Re: [OFFICIAL] Freighters/Merchants question

I think most of the arguments about ship designs has
missed the point. Don't ask what should the ship look
like, ask what is the ship carring and how to most
efficiently carry it.

For those of you who havn't been following modern ship
designs (wet ship) the fastest growing catagory is
container ships. The advantage is that the container
is only loaded and unloaded once.

So for container (reload cargo is ->):
origin -> container to train/truck to storage area to
to ship to storage area to train/truck as container ->
destination

old transport method:
origin -> train/truck -> warehouse -> ship ->
warehouse -> train/truck -> destination

So what I would propose is that there be two types
of containers one for bulk liquid (cylinder like)
and one for bulk solid (rectangular cube like) with a
standardised ship connection. The ships could then
be of any design from intersystem drones (attachments
for three cargo pods and an engine) to large bulk
transports (three(+) sets of four(+) transport pods
with engines to rear and crew quarters to front. Even
some of the present ship designs now sold could be
rerofited with these pods for bulk storage. The
attachment points might prove useful for carrying
landingcraft into system (an LCI or LCT on a mount
with the standardised ship connrction).

An interesting point would be that if you were
building a space station you could make (sell?) a
framework to attach the cargo pods to represent
cargos in transit.

Scott Siebold