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Tailsitters?

Are there alternate designs for "tailsitter" ships? Such as a "S" with vertical orientation rather than horizontal?
IMTU, thrusters, Air-Rafts and other grav vehicles exist, but artificial grav and grav compensators do not.
 
Given the "hard science" flavour of the rest of Traveller, I've never liked the fact that take-off & landing need magic, er, gravitic technology.
The main thrust is at the back end, and has nozzles that stick out of the ship to make it work. So where are the small dorsal/ventral & nose nozzles for manoeuvring and braking?

Why do all the classic designs have landing legs with feet instead of wheels? In a wacky moment I sketched a Type S that could extend a very long nose-leg, to angle the nose up for a straight-out take-off (kinda JATO-style), something like Thunderbird 2. But that's no help with landing, unless you put wheels on it.
 
The only official one I remember at the moment is the Judges Guild "Singing Star".

Anyway the creative bunch of people here created a couple of tailsitter ships. Just dig around in the fleet section and the design contests ...
 
There are a bunch of tailsitter designs. I was working on an early era campaign that didn't have common, cheap gravitics, so I collected all the ones I could find, and made up a few of my own as well. Although not all of them are technically tailsitters. The Azhanti High Lightning isn't going to land, but it's got the thrust coming up through the deck like the tailsitters, the same for the Sloan. Others are my own designs, including a Type-T cruiser that I redesigned as a tailsitter.

If you want to take a look at my collection, I have them here at http://www.starbeast.net/Carl/spaceships.htm . Someday I still hope to put them to good use in that campaign. For now, though, I'm happy to discus tailsitters with other fans.


[ May 30, 2007, 10:01 AM: Message edited by: Andrew Boulton ]
 
Originally posted by BetterThanLife:
The biggest canon Tail-sitter ship is of course the AHL.
... although it cannot "technically" tail-sit, since it cannot land. ;)
 
Originally posted by atpollard:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by BetterThanLife:
The biggest canon Tail-sitter ship is of course the AHL.
... although it cannot "technically" tail-sit, since it cannot land. ;) </font>[/QUOTE]More than once, anyway.

Landable tail sitters can be a bit more challenging to do deckplans for, particularly for stacked cylinders, since the curvature of the exterior walls will be a factor more often, and even reasonably large ships are going to have small decks if they want to qualify as "Needle/Wedge" (thus bringing wall curvature into play even more).

On the plus side, some very large hulls become viable to do deckplans for (per the Lightning class, for example), with both per-deck size and the ability to simply duplicate decks helping immensely.
 
The Ashanti High Lightning was a "tailsitter" in that it used the engines as the "Bottom" and the decks were built like a skyscraper. Not really a tailsitter since it was unstreamlined.
 
As an aside, I find the plans for the AHL almost impossible to visualize within the external image. They almost appear to be two completely different ships.
 
IMTU, I used Tailsitters almost exclusively until TL-12 when true Artificial Gravity came along. SO TL7-B designs were assumed to be tail sitters and TL-C+ were assumed to be planar (like modern airplanes). Added flavor without too much hassle. My group never got big into deck plans as a whole, so it worked for us.
 
In my universe inertial comp requires an artificial gravity field and is at right angles to the AG. Therefore ships with AG and IC are, as Plankowner says, planar. This is a GURPS tech 10 development. This can be highly inconvenient if the AG goes out(due to battle damage, inattentive maintenance, or just, you know bad luck).
 
Given the "hard science" flavour of the rest of Traveller, I've never liked the fact that take-off & landing need magic, er, gravitic technology.

Gravitics solves a large number of other problems, like noise, radiation, and carving holes in the launch pad. Not to mention a significant chunk of fuel.

The main thrust is at the back end, and has nozzles that stick out of the ship to make it work. So where are the small dorsal/ventral & nose nozzles for manoeuvring and braking?

Given that they're likely to be under 3cm, they're small enough to not be visible on most plans. If they are gravitic thrusters, they don't even show up when not in use.

Why do all the classic designs have landing legs with feet instead of wheels? In a wacky moment I sketched a Type S that could extend a very long nose-leg, to angle the nose up for a straight-out take-off (kinda JATO-style), something like Thunderbird 2. But that's no help with landing, unless you put wheels on it.

With gravitics, if you can hover, you don't need wheels. Just like a major chunk of helicopters.
 
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