So, while I work on a proposal for our monitor/self-propelled defence station, I'm going to write up the process I use so other people can design ships too if they want.
To start with, we're going to open Excel and create a few row and column headings. We'll have columns for tonnage, power requirement, cost, and crew requirement. We'll have a whole bunch of empty rows where we'll put the things that go on our ship (with more complex ships needing more rows), and then two rows on the bottom. For simplicity's sake while writing this, I'm going to assume that I am starting in the top left corner of an empty sheet (so the first empty row, after I add in headings and an empty row for the spacecraft's name - formatting stuff that you don't have to copy but makes me happy - is row 3), and my two "bottom" rows are row 35 and 36. In cell B35, I'm going to sum all the values in column B, which I'm using for tonnage (i.e., =SUM(B2:B34)), then do the same thing in columns C, D, and E for the other values (in my case, power, cost, and crew, respectively). Then, in B36, I'm going to insert my initial guess for the size of the spacecraft I'm building. This is a 5,000 ton-ish station, so I'm going to write in 5000. Eventually, B35 and B36 will have the same value, but we need a separate cell here or else it'll be a circular reference for excel and we'll just goal seek away the difference. I'm going to be referring to B36 a lot, so remember that it's the total tonnage.
Next up, we're going to create a few rows for the hull. Most hulls have zero tonnage cost associated with them, but they do have power and crew requirements and they cost money. The hull config is picked from the following table:
| | Tonnage cost mult | Hull point mult | Hull cost mult | Armour tonnage mult | Can it fly in atmo? |
| Standard | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Sorta |
| Streamlined | 0 | 1 | 1.2 | 1.2 | Yes |
| Spherical | 0 | 1 | 1.1 | 0.9 | Sorta |
| Close structure | 0 | 1 | 0.8 | 1.5 | Sorta |
| Dispersed structure | 0 | 0.9 | 0.5 | 2 | No |
| Planetoid | 0.2 | 1.25 | 0.08 | 1* | No |
| Buffered planetoid | 0.35 | 1.5 | 0.08 | 1* | No |
* These don't have a multiplier, but instead have a +2/+4 to armour.
There's other optional modifiers that can be applied to hulls (except for planetoid and buffered planetoid hulls):
- Reinforced hulls have an additional 1.1x hull point mult and a 1.5x hull cost mult.
- Light hulls have an additional 0.9x hull point mult and a 0.75x hull cost mult. Reinforced and light hulls are mutually exclusive.
- Non-gravity hulls have an additional 0.5x hull cost mult and a 0.5x hull power requirement mult.
- Military hulls have an additional 1.25x hull cost mult and double the max armour cap, but must be above 5,000 tons.
For the self-propelled defence station, I'm going to pick the buffered planetoid hull. It has a LOT of hull points (which act as hitpoints, if I understand correctly), it's got a very low hull cost multiplier, and that it cannot take the optional modifiers is fine - we get more hull points than we would with a reinforced hull, it's cheap enough that the savings from a zero-G hull is negligible, and military hulls increase cost too much. I'm going to go into cell A3, and write in "buffered planetoid hull", just to keep track of what I'm working on. Then, I add in the tonnage cost of the selected hull type in cell B3, which is =0.35*B36, representing the unusable volume represented by the hull's inefficiency. All hulls have a base power requirement of 20% of displacement, so I put in =1*0.2*B36 in cell C3. They also have a base cost of 0.05 MCr/ton, so in cell D3, I put in =0.08*0.5*B36. If I were, for example, picking a non-gravity hull (which isn't an option here, but bear with me), I'd throw in a *0.5 in the formulas for C3 and D3.
In column E, we have the crew requirements. For warships, we need 1 mechanic per 500 tons (1 per 1000 for a civilian ship) and 1 administrator per 1000 tons (1 per 2000 for civilians). Since this is a warship, I put the formula =ROUNDUP(B36/500,0)+ROUNDUP(B36/1000,0) in cell E3 to represent the crew positions which scale based on hull volume.
