Advanced Base

[icosahedron]

Traveller Book 3:

"Advanced Base, TL8, Cr50,000, Modular pressurized quarters for 6 persons, with airlock, and atmosphere recirculating system. 2 by 6 by 6 metres. Can be carried in the hold of a starship."


The base includes two ventilated double-bunk berths in the fashion of a budget 'coffin hotel', A combined shower and W.C. popularly called a 'fresher', a kitchen unit suitable for preparing occupants' meals, and a recreation area including dining facilities, a viewscreen and soft seating. High-level storage cupboards are omitted from this plan for clarity.
The power supply and life support units are situated in the corner of the main room behind the seating.
There is an airlock and separate hatch, each having docking facilities to allow expansion and modularization of the base.

[Talroth]

If it houses 6, shouldn't they be triple bunks, not double?

[guyanonymous]

They rotate bunks. 1/3 are always on duty, they aren't using a bed. (My guess)

[Talroth]

Yeah, but hot bunking is just nasty.

I forgot to comment on the map itself the first time around.

I like the general layout, but question the value of the rear hatch. (If I had to serve in a station built of these, I don't think I want to have people walking by my bed every time they move through the station, exterior corridor sections would be easy enough.)

What if you move the brown unit in the kitchen area down a little, knock out a bit of the counter in the kitchen so you can still get in to it, and move both bunks so they're side by side, and shove the shower down a notch.

This would give you more usable space for the crew to move around and work in.

Also for the way your bunks are, flip them around. Give them a grab bar and enter the bunk feet first.

I'm also not sure if I'm liking the colours/textures used, they feel busy. Would it be hard to replace the floor and counter with a less noisy surface?


I would also suggest you do a few more of these to go along with it. Could make for useful tiles to build a rapid deploy base for military or mining operations. You could do things like Full bunk rooms, basically a hall with sets of bunks on either side, mess hall (with pairs of hatches on either side from the main airlock so two or three eating rooms can be linked up in rows, and attach to kitchen units).

And don't forget your tubes for corridors!

[icosahedron]

Thanks for the feedback - and the rep.

Like a mobile home/RV, the settee can be opened into a double bed. This unit isn't designed for home comforts, it's one step up from a pressure tent.

I hadn't envisaged a shift pattern; that might require a re-think, though thinking as I type, whilst you have a point about disturbed sleep, I'm not sure that that problem can be solved by rearranging a 6m x 6m space - it's gonna be noisy, get used to it. I imagine opening and closing the hatch would reverberate throughout the structure. PS my missus thinks reducing the size of the kitchen is a bad idea.

The bunks could be placed side by side where the coffee pot is, and the whole kitchen moved up, but I imagine the airlock recycling would create a disturbance too. I pictured the airlock as the main thoroughfare, with the hatch only coming into play for emergencies or if there is another unit connected.

As you say, other accommodation types are available and an extended base would have zoning to make life more comfortable. I may draw more later. This beast just puts your typical party of travellers on a planet surface where the GM can do nasty things to them... er, I mean provide them with interesting adventures.

I haven't learned how to change colours yet and this is the beginning of my meagre collection of 'modern' elements. The steel table is the only thing I have at present that resembles a kitchen top, I don't have the skill to crop it without it looking a mess, and if I scale it, it will be too narrow. The floor was a choice between steel plate, wooden planks or stone paving, and the brown unit in the kitchen is a fridge. The other two 'fridges' are the engineering devices, but I only have the one 'big box' element. Making one white and two blue would help, but...

The only things I made from scratch are the cooker, the shower and the hazard strip, using Gimp. The rest are just downloaded elements arranged in Viewingdale.

Redrobes, if you're lurking, the hazard strip is 50% transparent to let the treadplate pattern through and consequently it floats above everything. How do I nail it to the floor?
(the treadplate pattern hasn't jpegged very well, but it looks fine on the original).

If anyone has links to top-down home design elements free for personal and map display use, I'd be much obliged - a proper sink/drainer and a bath are top of my hit list.

[ravells]

Funnily enough I was hoping that someone would make a Traveller accommodation - thanks for obliging!!

Making your own elements for the map is a good thing to learn - I find that vector is usually easier for making symbols with clean lines and edges - might be worth downloading Inkscape?

Just throwing in some ideas here:

How about making the base octagonal rather than square? It just gives the impression of something more geodesic / far future / built on the fly etc.

The elements (beds etc), although nice individually, look like they've come from someone's 21st Century living room rather than being science fictiony / futuristic - a good reason to make your own perhaps?

