The star fleet store says they are 1/3200 where does it say there are 1/3125?

Did I state it about right (typing errors aside) for how you figured the volume?

It we be nice if you could just use the 3d model or a 3d scanner and have a computer figure the volume and dimensions out.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 12:27 am: Edit

I can't find it now, but I am *positive* that Mongoose said they're using 1:3125 scale. The 1:3200 listing must be a disconnect between ADB & Mongoose.

I could, but didn't, measure the volume and divide cubic-meters by 13.5 to get tons. Rather, I measured total floor space and divided square-meters by 4.5, per what I was told on the Mongoose board how to calculate it.

I don't have a 3D model program, but I do have all the measurements for the POL. With a bit of math, I can tell you *exactly* what the Cutter's volume is.


Garth L. Getgen

By Jean Sexton (Jsexton) on Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 08:56 am: Edit

Garth, the post you are thinking of is the last post on this page: Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: The Joint Venture with Mongoose: Starline 2500: 2500: Older general archives: Archive through June 16, 2011

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 12:43 pm: Edit

Jean, thanks. I also found it mentioned on the FedCmdr board. Also, if you think this is topic-drift, feel free to move the last couple days' postings elsewhere. I'm afraid we're cluttering up SVC's topic.


Garth L. Getgen

By Matthew Potter (Neonpico) on Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 01:25 pm: Edit

I don't know what Mongoose uses for a modeller, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Blender. It's a free download.

I use it as my primary modeller, though it is somewhat complicated to use (the way Photoshop or GIMP are complicated to use).

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 01:39 pm: Edit

I wonder how long it would take to port 2D deck plans into 3D Blender .....


Garth L. Getgen

By Matthew Potter (Neonpico) on Saturday, April 27, 2013 - 03:25 pm: Edit

Depends on your skill with Blender (I can use it, but I've not done anything with it in a while), the detail levels you want on the final renders, and the detail in your source (the deck plans).

Once you get into the swing of things? Perhaps a week or two per deck. Depending on your final detail levels (Just laying out the decks, walls, and light fixtures, vs modelling the coffee cups in the forward galley)

I might add that trying to model the minis (redoing Sandrine's work) makes a great learning exercise in the modeller; working with solids that don't have too many curves until you really drill down into high detail stuff.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - 01:09 pm: Edit

Soembody e-mailed me asking for advice on drafting deck plans. I just sent them an e-mail, and I thought I should share my words here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
You have to decide, early on, some basic design items that will drive a lot of what you do down the road. How thick do you want hull / deck plates? How high are the ceilings?

And even before you answer those questions --- what will the primary snap-grid to be used within your CAD program to draw anything?

My primary snap-grid is 0.125 meters (5 inch), and sometimes I'll drop down to 0.0625 meters (2-1/2 inch) for fine adjustments. Because of this, all my rooms are made to the nearest 0.125 meters. Where I had a row of similar rooms (i.e., crew quarters), I would take the total space available to divide it up such that they were all equal, with maybe one or two being a snap-point different. If I had used a different snap-grid, I might have come up with one room more, or one less, in a row. The snap-grid also forces the size of furniture. It might seem minor, but a row of tool lockers 1.250 meters each might not fit into a space (and thus something else is put there instead), but if they were 1.200 meters, they'll fit okay. [If I were to design another set of deck plans, I'd probably use snaps in multiples of 0.100 meter (4 inch) instead.]

Changing ceiling heights will change the width of the decks (thus the width of the ship) and possibly the total number of decks. How "cozy" do you want the ship? At 2.75 meters, or nine feet, the ceilings on my Police Cutter are about what you'd fine in a typical house. But if you want more of an office-building feel, then you need to go up to 3.00 meters (9' 10") or more. On the other hand, if you want a more utilitarian feel, you could drop down to 2.50 meters (8' 2") or even down to 2.25 meters (7' 5").

Do you want to use scale thickness for deck plates and walls, or do you want to just use line-weights to show them? Again, this will effect size of rooms and such. As I mentioned, I used 0.125 meters (5 inch) for standard walls, and 0.25 meters (ten inch) for heavier bulkheads and 0.50 meters (20 inch) for hull plates and the "backbone" deck plate. If I have used line-weights instead, it probably would have changed the number of rooms in a few places. But I used scaled walls and thus had to account for the thickness when mapping out a row of rooms. [If I were to design another ship, I'd probably use 10cm, 20cm, and 30cm (4" / 8" / 12") thicknesses instead.]


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


That was snipped out of a longer message, but most of it was project-specific and need not be posted here.


Garth L. Getgen

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - 02:33 pm: Edit

A point about ceiling heights, how tall are the species using the ship? A Kizinti needs more space than a Hydran. Do not forget multi-species Empires like the Klingons and Federation, Brecons and Slidarians are tall.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - 03:37 pm: Edit

Yes, valid point and has been noted in previous discussions. The private conversation I snipped this from was dealing with a ship that will have human-sized crewmen (crew-beings?).