The hull can also have armour, which we'll be adding in as the next row. We have crystaliron armour, which has a tonnage cost of 0.0125 per armour level per ton of ship and costs 0.2 MCr/ton of armour. The maximum amount of armour we can have is limited by the TL of our armour tech, so it's capped at 10 (plus the extra 4 from being a buffered planetoid). I want as much armour as possible, so after putting Protection 14 into the leftmost cell of row 4, I put =0.0125*10*B36 in cell B5 and =0.2*B5 in cell D5. Armour doesn't consume any power or require any crew. Small hulls have additional penalties to mounting armour, but we'll skip that (it's pointlessly inefficient to make small armoured hulls at the scale we operate at).
There are also other optional upgrades we can add to the hull:
- Heat shielding exclusively helps with atmospheric flight with a nonfunctional m-drive or diving into a star's corona. Why add this?
- Rad shielding doubles the radiation damage reduction from 500 to 1000 rads, and gives the bridge the Hardened trait (more on this later). It costs 0.025 MCr per ton of ship.
- Reflec increases protection against lasers by 3 and is mutually exclusive with stealth. It costs 0.1 MCr per ton of ship.
- We're all familiar with Stealth coatings. The three levels relevant to us are:
| Dice mod | Price per ton of ship | Tonnage cost per ton of ship | |
| Basic (TL8) | -(2+TL advantage) | 0.04 MCr | 0.02 |
| Improved (TL10) | -(2+TL advantage) | 0.1 MCr | |
| Enhanced (TL12) | -(4+TL advantage) | 0.5 MCr | |
I don't think stealthing the angry asteroid is realistic, and since nobody except us seems to use lasers a lot, I'm omitting Reflec. I'll add rad shielding, though, because it'd suck if our station got fried by a solar flare. IMO, we should establish best practices of rad shielding basically everything that is expected to spend extended periods around a star or be involved in combat. I'm going to add a new row in for our radiation shielding. In cell A5, I write rad shielding, and I add the cost to cell D5 (=0.025*B36). And with that, the hull is almost done.
I will make a brief detour to describe the Hardened trait. Basically, anything that's Hardened is immune to ion weapons. Anything that's not hardened has a high likelihood of getting disabled for a round. Anything that draws power can be made hardened by multiplying the price by 1.5, and in doing so, you laugh at the enemy's ion weapons. I think it's reasonable to harden the basic electronics & life support against EMPs, so I multiply the cost of the hull (in cell D3) by 1.5, so it's now =0.08*0.5*1.5*B36. I'll be doing this a lot in the future.
Drives are fairly easy unless you start doing weird things. There are three types - M-drives require no fuel, but are capped in thrust; R-drives are heavy and require fuel, but can thrust hard enough to pulp everyone inside the ship if you want, and J-drives jump between parsecs.
For the M-drive, it has a tonnage requirement of 0.01 per ton of hull per drive level, requires 0.1 power per ton of hull per drive level, and costs 2 MCr/ton of drive. You can also make a M-0 drive for station-keeping, which consumes 0.01 tos per ton of hull. Because of a version switch, we can go up to M-6 (so 6 Gs of acceleration), while mostly everyone else can go up to M-3 or M-4. I'm going to pick M-2. We can go higher, but doing so takes a lot of power and I'm hoping to rely more on "the minefield will kill anyone getting close and the hull is durable enough to survive what gets through" instead of trying to outmaneuver an enemy (which takes us away from our optimal position in the middle of the minefield). Evasive actions let you try and dodge a number of attacks equal to your available thrust after maneuvering, so we can try and dodge two attacks per round, which I think is fair enough. Having M-0 gives a whole bunch of bonuses to an attacker, though, so I want to keep at least some capability. As such, in cell A6, I write in "Hardened M-2 drive". In cell B6, I write =0.01*2*B36. In cell C6, I write =0.1*2*B36. In cell D6, I write =2*1.5*B6, adding the extra multiplier from hardening it as mentioned above.
We use reaction drives on our strike fighters to give them a bit of extra thrust past the 6 G limit of our M-drives. We can go up to R-9, if you want to make the crew very upset with you; R-drives have a tonnage requirement of 0.02 per ton of hull per drive level and cost 0.2 MCr/ton of drive. I am not adding a R-drive to this because it's so heavy and it dips into our fuel supply.
