Traveller Illustrated

General Notes

In Traveller 5 designing equivalent ships to their CT, MT or TNE counterparts becomes impractical for larger hulls. The new system has been designed with consistency in mind which makes some of the older designs questionable. That is not necessarily a bad thing. After all it’s just the fact that the old designs were around for more than a quarter of a century and Traveller players are quite used to their stats that might want us to make the old design work in T5.

Rob Eaglestone – Co-Author of T5 and in my view the de-facto shipwright and primary capacity regarding T5 ship design – opened my eyes yesterday, that it might be time to come up with new design aproaches to achieve the same design goals specified when the craft had been orignally specified.

In that regard this 2500ton version of the Frontier Transport tries to implement a new concept. It might become a 2400ton or 2600+ton variant in the process and it will be different from the original in a few aspects.

There are a few common features that both ships share. Both are equipped with identical grapples, fixtures and connections to use and transport Drop Tanks or the Frontier Barge. Both have passive external fixtures to connect a Frontier Barge to the hull. The necessary grapples are part of the barge. Both ships can also use Drop Tanks inside the cargo bay or the Barge to refuel inflight using Fuel Transfer Pumps. The Drop Tanks carried aboard can be used as additional fuel tankage.

As opposed to the Texts all cargo bays aboard are designed to be used as additional tankage. They are specified as bulk liquid cargo hold to include the pumps, coating and sealing for the storage of hydrogen fuel, they are also accessible as standard cargo bays. Please note that any fuel needs to be treated as unrefined if the cargo bays are not cleaned for fuel usage prior to filling the holds with hydrogen. An optional addition could be flexible tank „bubbles“ inside each hold that are filled with the hydrogen.

Continue reading „Starship – 2500 ton Type-TI/TJ Fontier Transport“

General Information

Using a 2000-ton, TL15 hull, the Type-TJ Class Transport mounts jump drive-V3 and power plant-V3, giving a performance of jump-6. Fuel tankage supports a 6 parsec jump, at 200t per parsec, and 0.5 months of operations. Attached to the bridge is a Computer Model/6 std. There are 12 crew staterooms and 5 low berths. Installed weaponry include 3 T3 Missiles, 3 T3 Fusion Guns, and 4 T3 Sandcasters. The ship does have 40 tons of cargo space. The ship has a streamlined hull, with scoops for frontier refueling.

Carried craft include 1 Cargo Shuttle, 1 Air/Raft Enclosed, and 1 Grapple Set Triple. The ship has 6 crew plus gunners, flight and troops, and can carry 5 low passengers.

Notes

At Jump-6 this design is essentially not possible as there is no way to fit these stats into the ship while still retaining a 300dt (4050kl) Cargo bay. My design has 36dt overtonnage to fit a 40dt cargobay inside. rediculously small I’d say. And the concept of computers seems to have changed in T5, because neither this nor the Type-TI could ever fit thre Model/9 computers ito the hull and still come close to the MT stats.

Continue reading „Starship – 2000ton Type-TJ Frontier Transport“