Spaceships: Escape to the asteroids

[wellspring]

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

I'm fiddling with an alternate engine design from the boardgame source - a n-6Li Micro-fission thruster boosted with an antimatter bottle. It may be somewhat breaking the rules of reality, though, as that gives it an Isp of around 48000 sec, and an exhaust velocity of 480 km/sec.

Might I suggest the Fusion Rocket? It's a straightforward TL9 design, and unlike NSW, antimatter and pulse drives you can manufacture more fuel once you arrive and found your colony. As Fred points out, on long missions like this, delta-V is far more important than thrust in terms of cutting trip time.

Originally Posted by DataPacRat

Part of the Main Cargo includes industrial capacity, including a power generator; and part of the Second Cargo includes additional colonists, taking the trip in coldsleep to save on life-support requirements.

Coldsleep passengers should be placed in habitat sections (there are rules for how tightly you can pack them and their hibernation pods). I'm assuming this isn't THS-style nanostasis and they need some greatly reduced life support?

Industrial capacity and a power generator should be designed into the ship. If necessary, make them size 7 to fit them all together. There are several good reasons (game mechanic reasons and practical reasons) to do this, but if nothing else, if you're going to carry all that stuff, why not also be able to use it? I mean, while you're in transit. Plus, you need that stuff to build your base to be able to operate before you, you know, actually build the base. If the power plant and factory are each full-sized, you get a +1 to your ship's HT.

Support ships and shuttles should be in a hangar section, which includes launch/recovery equipment, parts and tools for maintenance, workspaces to specify the crew requirement and a bay door to launch the shuttles through.

As a GM, I'd rule that factories, reactors, and shuttles that are carried as cargo can't be operated. They're mothballed and crated, possibly in pre-assembled parts. You're not saving mass carrying them but not using them, and both fission and fusion reactors will operate for decades before you need to refuel them. If the plot demands it, then go ahead, but a pre-planned colony would never do it this way, and even a jury-rigged ship would probably be re-fitted in flight by the crew to get those components on line and ready to use upon arrival.

Armor isn't efficient for radiation protection if that's its only intended purpose. With a couple exceptions, ANY ship's system can be used as radiation protection. Make sure at least one of your habitat sections can accommodate the entire crew crowding in as a "sweatbox" for solar storms, then put that section in the core space of your best-protected area. Spaceships 8 has rules for this that are pretty straightforward (plus rules for hibernating crew). With that said, a 1/3 size armor module in each section of the ship is just plain common sense to deal with impacts.

A single midships turreted weapons mount would be a good idea; once you install the system, drop all the weapons except one and you have something that is mostly a cargo module. Only now you have an active defense against micrometeors. It might also come in handy for drilling. Power it with that reactor you took out of storage. Size the weapons module to match your power plant's SM.

One area where you aren't skimping but probably can is your control room. Undersizing your control room hurts handling and maneuverability, but the ship is intended for one extremely low-thrust mission, followed by docking in microgravity. A better pilot or AI weighs a lot less than having a combat ship's load of attitude thrusters. That saves you 2/3 of a space, which you can use for something else.

What are the specialized rooms? Workshops for at least three skills, and a medbay? You'll want to specify that. I'd also recommend either very good VR or a very nice rec room. Even once they arrive on the asteroid it's going to be a very grim life.

Also, you'll want to at least roughly stat out the shuttles and mining ships and etc. A refinery of some kind will be essential, not just to electrolyze water, but to synthesize fertilizers, produce industrial chemicals, lubricants, coolants, convents, solvents, etc. If such a "flex-refinery" isn't available in your setting or TL, then a larger chem lab space is required.