P
Pickles
Guest
Talking of lifeboats in Kureka Gigur's 400t Trader thread got me thinking about escape vehicles in general.
I'm not personally keen on the idea of dedicated escape pods or lifeboats on small ships (less than 2000 dtons or so). They take up valuable space and are only used once - when the ship is abandoned. Furthermore, they are unlikely to have much built-in survivability: tiny drives, low duration, primitive controls, you name it.
On the other hand, dual purpose craft like launch/lifeboats are only useful up to a limit. Even a dreadnought is unlikely to need thatmany runabouts.
Someone mentioned escape capsules mounted on unused hardpoints. I think these are a bit limited,as you're only going to get a maximum of one per 100 dtons, which is only going to be sufficient if there aren't that many passengers.
And then along comes the inflatable spacecraft. Mount these on your hardpoint, and on an emergency they inflate and you have a nice little 10 dton emergency vehicle instead of the 1 dton capsule.
I'm not personally keen on the idea of dedicated escape pods or lifeboats on small ships (less than 2000 dtons or so). They take up valuable space and are only used once - when the ship is abandoned. Furthermore, they are unlikely to have much built-in survivability: tiny drives, low duration, primitive controls, you name it.
On the other hand, dual purpose craft like launch/lifeboats are only useful up to a limit. Even a dreadnought is unlikely to need thatmany runabouts.
Someone mentioned escape capsules mounted on unused hardpoints. I think these are a bit limited,as you're only going to get a maximum of one per 100 dtons, which is only going to be sufficient if there aren't that many passengers.
And then along comes the inflatable spacecraft. Mount these on your hardpoint, and on an emergency they inflate and you have a nice little 10 dton emergency vehicle instead of the 1 dton capsule.
