Comments on my ship design please
All,
I'd like some feedback on the layout for this ship, if you all don't mind.
Some general rules that i have for spacecraft:
- must not have artificial gravity (unless from spin habitats)
- must assume fuel is carried between decks and in other unused areas.
- Supplies must be kept on board and accounted for.
Other than that, it's pretty open.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks.
I'd like some feedback on the layout for this ship, if you all don't mind.
Some general rules that i have for spacecraft:
- must not have artificial gravity (unless from spin habitats)
- must assume fuel is carried between decks and in other unused areas.
- Supplies must be kept on board and accounted for.
Other than that, it's pretty open.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks.
Comments
As for your deckplan, Micco40, I like it. It's certainly way better than anything I could come up with. Or execute. I like that you cover the needs of the crew as well as the functional areas of the ship (cargo, navigation, weapons, etc). That said, *ahem* I'm afraid that's as far as my knowledge of starship design goes. :-)
Nicely done,
~Dogtag
Was there a narrative reason for placing the life boat on the lower cargo deck? Going back to our damaged ship scenario from above, if I'm on the bridge I'll need to travel through five decks and also transition to a different hatch on the weapons deck to get to the only life boat. I would, maybe, think about enlarging the crew deck and place two or four smaller ones there, as it is centrally located in relation to ship activity (I'd place more than one, that way, if a lone crewman freaks out and launches by himself he won't doom the rest of the crew).
You stated there is no artificial gravity, is gravity provided by engine thrust and "down" is parallel to travel (if an apple falls, it drops toward the engines), or do folks float around? Great job, post more…
When you do more complete maps of a starship or any spacecraft - keep these ponts in mind:
#1, Nearly every part of a ship will be serviceable. Corridors and Gangways should logically be about 80% access panels, hatches, and cabinets. Your going to have conduits for ventilation, hydraulics, life support, electronics, maintenance bypass access, or various combinations of all of them - running away from the main corridors and forming capillary connections between rooms and corridors throughout the ship. You are also going to have cabinets containing emergency gear and deck survey patchboards (instruments controlling various important utility aspects of each major deck - and power routing / re-routing controls - as well as security / monitoring devices). Even the floor grilling will be removable for access to piping, wiring, and circuit systems. That's the way it is in real spacecraft - as well as real naval ships.
#2, Unless you are going to have a replicator system like in Star Trek - foods and medicines will - at least in large part - be dehydrated or freeze dried for longer shelf life and portability.
Water will be stored on board in water storage tanks, but will also be recycled from both the onboard air (from the crews ambient aerosol respiration and perspiration) and solid and liquid waste (Urine will be filtered and re-oxygenated into useable liquid water, fecal matter (poop) will be gas pressure compressed - or vacuum compressed - to drain it of recyclable moisture - which will then undergo the same general recycling process as urine - after undergoing boiler heating and antimicrobial electrolysis). Although water will be recycled - you will still have a certain measure of unrecoverable water loss per tour journey - so your ship's onboard water supply will be rationed to a certain number of gallons or liters per crew member / passenger unit, plus a surplus supply that represents at least +25% per crew member / passenger in addition to water that would be used for mechanical or other engineering processes - such as liquid cooling or thermal transfer. One of the things that will inevitably limit your ship's time away from dry dock is it's need to restock on water. Manned vehicles are resource expensive - and anything that can be recycled during a duty tour - will be - including any kind of organic garbage.
#3, A long range spacecraft is going to be at least 50% storage space as a straight up rule, and it's going to be jam packed with storage tanks for everything from fuel - to breathing atmosphere (used and un-used / reprocessed) - to water - to waste. Your basic slice up might be 50% storage, 35 t0 40% propulsion, navigation, and processing systems, 5% miscellanious systems, and around 5% crew / passenger space.
#4, A must is that if your spacecraft is manned - it has to have CO2 scrubbers to filter out the Co2 from onboard atmosphere - otherwise your crew will die - the CO2 will then have to be recycled in such a way that the oxygen is decoupled from the carbon in CO2 molecules - probably by virtue of some kind of gauged electrolytic process - and the useable oxygen will have to be re-stored - while the waste carbon is ejected. Just like water - Nitrogen and Oxygen tanks will also have to be rationed and calculated to "n" tanks per passenger / crew allotment + "X" amount for non - life support related operations, such as for pressurization or fuel / propulsive processes.
