Broadsword Class Mercenary Cruiser

[ravells]

This is the WIP of a map request here from Guild Member 'someguy' for deckplans of a custom built broadsword class starship.

Two very helpful references have been provided. The first is side elevation of the ship from Andrew Boulton's website (Thanks Andrew!) which is set against a grid, so calculating the dimensions of the ship is straightforward.

The second reference is a spreadsheet provided by Someguy with the ship's specifications.

I plan to draw the deckplans in Serif Drawplus, a vector drawing package.

The first step is establishing the dimensions as below.

[ravells]

The next step (I guess) I to look at the spreadsheet and get a general idea of what the components of the ship are and how big they are. I've taken the main components in the spreadsheet whose size is indicated in Displacement tons (setting the biggest component, armour, to zero as everything else is inside the armoured superstructure). I then expressed each component as a percentage of the total which would allow me to eyeball roughly how much room each component takes up. This is what I came up with.

[Steel General]

I'm admittedly not into the Sci-FI as much as fantasy, but it's looking good so far.

Though it does remind me of one of the drop-ships from Battletech

[ravells]

We were having exactly that discussion on the map request thread!

[RobA]

What, may I ask, is a "displacement ton (tonne?)"

A measurement of mass, or a measurement of volume?

-Rob A>

[ravells]

Good question.

In Traveller, a "ton" of starship size is defined as 14 cubic meters, the volume of a ton (1000kg) of liquid hydrogen. Taken from here.

Just looking at the design of the ship, it looks like when it's in a planet's atmosphere and the gravity pull is significant it can only really travel up or down (give or take a little lateral movement with retros) given the location of the thrusters. If it tried to fly horizontally, everything would slide down the decks and make an awful mess!

[RobA]

OK - thanks. So you calculated the volume of each deck based on its position in the sphere and the table provided? Cool (anal, but still cool).

BTW, what font was used?

-Rob A>

[ravells]

You think that's anal? You should see what the gearheads on the Traveller boards do...

The font is called 'Fanboy Hardcore' from Blambot. I was looking for a 'graphite light' type font which I'm sure I had once upon a time, but I lost it

I found a nice frame! (no further with the actual drawing though), too busy messing with my avatar...oh look a shiny thing!

[Valarian]

Just looking at the design of the ship, it looks like when it's in a planet's atmosphere and the gravity pull is significant it can only really travel up or down (give or take a little lateral movement with retros) given the location of the thrusters. If it tried to fly horizontally, everything would slide down the decks and make an awful mess!

If the ship were reliant on reaction thrusters (like in BattleTech) this would be correct. With reaction drives, you'd also only get gravity when in space while the ship was under acceleration. In Traveller, there's the handwavium of the grav plating on the decks to avoid this. Traveller manoeuvre drives generate artificial gravity.

[ravells]

Cheers Ian, I sort of vaguely knew that but how does the artificial gravity work when there's real gravity as well? e.g. if you are hovering 500 feet over a large planet. Presumably the handwavium cancels out effects of external gravity?