We only have the J-1 J-drive. It takes up 5 tons plus 0.025 tons per ton of hull per drive level, requires 0.1 power per ton of hull, and costs 1.5 MCr per ton of drive. This doesn't have a J-drive, since omitting one lets us save a lot of tonnage and cost and we only have 100 jump-trained pilots. Big ships (like this one) would require 2 jump-trained pilots if they were making jumps; ships below 500 tons only require 1. The minimum size of a J-drive is 10 tons.
This all assumes that the spacecraft doesn't have anything docking to it during maneuvers or jumps. If a spacecraft has something docked to it, the tonnage requirement is raised to include the additional tonnage of what's docked to it, be it another ship, cargo modules, drop tanks, etc. However, I'm
pretty sure that a docked ship can use their M-drive to help push things along if they have a functional one.
As for power, way back at the start we summed everything in column C, which gives us a convenient baseline for power requirements. It is possible to dip below this (you can halve the power required for basic ship systems in emergency mode, and you can make it so that there's only enough power to run the M-drive or J-drive, etc.), but in our case, we want to be able to have everything drawing power at once. All of our ships should be using a Fusion plant, which because of upgrades weighs 0.09 tons per unit of power supplied and costs 0.5 MCr per ton of plant. Since this is meant to be a "tanky" combatant, I'm going to oversize the drive a bit (critical hits can reduce the power output, with successive levels dropping it to 90%, 80%, and then 30%). Oversizing the powerplant by 25% means we have a buffer if we take a severity 2 critical hit to the powerplant. As such, in cell A7, I write in Fusion plant, in cell B7, I put in =C35*0.09*1.25, and in cell D7 I put in =B7*0.5.
We can also add emergency generators, which let us keep operating at 90% capacity for five rounds after a critical hit knocks the powerplant offline. This is 1/10th the cost and tonnage of the main plant. I add this in, with A8 being Emergency power, B8 being =B7*.1, and D8 being =D7*.1.
The drives and powerplant have their own crew requirements. We need 1 engineer for every 35 tons of powerplant and drives, so in cell E8, I write in =ROUNDUP(SUM(B6:B8)/35,0). If I had more drives (such as a R- or J-drive), those would also be included in the sum.
Fuel's pretty easy at first, but has a lot of options.
There's a metal hydride fuel option, but it's pretty useless (it reduces minor leaks, but doesn't stop the complete destruction of the fuel tank or catastrophic fuel explosions, which are what we really care about). Aside from that, there are a few other options to choose between:
- Conventional fuel tanks are free! For every ton, they carry 1 ton of fuel.
- Collapsible bladders take up an additional 0.01 tons per ton of fuel when empty, and 1.01 tons per ton of fuel when full. They cost 0.0005 MCr/ton (using the full tonnage). You need at least 1 jump's worth of fuel capacity in conventional tanks to use collapsible tanks.
- Drop tanks are external tanks designed to be jettisoned right before you jump for military purposes. They take up 0.04 tons per ton of drop tank on the carrier vessel, plus the weight of the drop tank (which is equal to the fuel tonnage). The attachment point costs 0.5 MCr/ton and the tank costs 0.025 MCr.
- Mountable fuel tanks can be used to convert cargo areas into fuel storage. They cost 0.001MCr/ton and for every ton carry 1 ton of fuel. They take a month to swap between cargo and fuel.
- There's also fuel/cargo containers, but they're just straight-up worse.
M-drives do not require fuel. Our J-drives require 10% of the total tonnage for every jump; if I had a ship that was going to make 4 jumps using conventional fuel tanks then I'd add in a =B36*0.4 in the tonnage column, for example.
Reaction drives require fuel equal to their rating times 0.025 tons per ton of ship per hour of thrusting. You can see why M-drives are better if you don't want to go beyond 6 G - the weight of the drive plus fuel required for just an hour of operation are about the same as the total tonnage of drives, powerplant, and plant fuel for several months using a M-drive. You can have a thruster that's only meant to fire for very short amounts of time, which helps a bit, but it's fiddly and I prefer M-drives.
