Archive through March 27, 2002
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Prime Directive RPG: NEW KINDS OF RPG PRODUCTS:
GPD Small Craft:
Archive through March 27, 2002
After looking at the FT plans, the Franz Joseph book, and talking with Nick, my Klingon admin shuttle got drawn at 7.5m long and about 3 or 4m wide. (I don't have the file handy, & I don't recall exactly.) The height is on the order of 2.5m with the gear down; probably close to 2m with it up and that includes the engine nacelles slung underneath.
I've no idea what these measurments are in Imperial; I think in metric except for people.
Kenneth, there are overlays for the different variants. The overlays look like the deck plans, but only show the parts that change for a given variant. The idea is that you can photocopy the overlay, cut it out, lay it overtop the main deckplan in the book and photocopy that, the final result being a deckplan of the variant.
Overlays are just a way to do a bunch of variants without printing an entire set of plans for each one and taking up lots of space.
The overlay method was used in the old Prime Adventures #1 for the small freighter. There was an overlay to convert part of the cargo space into passanger space.
Nick
500 MegaWatt seconds.
Otherwise known as 500 MegaJoules.
It's a measure of ENERGY
Joules are a measure of ENERGY.
Watts on the other hand are a measure of POWER.
If you get a Joule every second then you're getting a Watt.
Ahhhh the joys of being Metricated.
( the only real fear is that M as in MW can be confussed with mW where the m is for mili and thus miliwatts. )
Though I suspect that SVC's MWs is simply MegaWatts.
MJC: It's not SVC's MW. Others did that. I just posted it. GTN? better be PDQ? So LMA, ok?
I know it meant megawatts but the first thing that popped into my mind was "ahh, a capacitor for the phasers..." and not a power plant.
I do a lot of GURPS Vehicles designs, the difference isn't academic ;)
While I don't pretend to understand the GURPS specific jargon describing the shuttlecraft, there are several that seem to contradict SFB.
In particular, the number of passengers. An SFB shuttle can carry a crew unit (or two BP) which is as many as 15 individuals, but this lists only being able to carry 6. (And I don't see anything indicating the ability to stuff up to 60 bodies in it--I think that the max with maximum overcrowding).
Also, the tactical warp speed of 2.5 looks high (the shuttle doesn't gain speed 12 until booster packs come out). Or at least I'd expect a split value (based on a year or tech level).
David; I'm led to believe it's because the admin described is based on the actual shuttle from the TV series, and not some abstract generlization that is used in SFB.
Not exactly the TV shuttle which traded in 1 seat to create a more spacious opening near the door. (I had thought that was supposed to be an inset airlock that a lack of budget prevented from including.)
The shuttle could carry more passengers than the listed six. If the listed seats are roomy (as defined in GURPS:Vehicles), then the number of seats could be doubled if transferred to "cramped." Additional passengers could be placed in cargo and void areas by either adding seats or simply having passengers stand.
Life support is a problem with the design. Life support should be able to handle extra passengers. Total life support means the crew will have all needs for air, water, and food met for as long as shuttle's power system would hold out. (If the power plants can reduce fuel consumption, the needed 1/10 megawatt per second per passenger could be drawn for an incredibly long time. Never have to leave a crashed shuttle for 50+ years. Might hamper some GMs with the obvious plot lines to explore the planet.)
Quote:Life support should be able to handle extra passengers. Total life support means the crew will have all needs for air, water, and food met for as long as shuttle's power system would hold out
why should life support be able to support everyone forever?
it should be able to support the standard crew for the duration of the missions (plus a safety factor), but if you overload it you also overload the life support and you switch from a highly recycled low capacity environment to a throwaway high capacity environment.
for that matter, part of the overloading could be pulling out the recycling gear to make more space for people to stand.
a few small compressed air tanks can be sufficiant to support 50 people for an hour, but won't do any good for 6 people for a couple days
David: That is how "total life support" is defined. That is one of the weaknesses of G:V and successor products, no easy method of determining excess capacity, just hard ceilings on capacity.
It should probably be replaced with limited life support for a maximum of about 600 man days. Much worse under GURPS:Vehicles rules in terms of space and power usage but closer to how SFU has defined shuttles.
Sidebar: That one shuttles powerplant can meet the entire residential power consumption for the entire Earth in 2001. A crashed craft could rapidly change development patterns on a low tech world by powering massive foundries and other heavy industry. To think that fool Tracey thought a hand weapon had any significance.
DL; I think this type of life support system is beyond scrubber technology. That is whatever mechanism is being used it probably relies on some high energy reaction to break apart exhailed CO2, and reconstruct (reconstitute?) the elements into breathable atmosphere. Although I imagine even that process would require an excess element from somewhere.
Water; that's a bugger of mine. I remember reading about another high energy process developed by NASA to extract water from (of all things) rocks. I actually saw a demonstration of this on that PBS science show with Alan Alda a few years back (the show's name escapes me). But again that process required some external matter to make it work. I'd imagine that the shuttle would probably just recycle urine; maybe by burning out the impurities, converting the water to steam to let the heavier constituents fall into a basin or something. Off the top of my head; the leftover solution would probably go through several cycles of this until it was deemed distilled.
Richard; yeah, but Tracy was a military man, not a systems' analyst.
