Archive through February 20, 2019
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Prime Directive RPG: DECK PLANS PROJECTS:
Fed Police ship:
Archive through February 20, 2019
Oh, God yes, never give someone a piece of equipment without getting a signed hand receipt for it; and never return a piece of equipment without getting your hand receipt back.
I was on an exercise during which someone left their weapon in the TOC. The Sgt-Major gave him a 16-Lb sledge hammer to carry the rest of the exercise. Another time, they made everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, tie their weapon to their body with a 3' length of 550 cord (parachute cord). I was so happy I was not out in the field for that one.
Garth L. Getgen
It could work as a half sized basket ball court, a low racquetball or squash court.
The damage control lockers should also have either in it or next to it a medical supply locker. You'll need it if your hurt working in your area, triage of casualties, cut off from sick bay, etc. A medical tricorder and trauma supplies would be present. Alarmed so if its opened sick bay and security are notified.
Garth, what are the dimensions for hand ball courts? Would one or more of them fit into your "gymnasium"?
Jeff;
Handball courts are 60'ish by 130'ish.
re: the gymnasium
a badminton court is 44' x 20'.
I could see a *version* of badminton being useful in small spaces (with rule modifications for low ceilings).
Checkout some of the championship games on youtube! That looks like it's more of an aerobic workout than most people realize.
For this "future game", how about a modification where you have a smaller racket (closer to a ping pong paddle) in each hand. Keeps all the muscles "toned" and their reaction speed up... would probably be important on long, "uneventful" patrols/trips...
Okay, when you said "handball", I was thinking of squash. I just looked up Handball on YouTube. Totally different game. Yeah, I could see a version of 3-on-3 or 4-on-4 handball with much smaller targets. The only problem with such a fast paced sport is there's not much area out-of-bounds before you run into a wall. Calls for padding and/or safety force fields.
Of course, it would not be restricted to only one sport. In fact, with a "smart floor", the lines could be changed from handball to paddleball to badminton with the press of a button.
The gymnasium itself is 16.5 x 10.375 meters.
Garth L. Getgen
Garth- I have worked three different restaurants. None. NONE had a kitchen that nice. One was LOT less and could still crank out far more than 100 meals, three times a day. Food prep would be just fine. If I had to run a restaurant again- I would take that any day of the week....and twice on Sunday. I have also done trips to the BBs since then. Trust me, there were lots of compormises....the crew still got it done come chow time.
Okay, so, this was bizarre. A few weeks ago, I noticed I had a PDF-Creator installed on my computer that I had never used. It works as a virtual printer. I realized it'll work with my CAD (Floor Plan Plus v2.0, 1995), so I used it to export the deck plans directly to PDF. Before, I'd have to copy/paste to another program and save-as to get it to PDF or GIF or JPG, etc. There'd always be some sharpness loss in process.
Last week, while playing around with the options in the PDF-Creator, I discovered it can "print" directly to GIF or TIFF (but not JPG). As Steve Cole needs the image files as TIFF, I played around with it.
In default mode of 150-DPI, the image quality just wasn't there. I tried other settings, of 200-, 300-, and 600-DPI. I was going to send these as samples for SVC to import, so I'd know which setting to use for the rest.
When I looked as the folder, my eyes about popped out of my head. The smallest file size was 6,525,242 bytes, or six and a half megabytes. I can't e-mail that.
The 600-PDI file size was 104,378,368 bytes. Over 100-megabytes. And that's just one deck of an eight deck ship, albeit the one with the biggest PDF file size.
Last night, I thought if a crop the right half out, which is empty white space, and reduce it to two-color, it "might" make the file size manageable. The weird thing is, just pulling the TIFF file into Paint Shop Pro and saving it as a different name, with no other changes, the file size dropped to 1,185,892 bytes, just over one megabytes. That's a 100-to-1 reduction in file size.
Is that not the weirdest thing??
Okay, maybe not the weirdest ever, but it's on the weird-things list. After chopping and reducing to two-color, the file size is a petit 409,066 bytes, just over 400-kilobytes.
So, I have a PDF package ready for ADB to review, a way to export the images to quality TIFF format, and am part way thru typing scattered notes and random thoughts about the police cutter.
Life is good.
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Garth L. Getgen
Garth-
I don't know if SVC would nix this; but a cloud storage location could be set up (one drive, icloud, etc.) that isn't advertised, but that people that need to be dropping big files to send to ADB can just drop in a shared storage. I would suggest moving files out of such to more secured (non-shared) storage quickly just incase someone managed to stumble their way into it.
Before I discovered I could shrink the files, I had planned on opening a drop-box account just for this. That, or snail-mail the files on a memory stick. As long as the files are under 1.5 meg, I should be able to e-mail them without issue.
Garth L. Getgen
We have one of those. Ask Leanna.
Thanks, Steve. Good to know, but at this point, I don't think I'll need it.
Garth L. Getgen
Petrick -- Just to confirm, there's no reason a refit Fed POL+ can't use a scatter-pack shuttle, right?? Thanks!!
Also, said drones would have to be removed from the rack and not from reload storage, true? Is there a good technobabble reason why that is?? Thanks again!!
Garth L. Getgen
If a ship has a drone rack and an eligible shuttle it can generally use a scatter-pack.
I am utterly unsure where you got the idea that the drones have to come off the rack and not from reload storage. You could be misunderstanding the comment that as many ships with a single rack only have four reload drones that to fully arm the scatter-pack would require taking some from the rack (or to have bought some extra drones with Commander's Option points).