For every two weeks of operation, the power plant requires 10% of its weight in fuel. For the lazy monitor, I'm going to give it three months of endurance on internal tanks, since I don't want everyone inside dying because there was an interruption in the fuel supply and that should be enough time to arrange an emergency refuelling trip from Home plus a 50% margin of safety. However, this will be supplemented by a small tender spacecraft with a ramscoop or fuel scoop & refinery that should make the station self-sustaining, which I'll detail later. Since I'm otherwise just using conventional fuel tanks, adding it simply requires writing "Plant fuel (3 months)" in A9 and =0.1*B7*6 in B9. With that, fuel is done, at least until we talk about scoops, refineries, and so forth later.
These are the senses and nerve centre of the spacecraft. There are a bunch of optional things, but for the most part it's pretty simple.
To start with, we need to add a bridge or cockpit. The coding for this can be a bit funny if you're near a breakpoint since it uses a lookup table, but a simple if statement or going back to check to make sure you've sized it correctly can handle it. To start with, we need to choose what type of control centre we'll have:
- Cockpits are small, and designed for limited-endurance (<24 h), 1 or 2 crew spacecraft.
- Regular bridges are just that.
- Reduced-size bridges are half the cost and require 1 "step" less tonnage than regular bridges, but give a -1 malus to things like making sure you don't die horribly while making a jump.
- Detachable bridges can be disconnected in an emergency and are capable of landing on a nearby body, acting as an escape capsule for the bridge crew. They're 1.5 times the cost.
- Command bridges take up an additional 40 tons, cost 30 MCr more, and can only be used on ships above 5,000 tons, but give bonuses to tactical checks.
Single-crew cockpits take up 1.5 tons & cost 0.01 MCr. Two crew take up 2.5 tons & cost 0.015 MCr.
Basic and detachable bridges have a size as listed in this table:
| Displacement (tons) | Regular bridge tonnage | Detachable bridge tonnage |
| (0, 50] | 3 | 15 |
| (50, 100) | 6 | 15 |
| [100, 200] | 10 | 15 |
| (200, 1000] | 20 | 30 |
| (1000, 2000] | 40 | 50 |
| >2000 | 60 | 80 |
For every 100,000 tons above the above, you add 20 tons of bridge, in case that's ever somehow relevant to us.
For my station, I want to use a command bridge in order to get those bonuses. This means it's going to be 100 tons, so in cell B10, I put in 100.
The cost of bridges is based on overall ship tonnage, with basic bridges costing 0.5 MCr per 100 tons of hull (rounded up). However, at this point we have the option of adding holographic controls, which gives a bonus to initiative roles. I want to shoot first, so I throw this on any combat craft. It's a 1.25x multiplier on bridge cost.
This all means that in cell A10, I write "Holographic command bridge", and in cell D10, I write =(ROUNDUP(B36/100,0)*0.5+30)*1.25.
As for bridge crew, it's largely fixed. For military ships, you need 1 pilot and 1 astrogator if there's a jump drive. For military ships, you need a commanding officer, 3 pilots, and 1 astrogator if there's a jump drive. Since this is a military station, I'm going to put 5 crew in for the bridge in cell E10.
Maxim had a good idea of adding backup bridges, but these probably don't need as extensive of facilities. I'm going to throw a reduced size non-holographic bridge on it as well, so cell B11 gets a 40, D11 gets =(ROUNDUP(B36/100,0)*0.5)*0.5, and E11 gets 1, for the backup pilot.
Computers are weird and have rules scattered over multiple books. Key points, though:
- Computers take up no tonnage.
- A 5-bandwidth capacity computer costs 0.03 MCr.
- A 10-bandwidth capacity computer costs 0.16 MCr.
- You can harden a computer (despite it not drawing power), for the standard 50% cost increase.
- A jump spec computer gives an additional 5 bandwidth for running jump programs, for an extra 50% cost increase. A jump & hardened computer has double the cost of the regular computer.
- 40 additional bandwidth can be purchased for 45 MCr minus the cost of the jump control program.
