Crystal size is determined by the fineness of the powder used. This technology is available today.

Powder metallurgy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This would result in far too many imperfections and nowhere near growing one continuous crystal with no discontinuities, boundaries, or flaws. The TL 10 crystaliron would be one large perfect crystal. We can't do that yet.

Perfect crystal - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Gravitics isn't the only way to do this. You could also simply cast the hull material under extreme pressure to increase the density. This would also allow you to change the arrangement of molecules or atoms making it up such as turning graphite / carbon into diamond. This process is available today on a small scale.

Gravitics allows for mixtures not possible within gravity, and also I am postulating perfect crystals, something that can not be done as yet. We can not collapse the electronic structure of materials today, which is what is required for superdense.

There are various means to align the arrangement of molecules or atoms in a material available already like using magnetism for example. Other methods are theorized or possible to some degree today.

But none of them can produce perfect crystals, nor can they collapse the electronic structure to result in superdense.

I would assume that ceramets and other non-metallic materials and alloys would be available in the future. There is no reason to assume that metal will remain the material of choice for a ship's hull. For example, I could see carbon nanostructures used with ceramets (ceramic-metal alloys) to build a hull.

Cermet - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Not even close to the performance of superdense, let alone bonded superdense.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Traveller doesn't even really discuss the idea of refitting a starship

Covered in LBB5. Not extensively, but the rules exist.

As an example, there are no standard cargo modules in Traveller.

Traveller mostly pre-dates mass containerization of cargo; the literature it was based on definitely did.