Garth L. Getgen

By Jack Bohn (Jackbohn) on Wednesday, May 01, 2013 - 08:46 am: Edit

If one wanted to keep the 1.3m (4.5 foot) Hydrans from choosing a 2m (7ft) deck height and cramping alien boarding parties, it would be useful to point out that GURPS Module Prime Alpha gives them a 2 yard reach vs. one for humans. Extrapolating this to "stretching room" or reaching overhead will push up their space requirements. (Their reaching up for stowage or work surfaces will seem odd to anyone who's read Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity; perhaps it's only a shipboard practice.)

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Wednesday, May 01, 2013 - 01:29 pm: Edit

Shorter range expectations would probably mean looser restrictions on ceiling height. Although not made SFU cannon, it is said of in Trek lore that the starship is designed with a great deal of room for the comfort of the crew on long voyages. A cruiser is then going to have higher ceilings and wider halls than a Police Cutter that makes frequent stops and many base and planetary visits. Some in-between ships might have more narrow halls and lower ceilings on much of the ship with a few larger rooms for some "cramped living" relief.

Klingons probably have generally tighter space allowances (but probably acknowledge the crew still needs some places to stretch out and breath... like the firing range?)

Romulans, perhaps, are too disiplined to bother with such anoyances, which is perhaps why they are seemingly in a continual state of irritation.

MY guess is Kzinti, Lyran, and Gorn all have similar views on crew space as the Feds without being nearly luxurious. So, not as spartain as Klingons and not as cushy as Star Fleet.

Could be the ISC is worse than the Feds. Those ships are pretty big after all.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Wednesday, May 01, 2013 - 07:36 pm: Edit

Loren, don't forget that there are other ships out there besides warships, many that are just too small to bother making SSDs for in SFB / FedCmdr, but would be ideal for deck plans in Prime Directive.

Jack, that's a great idea! BTW: 2m = ~6'6". 2.125m = ~7ft. I know, I'm being picky.


Garth L. Getgen

By Jack Bohn (Jackbohn) on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 - 05:05 pm: Edit

As a check on my access to the board:

I'm reading the Hydran homeworld has unknown organisms in the methane/slurry slush that melds into its mantle, and their by-products feed the life in the methane-ammonia ocean, which in turn feed the life in the nitrogen-chlorine-methane atmosphere at the surface.

This is not the place to ask whether they have to Hydraform any non-native planets, or whether they'd even know how, and would have to depend on suitable planets having a parallel life cycle. I would like to raise the question of shipboard life support. Can we assume the Hydrans can synthesize whatever molecules they need? Or is there something they don't understand, and would have to stockpile in each ship? Or, most bizarrely, do they need to carry a bit of their biosphere with them? A counterpart to the "luxury" botany labs of peacetime Federation cruisers, Hydran ships carry tanks of pressurized liquid methane and nutrients, fed a chunk off a growing "yeastball," possibly initial supplied by the Spirit Kings.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 08:32 am: Edit

I would presume that every life-form that develops space travel will invent whatever life-support systems they need. In some cases, they will have to settle to bring large supplies of what they need, and pick up more along they way to restock. In other cases, they will have some method to recycle it, and in yet other cases create what they need "on the fly".

Take the Feds: They can recycle air and water, but food either has to be stocked (early tech) or created (later tech) using food processors (turning food-goo into roast turkey) or replicators (turns pure energy into complex carbohydrates and proteins). In my mind, the equipment to create food takes up about the same amount of space as a four-month food pantry and galley does.


Garth L. Getgen

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 12:05 pm: Edit

Compared to some of the more exotic species outside of the Alpha Octant, the Hydrans have it easy.


Take the Vari, a species of giant spiders in the Omega Octant, who feed solely on the blood of various animal and insect life forms, and always from a living subject. Not only would they have to keep pens (for the animals) or hives (for the insects) aboard each ship, they would be biologically incapable of simply storing their method of sustenance in refridgerated blood banks. If something (or someone) happens to their live food supply, and they can't make it to a fresh source in time, the entire crew would be doomed.

Or the aquatic Koligahr, who have to build their spherical hull sections (and interconnecting lattices) in such a way as to allow enough water to flow from one compartment of the ship to the next. (And possibly also allow for "dry" living quarters on certain ships, in the event that one of the ursine Ka-ma-ty-u needs be be re-located from the Koligahr homeworld; or perhaps to allow for ship-board negotiations, or joint operations with, a "dry" species.)

Or the silicate Trobrin, whose ships looks fairly normal from the outside, save for their discrete belts of armour (which are removable and replacable, unlike the embedded armour on a Fed CL or Romulan WE) which they would have to allow access to... so that the crew can eat them. The Trobrin as a life form consume rock as their staple diet, so the armour belts can act as a secondary food supply when sent on extended patrols.