- Right now, the available software we have is:
- Advanced Fire Control/1 takes up 15 bandwidth, costs 12 MCr, and gives +1 to attack rolls.
- Battle System/1 takes up 5 bandwidth, costs 18 MCr, and gives +1 to tactics rolls.
- We may or may not have EWAR/1, which takes 10 bandwidth, costs 15 MCr, and gives +1 to sensor rolls.
- Launch Solution/1 takes up 5 bandwidth, costs 10 MCr, and gives +1 to torpedo and missile attack rolls.
- Point Defence/1 takes up 12 bandwidth, costs 8 MCr, and lets us use PD batteries to defend other ships in close formation.
- Virtual Gunner/0 takes up 4 bandwidth, costs 1 MCr, and lets us repeatedly spend 1 bandwidth to replace 10 gunners with autonomous control at skill level 0 (AIUI, this is a -1 modifier to what we can normally expect).
- Jump Control/1 takes up 5 bandwidth (or 10 if doing a synchronized jump) and costs 0.1 MCr.
- Evade/1 takes up 10 bandwidth, costs 1 MCr, and gives a -1 modifier to enemy attack rolls.
- Fire Control/1 takes up 5 bandwidth, costs 2 MCr, and lets the computer either fire a single turret or give a gunner a +1 modifier.
- There's a bunch of other software that's not useful at the level of detail we operate at, and has no relevant cost.
I'm of the opinion that it's worth it to spend on this stuff for our big station. A 5-bandwidth computer is fine for a small noncombatant, but we want something more capable. I want to have AFC/1, BS/1, EWAR/1, LS/1, and Evade/1 operating simultaneously, which adds up to 50 bandwidth. PD/1 is useful if we need to defend a nearby ship. The combo of Virtual Gunner/0 and 10 Fire Control/1s would give the same effect as 10 gunners, which is nice, but it's also going to cost ~61 MCr with non-hardened computers. I don't think that's worth it in our case; once we get better software, though, virtual gunners are a good way of reducing the tonnage devoted to crew spaces.
As such, we're going to be paying (0.16+45)*1.5 for the hardened computer hardware, and 64 MCr for the software. It's really expensive, being something like 10% the total cost! I throw the total costs in on row 12.
Sensors are important, as shown by our recent... issues. To start with, we need to pick the base sensors that we'll apply stuff to, with three options:
- Basic, with a -4 modifier, but no cost
- Civilian, with a -2 modifier, and a cost of 1 ton, 1 power, and 3 MCr
- Military, with a 0 modifier, and a cost of 2 tons, 2 power, and 4.1 MCr
I'm going to opt for hardened military sensors, and write that in to cell A13, with the values written in the rest of the row (and the cost multiplied by 1.5).
Spacecraft have, by default, 1 on-duty sensor operator on the bridge per 7500 tons, and three shifts. Cell E13 gets =ROUNDUP(B36/7500,0)*3.
It can be helpful to have more sensor operators, since a sensor operator can only do one thing at a time. If they're tracking a ship to get a firing solution, they can't attempt to jam multiple salvoes of incoming missiles, for example. Additional sensor stations cost 1 ton and 0.5 MCr. I think I'll add three more sensor stations with 9 crew, so I write that in cell A14, put 3 in cell B14, 1.5 in cell D14, and 9 in cell E14.
There are also upgrades we can make to the sensors themselves. Extension nets increase the range at which we can obtain limited or full data by one range increment, but cannot be used when the vessel is moving. It takes up 0.01 tons per ton of ship, has a minimum size of 1 ton, and costs 1 MCr per ton. A shallow penetration suite lets us determine if there's something fishy going on with a target at up to very long range; it takes 10 tons, 1 power, and costs 5 MCr. I'll add the extension net in as =MAX(0.01*B36,1), with the cost being =B15, and a hardened shallow penetration suite as 10 tons, 1 power, and 5*1.5 MCr.
I'm going to skip over the rules for pax, because we don't really care about that as a military. There's already a lot of stuff here.
Staterooms take up 4 tons and cost 0.5 MCr each. They can have a single bunk or two bunks, with the caveat that it can "wear crews not used to it". There is no mention of hot-bunking. Since a "ton" in traveller is actually a measure of volume, equal to 14 m^3, a stateroom is about three times as large as the dorm room in university. The crew can suck it up and sleep in their bunk beds.