#5, on board electrical power will likely come from a combination of high efficiency solar cells, rechargable battery stacks, and integrated power multiplier systems utilizing large transistor / rectifier diode arrays. Perhaps also small / compact / clean limited neon fusion reactors or temperature based pad generators. There are also other ways of generating limited power from peripheral / marginal processing involving the functioning of other unrelated systems where electrical current is a byproduct.
As far as long range spacecraft are concerned - the slower the ship - the bigger the size / the faster the ship - the smaller the size. The faster that your ship can make it from port to port - the smaller it's essential storage and spatial requirements will be, provided that it's not excessively fuel hungry. Even at our current technological level - it takes around 214 days for one of our spacecraft just to get to Mars.
With a manned crew - it might take a full year or more because we would have to readjust our ship's velocity to account for the effects of excessive g-forces on the crew. There and back again would be around two years +/- a month or two.
One person needs 182.5 gallons of drinking water per year minimum, or 690.83764985 Liters ...
182.5(2) = 365 gallons per person on mars mission.
A six person crew would require 2,190 gallons of drinking water, or 8,290.0517 Liters of water for this trip.
The Pioneer 10 probe was launched on March 2nd, 1972. It left the outer limit of Pluto's orbit on June 13, 1983 - a nine year journey one way.
Let's say that for a human pilot it would take about 12 years, readjusting for relative velocity to decrease the effects of g-forces, and to allow for human task schedules.
A round trip would take 24 years - if we had a crew of only three people:
(182.5 x 3) x 24 = 13,140 gallons - or 49,740.310 liters of drinking water would be required for the entire crew - for the 24 year mission.
A typical inground Olympic sized swimming pool holds roughly 20,000 to 30,000 gallons. The amount of water stored in a typical municipal or rural water tower may hold about 50 times that amount.
We're not even talking about fuel, breathing gases, food, hygenic products, deployable or portable gear and equipment, clothing (presumably disposable), medicine, or accessory cargo requirements - nor waste management and recycleable waste stowage systems. We're only considering the bare minimum water budget here. What about our food budget?
A typical human being eats roughly 1000 pounds of food per year, or 453.592 Kilograms.
Our two year Mars mission with six crew members would need 12 tons of food, or 5443.108 Kg of food.
Our twenty four year pluto mission with three crew members would need 72 tons of food, or 32,658.650 kg of food.
#1, Mars Mission - two years - 6 crew members:
8,290.0517 Liters, or 8.2900517 Metric Tons + 5443.108 Kg, or 5.44310 Metric Tons = 13.7331517, or roughly 14 Metric tonnes of cargo.
#2, Pluto Mission - 24 years - 3 crew members:
49,740.310 Liters, or 49.74031 Metric Tons + 32,658.650 Kg, or 32.6586 Metric Tons = 82.39891, or roughly 83 Metric tonnes of cargo
Theoretically - I can see where a formula could be devised that would allow you to calculate cargo capacity based upon the variables of crew compliment, speed (maximum distance over minimum time), etc.
To begin to do that - we would have to find what solid cargo, liquid cargo, and gas cargo have in common geometrically - the answer is VOLUME. You could probably extrapolate storage space in cubic meters based upon the variable of VOLUME in either computing the metric tons of a liquid or gas based upon it's density - in this case water (d=1000), or the volume of solid cargo in Kilograms based upon "n" kilograms of capacity per "x" cubic meters of space?
In other words - we could determine how large a ship SHOULD be in the process of designing it - by determining how much fuel it needs, how fast it has to go to get to it's closest target point (or "port of call") in a subset of target points - or destinations, how many crew members and / or passengers it carries - and how much food, and water, and breathing gas composition ingredients, and medicine, and specific hygene products, and electrical power each crew member or passenger consumes within a particular integral of time, such as hourly, annually, etc. We could devise some type of mathematical relation - I believe - to generate a ship size in say "cubic meters". The geometry of the ship's design could be anything arbitrary - but we would know the limits of it's dimensional / spatial parameters - minus any non essential extranious creator embellishments and doo dads.
