Variant Small Craft
- Thread starter RossWinn
- Start date
Condottiere
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Armed Armoured Assault Shuttles.
Working on a one shot assault glider.
Working on a one shot assault glider.
kilemall
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Oh heavens, forgot that stealth IMTU is a thing but fabulously expensive to build and maintain. So normally only small craft get the useful levels, with a few ships getting the minimal stealth treatment.
Small smuggler craft, specops insertion/exfiltration, stealth recon missions.
Small smuggler craft, specops insertion/exfiltration, stealth recon missions.
I tend to stick to the classic smallcraft hull shapes (rolling pin) and sizes (20t,30t,40t,50t) with most of my small craft, so that they can use a standard size docking bay on different ships. For example, most launches and boats have a 4.5m tube hull, so can dock with a standard 4.5m bay, while most standard pinnaces and cutters can use their 6m wide hulls to dock with most 6m bays. Different performances can be built into a wide range of 'standard' hulls, depending on the TL and role they are designed for. Different sized and shaped hulls (wedge, box, disc, sphere, dispersed structure, with wings etc) are possible as well, but they will either have to be carried in either custom bays designed just for that smallcraft (and will be incompatible with most other starship bay), will have to be carried in a cargo bay of the right dimensions, or be not carried by a starship at all and just used for local in system (world to world) flights. I also find this is a good way to keep the players guessing - if they pick up a 'Ship's Boat' on the sensors, it could be anything from an insystem slow freighter/passenger Boat to a heavily armed gunship/troopship/Fighter.
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Spinward Flow
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If you think in terms of Squads (9-10 people), you can put a GCarrier (8 tons, TL=8+), a Speeder (6 tons, TL=8+) and 10 acceleration couches (5 tons) plus 1 ton of cargo space (for consumables) into a 20 ton form factor that can be dropped into a LZ (and left there?
). That gives you 2 vehicles with gravitic mobility, one slow APC (optionally armed) for moving the grunts and one fast mover for recon/overwatch/rapid evac, at the squad level.2x squads and you've got yourself a Section.
4x squads and you've got yourself a Platoon (just add extra 20 ton box for additional mission supplies).
The assault carrier would have the staterooms for barracks.
Like kilemall, custom shuttles for intra-system work. As these aren't intended for carriage by ships, they don't need to be, and often aren't simple bullet shapes. They'll often have wings, and be of non-cylindrical form - needles for high performance craft (they look fast) and domes/disks for other craft are common (being the cheapest aerodynamic forms in FF&S).
Condottiere
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You leverage the design, and spacecraft operations, rules.