A17 is "Staterooms", B17 is =ROUNDUP(E32/2,0)*4, and D17 is =B17/4*0.5.
Seriously, I want to editorialize for a sec and say how absurd it is that we're giving these huge spaces to crews. We could be hot-racking them in coffin lockers, in which case we'd be getting 21 people per ton! Staterooms have
individual kitchenettes! This is a warship?!?!
Common areas are suggested as being 1/4 the displacement of the staterooms, and cost 0.1 MCr per ton. That's a simple addition on row 18.
Emergency low berths can be used to place 4 crew in stasis should there be a medical emergency or the life support fails. They weigh 1 ton each, cost 1 MCr, and take 1 power. I like having enough for the entire complement. Implementing them in the sheet is a bit awkward because it'll result in a circular reference, so it'll require a bit of funniness. The tonnage in B19 is going to be given by =ROUNDUP((E35+20)/4,0); I'm adding 20 in there because I want to add a 20-person FLF complement later. We can't directly reference that tonnage for the power, so instead copy the numerical value to cell C19. The cost, however, can just be =B19.
Barracks can carry 1 FLF soldier per ton and cost 0.05 MCr/ton. I want 20 soldiers to defend against boarding actions (if they somehow happen), so I add in a 20 for the tonnage in row 20 and =B20*0.05 for the cost.
I'd also like to add in a medical bay, since that seems pretty helpful. Four tons of medical bay allow the treatment of 3 people, consume 1 power, and 2 MCr. I'm going to add in a hardened medical bay capable of serving 12 people, so I add that in on line 21 (16 tons, 4 power, 4*2*1.5 MCr).
To defend against boarding, I'm also going to fit armouries. One armoury is needed per 25 crew or 5 marines, weighs 1 ton, and costs 0.25 MCr. The tonnage is given by =ROUNDUP(E35/25,0)+ROUNDUP(B20/5,0), and the cost by multiplying that by 0.25.
I'm adding a briefing room, since it gives +1 to tactics rolls for something planned there. It's 4 tons and 0.5 MCr.
I'm also adding a swimming pool, because I think it's nice to give them some leisure and Pr. 941 memes. That's 4 tons and 0.02 MCr.
Since the crew will likely be deployed for extended periods, I'm going to add training facilities. It's 2 tons and 0.2 MCr per trainee, and I want to train 5 people at once, so that's 10 tons and 1 MCr.
I'm going to add a 12-ton workshop. Every 6 tons lets 2 personnel repair broken equipment or fabricate new items, and costs 0.9 MCr. That goes in on line 25.
Other options not taken that are relevant to us laboratories (for each 4 tons, get enough space for 1 researcher) and libraries (4 tons, 4 MCr, +1 when training for new skills).
I'm going to add escape capsules. It's 0.5 tons and 0.02 MCr each. B27 gets =(E35+B20)*0.5, and D27 gets =B27/0.5*0.02.
Penultimately, there are crewmembers whose quantity scales based on the number of crew. 1 medic is needed per 120 crew, and 1 officer is needed per 10 (20 for civilian ships). This is going to be a bit backwards to avoid splitting the sum, but "Add. crew" is written in A34, and E34 gets =ROUNDUP(SUM(E3:E33)/119,0)+ROUNDUP(SUM(E3:E33)/9,0).
Weapons are complicated. They're sorta explained in the threadmarks, and can also sorta be handled by copying existing ships. I don't know how many things work. This is mostly guesswork.
I'm going to start with a hardened trio of the LMDC that Omarov found effective; that's 300 tons, 150 power, 75*3*1.5 MCr, 1 hardpoint, and 6 crew (I think). Based on the CFA-D, a 20 projectile magazine is 8 tons; I'll take three. If we can put this in a capital turret that'd be ideal but I don't know the rules for them.
In addition to that, I'm also going to add 24 sandcaster turrets with a 2400-round magazine, 22 PD lasers, and a small missile bay as point defence. These are mostl copied from our ships. Everything is hardened, as usual.