Actually GURPS Space and Transhuman Space have both noted that the Total Life Support has a bit of "slop space" and isn't quite such a hard limit. Well... I think Space does, but I'm not going to dig my book out this second ;)
Specifically, looking at Transhuman Space Appendix A, p. 182 has rules on overloading life support.
Quick Summary
- Roll 3d each day the system is overloaded, at +1 per 10% over capacity. On a 13+ the system starts to fail, losing 10% of its capacity by each point the roll exceeds 12.
- You may attempt a Mechanic (Life Support) roll each day that will restore 10% of full capacity if successful (not more).
George, my point is that all the equipmrnt to recycle things and covert stuff to replace the missing elements takes up space (potentially significant space if you include the sanatary facilities that collect the waste)
when you are overloading a shuttle you can (if designed right) remove all that stuff and use that space to hold more people, surviving for a short term on much simpler technology. it's not just a matter of X man hours of support being used up faster, it's a matter of replacing equipment that supplies X man-hours + y man hours/hour of support with space for more bodies at the expense of the + y man hours/hour section of the calculation
nowhere in SFB has a limit been set on how long a shuttle can be overloaded (senerios just don't last long enough to matter :-)
SFB has certainly does have specific limits on overloaded shuttle time. See rule (G9.14).
Normal load is one crew unit (usually 10 indviduals), time is not specified, presumably a long time.
Overcrowded is two crew units (usually 20 individuals), time limit is 20 SFB turns.
Very overcrowded is three crew units (usually 30 individuals), time limit is 10 SFB turns.
thanks nick, I forgot about that.
That's a silly rule given the physics of SFB. Last month Bannon Campbell and I had a game that lasted 16 turns, and I used every shuttle I had against him. Imagine if I had to abandon a ship or something, and overcrowded my admis.
DL; I guess to me it seems like any system that can crank out 500 MW/s could probably stand a little overloading. Then again, maybe not. I don't know.
Before fistfights break out, everyone should remember that what you are discussing is basicly taking two different design systems, which are totally incompatible, and trying to transfer something from one system to the other.
It is not going to work perfectly, ever. If you think it did, go back and check for errors in your math. J The best you'll ever be able to do is get close to what you want.
It will become easier once GPD comes out. One whole chapter is devoted to this, and Thomas Gamble (aka Red-shirt) and Aaron Hendricks did a lot of fine work in figuring this stuff out.
George, the problem isn't available power, it's available space.
how are you going to get 20-30 people in such little space? I think the answer is you make more space by removing non-essential equipment (and for such a short duration a lot of the life support stuff is non-essential)
think of current recycling capability on subs. they can stay down as long as their food will last (usually 60 days or so right?) with a standard crew (with some elbow room for safety) but if you were to crowd them full with 3 times as many people as the systems are designed to handle you don't now have life support capability of 20 days, you have a capacity measured in hours
Gary; no fistfights here, just a little design comizerating 
Although I'll concede that it is a bit futile to compare SFB mechanics to GURPS.
DL; good point. Recalling the shuttle schematic from memory I'd imagine (were time available) the seats could be ripped out. And people could sit on top of one another. Maybe the artificial gravity could be shut off inside the shuttle, and the people could be "stacked" like lumber or something?
The sub thing; that's true. I suppose to really solve the problem we would need to know how much air (an actual volume) the system can recycle over some period of time.
How much you want to bet that the way to get "30 people in one shuttle" was something first discovered during a dare over spring break at starfleet academy.
hehee.
it definantly explains why people crowded into an overloaded shuttle need a turn to get out and orginized before they can contribute to the battle :-)
George,
as for stacking them like lumber, if the inertial dampener can be depended on (just a little more then in the TV show :-) setting things to null gravity and packing them in like lumber could work fairly well.
as far as the actual volume of air recycled is concerned, I don't think you need to worry about that level of detail, if you say a normal shuttle life support is designed for 10-12 people (the normal load being 8 this should be a suitable safety margin) and then figure out some extra man-hours worth of air that are kept on board for emergancies we can have a reasonable figure.
now with the 'official' time scale of 1 SFB turn=1 sec we find that you have 200 man-seconds worth of air on board, this is obviously wrong, but we'll need to get gary to tell us the corrected scale :-)
after that it's simple, 20 people * 10 turns = duration of emergancy supplies (the other 10 people live off the normal life support equipment, and there's still a small safety factor)
I thought each impulse was 1 second. A turn being about 30 seconds.
I could be wrong :-)
but even then you are talking about 200*32 =6400 seconds, or less then 2 man-hours of air, you have more then that in an empty shuttle with no life support at all
It's going to depend on the time distort factor that the impulse engines are cranked up to. (Oh, you wanted a serious answer?)
SPACE3 page 124 defines what happens when you overload life support. Life support on an Admin shuttle is designed for 8 people, so if you have a total of 24 aboard that is a 200% overload.
You've got 24 hours before you have to roll dice, and a 200% overload = +20 to your die roll 
and you have to roll EVERY HOUR.
If you roll a 13 or higher, you lose 10% of your life support, so unless you have someone with Scotty's skill levels working on the LS system, you have 34 hours before life support fails entirely.
With an hour or two of air in the cabin, call it 36 hours max.