Frieghters

[Baphomet69]

I'm no expert on ship building for Traveller. I was wondering how you would handle building ships with external storage, such as these two:

http://www.gtns.co.uk/store1/html/images/ft-338a.jpg

http://www.gtns.co.uk/store1/html/images/ft-332.jpg

Especially being modular...

 

[Valarian]

I've handled it by treating each of the cargo bays as ships and putting external docking on the freighter for each of them.

See this design as an example (T20 stats)

 

[atpollard]

I did it like THIS .

 

[Ranger]

Originally posted by atpollard:
I did it like THIS .

Yes, those are exceptionally nice designs.

 

[far-trader]

I would say it depends on the rule edition and ship construction. Two examples:

Book 2 Classic Traveller you would just need to count the tonnage of the modules as part of the hull total. For example buy a 400ton hull and declare 200tons of it as modular containers. No extra volume or cost.

Book 5 Classic Traveller you should probably calculate them as seperate hulls for cost and lost volume, as well as the launch/recovery of the containers.

The topic has come up before and you should find some of the threads by searching for "lighter" and "lash" on the boards.

 

[Baphomet69]

Thanks, far-trader! I found a great thread discussing just what I needed!

I had never heard the term LASH, so I probably never would have found it on my own.

Again, much obliged.

B

 

[far-trader]

You're quite welcome B. Enjoy

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Where did you find those two cool-looking ship minis? I'd like to get ahold of a couple.

 

[MR TEK]

Alright.

Dumb question time.

I skimmed through all of the lash designs, and I am at a loss.

Why does the jump tug need to waste space carrying engines and fuel for the lighters?

Replace them with a standardized cargo box. One face mounts to the Jump tug frame.

The other face mounts to a Sunlight tug frame that hauls it away and maneuvers the replacement into place.

Now, make the jump frame massive so it carries hundreds or even thousands of those lash boxes.

Now the Jump frame carries it’s engines, Bridge, fuel, etc. The 51st century equivalent of modern container ships. For the same reason, and Gaining the same benefit..


Now you have a large ship universe where the Megacorps and their huge Lash ships carry the regular trade needed to keep an interstellar society alive, and makes huge fists full of money doing, and the little cargos, to low priority, too irregular or too illicit to make the Lash network and left rotting for the spec traders to eek out a living carrying.

Even better, Put the lash port WAY out of any gravity well. The Jump ship only has to have enough maneuver Fuel and engines to reach the port from whatever the Jump error sphere is, and it only has to be 100 diameters from the most massive components of the Jump port.

Then anything passing through the system only has to be shuttled to a holding yard, and only containers destined to or from this system have to even enter the well.

Unless you severed in the Merchies, or for some odd reason ran way out system, most player characters would never actually see these ships, or the network.

The Megacorps would maintain a veritable fleet of axillaries and enough of them would be armed that Pirates would probably have more luck with the stream to and from the in-system ports to the jump ports.

Enemy commerce raiding would be a much bigger issue, but truthfully, if the enemy has penetrated deep enough to reach you core internal cargo lines, you are in more trouble than loosing the cargo anyway.

 

[Valarian]

This is more or less the philosophy I use in my modular trader design (see above). The ship can carry up to 6 standard 50dt cargo modules. The cargo modules are packed with the smaller cargo crates. A Cargo Shuttle transports a single cargo module in to place and the trader takes them to their destination. Another cargo shuttles would be waiting at the destination to take the modules on arrival.

 

[Baphomet69]

Originally posted by Jeff M. Hopper:
Where did you find those two cool-looking ship minis? I'd like to get ahold of a couple.

They are from Ground Zero Games, they're from the UK, but that's a good thing for us in the states. The figures are about 15% cheaper for us (we don't pay the VAT) and shipping was not too expensive and it has been incredibly fast for coming from Britain.

They have several different fleets of ships and many support ships (like the two I linked to). They don't have a whole lot of pictures of their ships on the site, but if you download or view their PDF catalog you can see most if not all. They are nice.

BTW, they are the guys that originally came up with 'Full Thrust' (which 'Power Projection Fleet' is derived from), 'Dirt Side II' and 'StarGrunt'. They also have 15mm and 25mm ranges of vehicles, buildings and troops. Not to mention some cool 25mm figures that fit well or have that 'Traveller feel'.

 

[Baphomet69]

Also, from the same company I just found some figures that would make pretty nice Imperial Marines (if painted differently). Check the thread on Ad Astra Miniatures in this same forum for the link (don't want to cross-post - hope this doesn't qualify).

Man, my wallet is starting to complain LOUDLY.

 

[Qstor2]

There's aslo GT stats for LASH type frieghters in GT Starships IIRC.

Mike

 

[mbrinkhues]

Two ways to handle this IMHO:

a) Treat them as cutter modules

The beast carries 18x30dton cargo modules and either has a few modular cutters of it's own or relies on local boats. Gives it some 500dton (assuming 28dton cargo/module) cargo space.

If you use/own "Modular Cutter" this ship can be part of a "Cutter Ecosystem" with smaller J-Cutters serving as feeders and the Double Cutter as In-System transport

b) Treat them as a LASH design

This get's a BIG ship. LASH barges in GT are 800dton so the beast has some 9950dton cargo (14400dton subcraft carried) using standard barges from GT: Far Trader.


(All assumes 18 barges in 6 rows of 3)