God weapons confuse me so much.
There are a bunch of other things we'll want to add (or could be added to a different ship), and I'll go through it quickly:
- We can apply armoured bulkheads to any part of the ship, which reduces the severity of a critical hit by 1 tick in exchange for weighing 0.1x the tonnage of what's being covered and costing 0.2 MCr per ton. Critical hits can apply to sensors, powerplant, fuel, weaponry, armour, hull, drives, cargo, crew, and the computer. I am, naturally, going to uparmour all of these, except for the hull, due to economy reasons.
- Warships require 1/10000 of their tonnage per day as consumable supplies. Since this can't be replenished locally, unlike fuel, I'm adding in 365 days of supplies.
- Docking clamps scale with the size of the ship docking to them. I'm going to add 4 50-ton/8 MCr clamps, which have no upper limit on the size of the docked ship.
- UNREP gear transfers 20 tons of fuel and supplies per ton, consumes 1 power/ton, and costs 0.5 MCr/ton. I'm adding 1 ton of it.
- Hangars require twice the tonnage of the largest craft it can carry, rounded up. They allow repairs in a pressurized environment and easier loading/unloading of cargo. They cost 0.2 MCr per ton. I am adding one, scaled to a 100-ton smallcraft.
- Docking spaces require the tonnage of the craft they carry, and cost 0.25 MCr per ton. I am adding 100 tons of docking space.
Other stuff that we don't add:
- Modular cargo space can be designated that can be swapped out to be other things. It applies a cost multiplier to the hull equal to 1 plus the modular tonnage divided by the total tonnage. Modular sections have separate hardpoints.
- Breakaway partitions can be added to let a spacecraft split into two independent spacecraft. This takes up 0.02 tons per ton of ship & costs 2 MCr per ton that goes to this.
- Hamster cage & double hull artificial gravity can be added to non-gravity hulls. They require 0.1 tons per ton of spun hull. They apply a cost modifier to the hull equal to 1 plus the spun tonnage divided by the total tonnage.
- Solar panels can be added to ships to provide backup power when orbiting close to a star. It produces 0.5 power per ton and costs 0.2 MCr per ton.
- Concealed M-drives can be built, adding a 1.25x cost and tonnage multiplier and halving the produced thrust, but don't produce the sensor signature normally given off by M-drives.
- Solar sails take up 0.05 tons per ton of ship and cost 0.2 per ton. They act as a M-0 drive when orbiting a star.
- Fuel processors refine 20 tons of fuel per ton of processor, cost 0.05 MCr per ton, and consume 1 power per ton.
- Fuel scoops collect unrefined fuel from gas giants, and cost 1 MCr. Streamlined ships don't need a scoop, they can just fly through the atmosphere.
- Ramscoops collect processed fuel from the interstellar medium as long as a spacecraft is thrusting. Ramscoops cannot be taken in atmo. They take up a minimum of 5+0.01 tons per ton of ship or 10 tons, whichever is lower. Ramscoops can be enlarged to no upper limit. They cost 0.25 MCr/ton.
- There's a bunch of cargo handling options, but it's 1 AM and we're a navy, not a cargo carrier, so it's not really that relevant.
- There are probe drones for exploratory purposes. 5 drones take up 1 ton, cost 0.5 MCr, and can be used to survey planets or act as comms relays.
- Ships can be fitted with breaching tubes (3 tons, 3 MCr) and forced linking apparatuses (2 tons, 0.075 MCr) to assist in boarding.
- Construction decks can be used to build or repair smaller ships (although this may not be allowed). They are twice the tonnage of the largest ship they can build, require 1 power per ton, and cost 0.5 MCr/ton.
- In addition to the hangars and docking spaces mentioned above, there's also launch decks and recovery decks. A discussion of them is very long and beyond the scope of this.
First, check to see if the emergency low berths' power requirement matches the number needed.
Then, use goal seek to change the tonnage in cell B36 to match the tonnage in cell B35. Re-check the emergency low berths.
Once that's done, congrats, you know the minimum tonnage needed for your design!
God this took ages it's quarter after one why did I do this.
