Spaceships
Mar. 11th, 2011 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have discovered I find designing imaginary spaceships quite calming. I use GURPS rules which have lots and lots of lovely numbers to play with if you want them. The system looks simple, a little grid with 3 sections front central rear, with 6 slots in each section, plus 2 core slots that can go in any section you choose. Fill them up with engines and control room and habitat and cargo and a whole bunch of other things off a list. You can keep it really simple, or you can start playing with particulars. Make the ships different sizes (SMs) and decide what goes in all the cabins. Name the bars. Put in childcare. It's all playing with imaginary numbers in a game system I'm unlikely to ever use for RPGs, yet I find it soothing. Kind of like lego, it all clicks together. Plus I can use it for story design. A pilot with a lot of weapons and some passenger seats has a very different ship to one with a lot of armour and some cabins set aside for daycare.
You can design ships so the upper stage seperates, the whole Front section, which is mostly meant for booster rockets getting little ships into orbit or something. But then you can have the Front section of that be yet another Upper Stage. And then it can start to get silly.
I just spent a while designing an SM+10 ship with enough fuel to do interplanetary travel in only a couple of months, an SM+9 stage that can pop off with all its cargo and go down to a planet and back, and an SM+8 Habitat ring with different fuel so it can slow itself down and be sort of a life pod. All the gardens are on the Cargo section though so it would need to pack a lot of emergency rations into each Cabin if it wanted to be a life pod suitable to two month journeys. ... now I want to figure out how much weight of food they need each for two months and see if it fits in the cabins...
it's like playing with doll houses without the dolls or the house and with more things that go boom :-)
The only disadvantage to this nested design is the thing where you've got a lot of extra fuel and engines you wouldn't use in ordinary circumstances. But I figure if you're going to actually live in the thing full time and bring your children along then you're going to plan for extraordinary circumstances too. Plus if your habitat is separate you can bolt it on to new engines and cargo sections if you can afford a fancier ship or someone invents better engines, without having to move out or buy new kitchens. It's only 10% of the ship mass and probably not much of the expense... I haven't figured out the costs yet even though they'd be significant to these merchant dudes. I like it better designing like there's no purse strings.
I looked up some prices per ton of various Stuff in the present day. Stuff costs more than I'd thought. Onions cost more than I'd thought, cause I'd never tried to think of them per ton before. I have no idea what space merchants would take from planet to planet but it looks like they'd make a lot of money from it. I'm going to start off figuring they'd get biologicals like plants and spices from gravity well places, planets, terraformed or domed big places, and they'd get metals from the Belt places, and maybe gases from big gas planets they couldn't get to very often because of orbits. ... I spent a while the other day trying to learn about orbits but ended up deciding they're Very Complicated and planets would move at the speed of the story.
Also today I decided on the name of my merchant family (McRae) and then realised I'd named them for the people that have Eilean Donan Castle, which location will be known to Highlander fans from the movie. I hadn't consciously known that before, but now I decide it is cool. Also it gives me colors to paint the ship.
At some point really soon now I need to actually write about this ship, or stop calling myself a writer.
I just wanted to figure out how the McRae's could lose most of their crew and still reach a destination safely and have enough money to keep trading, and I think I managed it. If the habitat rings are seperate, even if they're better armoured (two sections Armour vs one or none on the water filled fuel tanks) they can be hit by different things and you can lose the habitat full of sleeping people without losing the ship. Or you can zoom off with the people and leave the control room and the big engines behind. Now I just need to think of a couple of suitable emergencies to go with my ship design.
I keep reading physics pages too, but what I mostly learn is I'm never going to get the physics right.
Is still fun.
These people in my head have worlds to live in now.
... I think the story is still mostly going to be about parents and children, but they'll be zooming through space really fast between planets and possibly getting attacked by space marines, so is more interesting.
You can design ships so the upper stage seperates, the whole Front section, which is mostly meant for booster rockets getting little ships into orbit or something. But then you can have the Front section of that be yet another Upper Stage. And then it can start to get silly.
I just spent a while designing an SM+10 ship with enough fuel to do interplanetary travel in only a couple of months, an SM+9 stage that can pop off with all its cargo and go down to a planet and back, and an SM+8 Habitat ring with different fuel so it can slow itself down and be sort of a life pod. All the gardens are on the Cargo section though so it would need to pack a lot of emergency rations into each Cabin if it wanted to be a life pod suitable to two month journeys. ... now I want to figure out how much weight of food they need each for two months and see if it fits in the cabins...
it's like playing with doll houses without the dolls or the house and with more things that go boom :-)
The only disadvantage to this nested design is the thing where you've got a lot of extra fuel and engines you wouldn't use in ordinary circumstances. But I figure if you're going to actually live in the thing full time and bring your children along then you're going to plan for extraordinary circumstances too. Plus if your habitat is separate you can bolt it on to new engines and cargo sections if you can afford a fancier ship or someone invents better engines, without having to move out or buy new kitchens. It's only 10% of the ship mass and probably not much of the expense... I haven't figured out the costs yet even though they'd be significant to these merchant dudes. I like it better designing like there's no purse strings.
I looked up some prices per ton of various Stuff in the present day. Stuff costs more than I'd thought. Onions cost more than I'd thought, cause I'd never tried to think of them per ton before. I have no idea what space merchants would take from planet to planet but it looks like they'd make a lot of money from it. I'm going to start off figuring they'd get biologicals like plants and spices from gravity well places, planets, terraformed or domed big places, and they'd get metals from the Belt places, and maybe gases from big gas planets they couldn't get to very often because of orbits. ... I spent a while the other day trying to learn about orbits but ended up deciding they're Very Complicated and planets would move at the speed of the story.
Also today I decided on the name of my merchant family (McRae) and then realised I'd named them for the people that have Eilean Donan Castle, which location will be known to Highlander fans from the movie. I hadn't consciously known that before, but now I decide it is cool. Also it gives me colors to paint the ship.
At some point really soon now I need to actually write about this ship, or stop calling myself a writer.
I just wanted to figure out how the McRae's could lose most of their crew and still reach a destination safely and have enough money to keep trading, and I think I managed it. If the habitat rings are seperate, even if they're better armoured (two sections Armour vs one or none on the water filled fuel tanks) they can be hit by different things and you can lose the habitat full of sleeping people without losing the ship. Or you can zoom off with the people and leave the control room and the big engines behind. Now I just need to think of a couple of suitable emergencies to go with my ship design.
I keep reading physics pages too, but what I mostly learn is I'm never going to get the physics right.
Is still fun.
These people in my head have worlds to live in now.
... I think the story is still mostly going to be about parents and children, but they'll be zooming through space really fast between planets and possibly getting attacked by space marines, so is more interesting.