[Spaceships] Linking ships

[yoippari]

I've been playing with the ship cost calculator and my handy book here and wondering what the effect of making multi stage ships that instead of being linked between the front and mid sections are built as full ships and linked using external clamps.

Essentially this would be one or more tugs push/pulling unpowered cars like a train, but on a larger scale. The external clamp rules do shave a lot of acceleration off when you try using a small tug, even one that is all engine and fuel, to move even a one size larger ship but what about a reusable mothership engine and a smaller runabout similar to the jedi fighter hyperspace booster thing that appeared in the newer episodes?

My goal is to see if a cargo "train" is viable without super science preferably around TL 10. I would go through and run all the math myself but I'm having a hard time grasping the movement rules.

[Ulzgoroth]

This method works quite well for delivering large parasite craft.

It does require some care to make it efficient, though. There's no point burning mass to bolt together several ships that could operate just as well independently.

For a simple cargo ship, you don't gain much, if anything, by adding parasites. It's maximally efficient to carry cargo in cargo bays, not clamp-on cargo pods, unless you're extracting some special advantage from the ability to detach the pods.

A long-distance flight carrier (FTL or just high delta-V) coupled to a short-range craft is one of the cases where it definitely does work. The short-range craft avoids hauling around the surplus mass of a long-range drive while in local-space, which is a particularly huge benefit if you're using a short-range engine with very expensive fuel.

So...Er...what exactly are you hoping to achieve with this thing?

[yoippari]

Basically a viable way for PCs to get from A to B quicker while still having a versatile ship once they got there. The cargo train idea is more of an extrapolation to create a train heist in space.

[Ulzgoroth]

Here's a skeleton for you, then.

Insystem transport booster

TL: 10
SM: n-1
Crew: 0
Move: 0.02G/924mps

Front
[1] Steel
[2] External Clamp
[3-6] Fuel Tank (Hydrogen)

Middle
[1] Steel
[2-6] Fuel Tank (Hydrogen)
[core] Control Room (0 crew stations)

Rear
[1] Steel
[2] Fuel Tank (Hydrogen)
[3-6] Fusion Rocket
[core] Fuel Tank (Hydrogen)

In normal operation, this booster is clamped to a ship of SM n. The combination has:
Move: 0.005g/165mps

If you want to squeeze more delta-V into it, you could strip the armor (making it very vulnerable) and/or the control room (making it a totally dumb booster rocket) for more fuel tanks. Each one added gives 15 mps to the booster/ship complex.

You could get much the same capability, cheaper and without the risks of leaving your main engine unattended (seriously, having something bad happen to your long-range drive while you're away from help is probably a death sentence), by including a fusion rocket and 3 fuel tanks in the main craft. But if you need absolutely optimal performance, this can help.

"Train heist in space" has a very space-operatic sound to it. Space opera is not highly compatible with non-superscience Spaceships. In particular, note that stealth in open space is on the cusp of impossibility unless you have cloaking fields, and highway robbery in plain view of fleet headquarters tends to go poorly.