Or the Chlorophon Association, whose starships all have to be built around a central detachable "bridge" pod containing a gigantic spherical tree that commands the vessel, with enough room for its myriad of vine-like tendrils to extend to different parts of the ship and to allow access for the anteater-like Keeper crew to drink the sap from their Phon commanders. (The Keepers have evolved to form a symbiotic relationship with the Phons, and cannot survive without regular access to a Phon's sap.) Can you imagine trying to account for that in a set of deck plans?

And then there is the Drex, a "species" of robots whose sole reason for even bothering with any kind of life support system is on the odd chance they have to host one of their walrus-like Drexari masters. Fortunately for the latter, the Drex don't seem to be familiar with a certain Earth television program, lest they get one too many ideas about their lot in "life"...


And all of that is before you start getting into the really "out there" candidates. Such as the Loriyill, whose ships seem to be woven out of silken strands of light, which the færie-like crew can flitter about with no concern for the vacuum that surrounds them. Or the Souldra, whose crystalline vessels have a cross-section that would look like a nightmarish circuit board, along which the dark energy "crew" can "move" from one end of the ship to the other. Or the Alunda and Branthodons, whose bio-ships are space monsters recruited into service; gigantic "domesticated" space whales in the case of the former, and cloned, lobotomised Space Dragons with the latter.

Supposedly, the land-octopus Mirn species "inhabit" the hollow innards of their Alunda host creatures, and use a series of bio-engineered "control mechanisms" to command it as a bio-ship. But how do they even get in there in the first place? Do they grow organic "decks" to comport themselves along, or does the inside of an Alunda Host ship look like a giant fleshy O'Neill cylinder? And how do they "fly" the remora-like parasites they use as fighters? And how do those control systems account for the later ability to be adapted into pseudo-X "Sig-Tech"? I don't envy whoever tries to do "deck" plans for one of those someday.

(The Branthodons go the opposite route, and "fly" their dragonships from within a series of organic/cybernetic modules fused onto the creature's back plates, which are grouped together as an "exoskeleton" on a Dragonship SSD.)


And then there are those empires whose main problem is not with their ships, but with their own crew. The Arachnids out in the Triangulum Galaxy are a species of half-inch translucent psychic spiders, who infest a series of host life forms to go about their business as a star-faring empire. But the problem is that their hosts (who did not evolve on the now-destroyed Arachnid home world) cannot handle the long-term strain of being hosts, and die after 2-3 years of infestation. (The virus-like Sigvirions in Omega take over their own hosts, but don't seem to have this same problem of host "burnout".)

So, an Arachnid survey ship simply cannot go on an extended "five-year mission", since its entire host crew would die before they got back home. (It's not clear how long the Arachnids themselves can survive for long without a living host, or if they need to go into some sort of stasis instead.) Unless they made a point of raiding every inhabited world, base, or ship they encounter, in order to "re-stock" their crew roster. (And they are supposed to be one of the Triangulum Galaxy's emerging superpowers, despite all of this.)


Or in the case of the Baduvai out in the LMC, the main problem for them is their sheer size. With each individual Baduvai standing as a 1200kg quadruped with an innate echolocation system, they need to build ships with a lower amount of compartmentalization than others (which results in a lower number of hull boxes per size class). And it means that not only are their Marine squads smaller in numbers (they deploy them in groups of three), they would have to be careful about operating shuttles and PFs, and are physically incapable of operating a fighter.

(That last point would probably have been true for the squid-like Uthiki, whose ships would be set to atmospheric conditions set to match their native gas giants; but they were destroyed as a star-faring power by the Andromedans long before fighters became an issue.)


So, like I said, even the Hydrans have it easy compared to some.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 12:11 pm: Edit

Fortunately I don't think deck plans for these races are being worked on at this time.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 12:12 pm: Edit

Maybe not, but there's always hope for the future... even if it's mostly forlorn at this point.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 12:15 pm: Edit

You remind me of that guy in The Big Lewbowski that brought the Vietnam War into everything. :p

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 12:18 pm: Edit

Far be it from me to deny the other BBSers their chance to play a certain "drinking game"...

But in all seriousness, on the off chance that a future Prime Directive module (or an issue of the long-awaited Final Frontier series) makes it outside of Alpha, these kind of issues might be relevant at that point, if any of the "non-standard" locals were to be considered for RPG development.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 02:57 pm: Edit

Gary;
Don't give up all hope CL22 had PD:1 stats for 21 Omegan races, seven of them Maesron.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 03:57 pm: Edit

Somebody ought to remind JEAN to have us to go get that page and put it on the PD1 webpage.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 04:01 pm: Edit

Looks like it's already there!

(There's a better quality version of that pic with five of the Mæsron member species over here.)

An updated version of that page would be great to see in a future product, if anyone knows how to convert those PD1 stats into one of the current game systems. Perhaps just for the Mæsron species to start off with?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 04:08 pm: Edit

Talk to Jean. Maybe somebody could do that. We could whip up a quick and dirty little Omega RPG book using the existing timeline and maps, along with the new species stats and maybe one or two other things.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Thursday, July 11, 2013 - 04:40 pm: Edit

Email sent.