I think you could have real fun with this in finding ways to maximise the space as much as possibe - e.g. a table that folds into the wall (maybe the beds too?), having multifunctional spaces etc.

Anyway, great work and fun to see a traveller entry!

[icosahedron]

Yes, Ravells, drawing my own elements would be useful - if I'd been born with an art gene. As it is, I'm very much dependent on what other people produce.

However, since you are the lucky 1000th customer who's suggested I try Inkscape, I just downloaded it. It might beat Word Draw for feeding stuff into Gimp.

Folding table is good, I'm on it.

I'm curious - how do you make a futuristic bed? The things have looked pretty... well, bed-like since Roman times. I thought those did look pretty futuristic - The only other bed I had available was a gnarled wooden one from a fantasy set.

[ravells]

You don't need an art gene (I don't have one either). It's more about function than form (IMO) with futuristic stuff. So with the bed, the way I see it is that as a double function it should be a bed and, say a life pod, as a last form of defence against the elements if the shelter fails. So I guess that would mean an external hard shell that could be completely enclosed, something on the outside showing life signs and some sort of designator. Maybe a transparent top so you can see the face of the person sleeping in there (I'm thinking the low berths from Alien). Come to think of it, you have a wealth of references just from films alone.

Since this is traveller, it would probably need a locator beacon....you know that kind of stuff. Here's an example I knocked up in Drawplus (which is like inkscape) - to make these things you just add, subtract and overlay shapes on top of each other - it's fun!

If you start adding repeated elements across all the items (might be a texture, text, colour etc) then it all looks like it belongs together and makes the image more cohesive.

Maybe the chairs could just be moulded studs coming up from the floor? (Could double as supports to hold the shelter above ground or something) Stuff like that really.

[icosahedron]

Hmm. I thought you said you didn't have an art gene...

Having had a brief look at Inkscape, I could probably create a line drawing something like that given a few days, but the texturing, gradients and shadows will have to wait for a future challenge, I think.

I hadn't thought of beds doubling as cryoberths - good idea.

The basic layout of the cabin is from a quick sketch I did for a game 20+ years ago, and the furnishings are just whatever elements I found on the net.

That smooth metal texture you made would create good floor plates, too.

Yes, maybe I could make a few more of my own elements when I get the hang of Gimp and Inkscape properly, but at the moment my 'flying hours' on both of them are probably still in single figures!

Thanks for the advice and encouragement.

[loogie]

Yeah its looking good, and I very much agree with Ravells, you don't need an art gene to make vector images. You may dred doing so but when it comes down to it, if you practice a bit and get better at drawing some things (enough so that you can bust out some simple shapes and such quickly) you don't have to worry about finding or asking people to build something for you. Such textures that Ravells made are quite easy, from what it looked like it was a simple gradient, and would take a few seconds to create... thats whats nice with a future setting... things can be smooth.

As for ideas for your room, what about having moveable beds-pods? they could dissapear into the floor or somwhere else where they don't take up space. Another thought is to make them vertical, it'd save you a lot of space if they were upright with doors. I don't know traveller, but they could also be used for strap down pods if you are "dropped" places like I've seen in many scifi movies.

The floor texture could be usefull as a clean, white or very light aqua colour, not metal or tile, but something smooth, and most likely synthetic. I would imaging many, many stripes and symbols to act as instruction in the room, things like symbols for bed, cooker, bathroom, etc... I'd imagine the future is full of the "this is used for that and that only" style of istruction.

Also, if this is meant to be a low budget space pod thing, then it by all chances may be a lot less orderly then it seems... Depending on the setting, think of many Sci-fi space movies and series... Alien, Star Wars, Firefly, all of these has ships that looked like a 20 year old beetle that is ready to fall apart, but still somehow runs. If that is something you want to try to recreate, make things dirty, remove the shiney smooth covers from the objects and make some (or all) of their inner workings poke through to the surface. And in that aspect, they would rather save a buck then make things safe, so it is possible to have hot gas pipes etc out in the open, with a simple sign that says "Hot! do not touch!"

The other way is to be sterile, make it look like a hospital. Thinks should looks smooth, and very little inner workings of the room should be shown.

Basically its easiest to start out with the sterile setting, and then trash it to make the old dirty spaceship style. But the colour schemes are usually much the same. A green/blue steel pain that you would see on a battleship, with a mixture of white throughout important areas. Yellow/red/green/blue for the markings, usually color coded for severity.

of course these are all just personal prefs... it just what i think of when i think of spacecraft.