Oh, okay. Thanks. I guess memory isn't as good as it used to be.
Garth L. Getgen
Garth L. Getgen:
Well, do note that even at WS-III you cannot have unloaded a drone rack. So a Fed POL+ at WS-III could (assuming it had not used some of its Commander's Option Points to purchase extra reload drones) start the scenario with a scatter-pack holding 1, 2, 3, or 4 drone spaces, but cannot have less than four spaces of drones (allowing of course for substituting anti-drones for some of the drones in the initial loading) in its drone rack, barring a "special scenario rule," such as the ship had used the drones in a previous battle or earlier in the current battle. And of course if the drones were "fast" and the range was close enough, it might begin the scenario (at WS-III) with a drone already launched.
Also note that at WS-III it is legal (tactics vary) to have both shuttles prepared as scatter-packs. One might have no drones (a dummy, and yes, both could be dummies), or might have one drone while the other has three (again, extra reload drones might have been purchased). Or both might have one (for some devious tactical reason), or both might have two drone spaces (again, see devious tactical reason). And of course, at WS-III, if you spent all the Commander's Option Points available on spare type-IF drones (you could buy at least five on a POL+a), you could start the scenario (at WS-III) with four drone spaces in your drone rack (less one drone you might have launched before the scenario began) and have two scatter-packs ready dividing some number of the nine available drone spaces between them, or between them and still in reload storage. That is to say your devious plan is to launch one scatter-pack with only a single drone space in hopes your opponent will blow it up before it opens to reveal that there is just one drone (if he blows it up, you need only tell him the destroyed shuttle was indeed a scatter-pack, not how many drones it was armed with) so you can later surprise him with the second scatter-pack [hoping he will assume it is a manned shuttle (since he already destroyed your scatter-pack) and not fire on it until it releases the drones] releasing its six drones. Leaving you two drone spaces in reload storage still.
Well, I wanted to verify before typing up background notes for the deck plans. Now I'm half wondering if I should create an icon for a scatter-pack mounting rack that would be bolted to the shuttle. The more I think about that, I think I should just put a box in the corner of the shuttle bay and make a note that said rack is in the box.
Garth L. Getgen
Garth L. Getgen:
I am not sure there is any formal equipment for Scatter-pack use. The first use was an emergency improvisation that spread from there, and no "deck crew action" is required except fitting the drones. A "rack" or other equipment would imply that there is a deck crew action required to fit the equipment to then add the drones.
The Secret of the Scatter-Pack
by Steven Petrick
Many have wondered over the years how Scatter-Packs work.
This is the really true story. Honest.
The answer is that there is a little known design feature of all shuttles capable of operating as Scatter-Packs.
All such shuttles have external hand-holds and grips to be used by Marines in much the same manner as Special Operations Troops in the late 20th and early 21st centuries on Earth would ride on the outside of variants of the H-6 Cayuse helicopter.
Naturally a shuttle transporting troops in this manner had to move very slowly, even in space, so while the feature was there, its use was infrequent. (Usually a short hop to an area where there was insufficient flat space for the shuttle to actually land, and never when there was a risk of the shuttle being taken under fire which would be fatal to the exposed troops.) And even then, only if the use of transporters to move the troops was unavailable or tactically unwise for some reason.
It was also often commonly used by asteroid field miners and on small atmosphere-less moons. As the interior of the shuttle could use its full cargo volume and miners in their suits could ride on the exterior, at somewhat higher speeds for the short trips, to their mining sites. It was much more economical than having the shuttle make multiple trips, or using more than one shuttle, or moving a whole ship. It could also sometimes be used in an emergency to evacuate a site, if something went wrong, by carrying additional people on the exterior in their suits. Again, the shuttle's absolute speed was limited to far less than even sublight speeds as even a small bit of space dust could prove fatal to such an exposed individual at higher speeds.
It happened that these grips were located such that it was relatively easy to attach drones to them. It also happened that these points had attachments for the troops to "plug in" to the shuttle to fully charge their equipment and communicate with the shuttle's pilot, or other passenger who might be providing information for the mission.
In Y81 a desperate Kzinti captain with a talent for improvisation (or perhaps it was his weapons officer, or maybe the ship's engineer, or perhaps an enterprising shuttle pilot aboard the ship, or maybe even an ingenious Marine ... do not laugh, they do exist) made use of this feature. And thus a new tactic was born and rapidly spread across the Alpha Octant (to the immense annoyance of the Lyrans, among others).
See. It all makes sense, and is really true.
Why are you looking at me like that?
It was all plausible until you said ingenious marine.
Actually the published data says there were always external mountings for cargo packs for extended missions on planetary surfaces.
Well, they have to attach somehow, unless the hard-points are built into the shuttlecraft.
See image here: Scatter Pack Shuttle Mini
Where would those brackets be stored? In the shuttle bay or in with the drone reloads??
By the way, in the text, I mention that there is a gantry crane built into the ceiling, extending from the storage compartment to the shuttle bay, to move the spare shuttle engines to/from storage. This storage compartment is converted to the drone launcher with the Plus Refit, so said crane could also move drones to the shuttle bay to load a scatter pack. 
Garth L. Getgen
Cross-posted with SVC.... GLG
Why do you need brackets when you have self-tapping screws?
(I was always a fan of the drones being launched from a pallet through the rear cargo door. No need for hardpoints or why the crew doesn't want to be in there when the drone motors power up.)