Non-combat craft

I was playing around with some campaign ideas and
decided to come up with a few non-combat craft.

Ideas for campaign mechanics blatantly stolen from
various web pages.
Industrial landing craft:
8 Mass non-ftl Merchant Hull, Q-ship Drive.
4+ Thrust, Streamlined
C Beam PCS

5 Mass cargo for a mining, refining, construction or
fleet repair unit.

Cost:
18 + 8-16 + 3 = 29-37 points for the ship, 50-100 for
the specialized cargo.	(54 - 66 points for a 12 Mass
FTL version)

Industrial Landing Craft are attached to colonial 
expeditions to ensure the new colony can quickly
become self-sufficient.  They are also useful to
quickly establish an advance logistical base for
repairs, fuel, and munitions resupply.	Once they
are unloaded they provided heavy cargo lift capacity
to the new colony or base.

Colony Tug:
Mass 100
Merchant Hull	 150
FTL (tug)	    100  + 200
Thrust 2	    200
Damage		     25

Long Endurance Fighter Bay    32
(Or Long Endurance Multirole Attack  44)
Superior Sensors		    30
C Beam PCS
C Beam PCS
10 +1 Damage Control Party

20 Mass Cryostorage for 1000 people (and animals) 200

16 Mass Boat Bay		   16
2  Mass 8 systems boats:
Streamlined military hull
C Beam PCS
Thrust 8
Damage 4
5 Mass of Cargo
Additional Damage Control Party
Cost 53 each  (37 points for the civilian version)

4 Mass additional Cargo  (14 Mass or 700 cargo units total)

Cost: 1050 or 1062 with better fighters

Long endurance fighters can be transfered to the
new colony for system defense, after all, they'd have
three turns of combat ability after the gravity well
requirements.  They are also useful for survey
work.

Using the transporting troops rules on pg 15 of More
Thrust I figured that cryostorage would be ideal for
a colony craft to transport people, plants and animals
to their new home.  The ratio of cargo mass to
colonists seems a bit low unless a significant fraction
of the cryostorage is for food animals and the like.

A tug can be an extremely efficient modular cargo
ship.  If you replace most of its internal structure
with boat bays and extra fuel you can do in-system
cargo loading really fast.  Take a whole bunch of
small non-ftl cargo ships with cargos going to 
particular places and offload those ships when they
get to that system.  The cargo-tug then picks up the
local non-ftl cargo ship and off they go.

Other non-military ship ideas:

Passenger liner:  Mass 50, Thrust 4, Level-1 shields,
PDAF, C PCS Perhaps passenger ships shouldn't have
any offensive weaponry, but shields for the safety
of the passengers makes sense.

8 Mass Boat bay
4 Accommodations for 50 passengers  cost  4+
4 Cyrosleep beds for 200 passengers cost 40
4 200 Cargo Space units for extra facilities for
1st class passengers and cargo

Asteroid Miner-Tug:
This ship breaks asteroids up and then tows them to
a mining/refining base.  They make have Armor to
protect them from the odd rock hit, but their main
system is a set of forward firing batteries used to
break rocks apart.

The ship has a tug system, or tractor beams, or
oversized engines in order to get its heavy cargo
home.  These ships have some combat use, but their
batteries are fixed for efficient rock chopping, not
anti-ship use.	It is easy to track a rock and these
batteries are designed to be fired at point blank
range.	They can be devastating if used to tug
rocks for bombardment purposes.

Skimmer:
This craft is a specially designed Gas Giant skimmer.
Thrust 8, streamlined, no systems, Special Cargo
system for processing and compressing gasses.  It
is used as an auxilary craft to quickly refuel
major ships.

Close in Stellar Observer:  Mass 100
Shield-3  Enhanced Sensors
Partially streamlined (round with huge radiator
fin in CiSO's shadow.  Used for long term studies
of stellar dynamics.  Most of the mass is used
to shield the crew and scientists from stellar
radiation.  The ship could also be designed to
beam power collected by solar panels to a colony
world in the system.

In the Age of Iridium universe it can serve as
a customs station.

Some things to think about:
There is a great deal of internal difference between
a ship designed to transport bulk grain, oil, ore
or construction materials and a ship designed to
transport heavy machinery, or a container ship.  It
would take some time to refit a ship to be most
efficient for carrying a particular cargo.  At the
very least some cargo space should be lost when
carrying cargo a ship isn't optimized for carrying.
For one thing, there is the consideration of whether
the cargo hold is pressurized or not!  And there is
the matter of setting up an automated loading and
unloading system that will speed turnaround.

Since some merchant ships are basically huge hollow
holds with an engine, it may be practical to define
it as a tug that can carry all its cargo inside,
possibly by openning up like the Super Guppy, a real,
if silly looking, plane designed to carry aircraft
parts and rocket parts.

So an ore carrier defined as a 50 Mass tug could
carry 70 Mass of ore, if with a low thrust...

More missions for space installations:

Ships designed for combat are designed to make it
hard for enemy weapons to get in.  This can also
make it difficult to rapidly get supplies on board
or to open up the hull to repair or replace internal
systems.

So, a port facility should be able to rapidly load
and unload cargo from a wide variety of ship types.
To some extent this can be done through the boat
bays.  Some fleets design all their Capital ships
with at least one boat bay to speed cargo loading.

A port facility also needs heavy cranes, and
the station keeping drives to steady itself to use
them, needed to properly open up a ship.

Ports need advanced medical facilities and quarantines
for explorer vessels.  They also need communications
gear, FTL communications if the campaign has it.
If the administration of a system or colony is done
from space, the bureaucracy could take up a significant
amount of room.

Not to mention the zoos, theatres, gyms and other
entertainment the ruling class would demand.  A
space station could be a vacation spot of choice
for a particularly harsh colony world.

For really big orbital facilities, you might want to
consider a beanstalk system.  Have the entire 
Geostationary orbit be occupied by a gigantic
space station with beanstalks for quick cargo shipping
to the planet.

How much should a Beanstalk cost?  A 6" FT elevator
from ground to space.

Michael Sandy