Questions that could be answered:
#1, How much space in cubic, or adjusted sqaure meters do we need for propulsive fuel storage a/o - if tanks have a storage capacity of "x", how many fuel tanks do we need per propulsion unit a/o navigational booster?
#2, How much space do we need for food?
#3, How much space do we need for water?
#4, How much space do we need for battery piles / stacks?
#5, How much space do we need for sanitary / hygene supplies like antibacterial sanitary wipes, deodorant (yes - you'll need it), sodium packets to mix with water for mouth rinse, dry soap, etc.
#6, How much space do we need for medical and emergency supplies and spare / accessory equipment?
#7, Do we need an armory? If so - how much space do we need for weapons and munitions stowage?
#8, If we are going to carry contract or duty payloads - how much space for frieght?
#9, How much space for crew qaurters including personal closets and supply cabinets / lockers? Will the crew bunk, will they be barracked, or will they have personal qaurters?
#10, Will crew qaurters have individual lavatories - or will there be a single lavatory per "n" numbers of personnel / passengers?
#11, Your also going to have waste materials to deal with. Crew members will be exhaling CO2, and if you have a few diabetic crew members - they may also be exhaling minute traces of Acetone. In addition to that - electrical circuits will be emitting CO (Carbon Monoxide), and Ozone (O2H and O2), all from hot circuit components. Breathing air / on board atmosphere must be fltered and cleaned consistantly.
Also - the crew will be - of course - using the "potty", etc.. Inorganic / unrecycleable wastes will have to be stored temporarily prior to ejection since a consistant venting mechanism would cost precious energy, and organic / recycleable waste would have to be temporarily stored prior to being re-processed and re-dispensed. How much space will be required to stow these materials as far as waste processing goes? Let's not forget that we humans also emit Methane and Sulphur Dioxide as well, (these processes are also known by the more charming nomenclatures "farting", "cutting the cheese", and "burning one off", lol).
A few of many things that should be pondered during the design process, food for thought I guess, lol
I strongly suggest that you do what I love to do and poke around the NASA website - and dig in to nosing around all of that cool junk. It's really great for inspiration. Also for research - check out these sites:
http://projectrho.com/rocketstub.html
http://projectrho.com/starmapstub.html
http://www.starshipmodeler.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4225/diagrams/shuttle/shuttle-diagram.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module
http://www.fi.edu/pieces/schutte/LMinterior.html
Those are great points, thank you for your input. I'll see how i can revise this to make the access easier.
Yes, the gravity is generated by propulsion, so "down" would be where the engines are and "up" would be where the ship is heading. It's one of the few things in most science fiction movies that just bothers me for some reason. Very much appreciate the input :-)
You just wrote the design guidelines for my future designs :-) What a great list of things to consider. I may not be able to do them all, but i'll certainly try.
Please feel free to do that as often as you want to, since I was looking for ideas on how to improve the design and consider other issues.
As far as adding more information to the map, i'm constantly struggling with my inner minimalist to add enough detail without cluttering the map unnecessarily. I'm trying to keep the maps fairly faithful to the original Traveller feel, minus the sketchy part about the "grav plates" that i don't see stopping anyone from being made into paste on the back wall when the engines fire :-) I'll keep working and see what i can come up with.
Thanks again for taking the time to post all this, i really appreciate all the thought you put into the response.
Well jonas - I usually do that after a 2 liter of Coka Cola and / or one or two large Cappacinos - heavy on the coffee and sugar + 2% milk - sans cream, Lol
I'm a caffiene junkie and a smoker doing the off and on quiting thing - so naturally it goes without saying that I am wired, jittery, and my mind is constantly active. HEY - by the way I think I had three whole hours sleep last night, or today, or whenever it was, ROFL!
My blood is so thinned out from drinking so much bitter brown battery acid that whenever I get a paper cut it's like the BP oil spill, lol.
Thanks for the comments. Unfortunately for me, the link you provided doesn't lead me to any deckplans, just a list of names.
I would say if anything, my weak point is drawing sideview deck arrangements. I'm simply not that good of a freehand drawing person and i really don't know where to start. I have great ideas that just look terrible on paper :-)
I'd definitely like to see what you created and hopefully get some good pointers.