WIP: ICS Immaculate Radiance

DaltonSpence

I'm currently working on a starship with a somewhat familiar profile. The resemblance is just superficial and it will be very different inside. I will design and add one deck at a time. Here is the outer hull design. (Yes, it's a bit plain. I'll add details later.)

The primary hull is a 30 meter sphere with secondary one a tapered cylinder with the same diameter. That's five 3 meter decks above and below the centerline. Working out the deck profiles for the upper and lower decks will be a bit tricky (more so for the secondary hull than the primary) so I'll concentrate on the middle decks for now. I've done a little work on deck 1 (mostly engineering systems and vertical transport) that will duplicated on Subdeck 1.
Filling in the details has always been the hard part for me so this could take a while. Any advice would be gratefully accepted.

Wyvern

Been a very long time since I did any spacecraft designs. General principles still apply though, remembering this is a self-contained, self-reliant unit, so essentially you need everything you'd have on a normal ship with a sizeable crew - they need to eat, sleep, stay clean (clothes and person; toilets as well), exercise, medical facilities, a means of controlling each system on the vessel, a means of communicating with other vessels and shore/planetary/orbital bases, a means of carrying out the vessel's primary and subsidiary functions, emergency escape facilities, emergency handling facilities (e.g. fire, flood, general damage control), a means of observing whatever is around them outside the vessel, and as you obviously already have, propulsive engines and fuel sources. This list is not exhaustive! And almost all this has to fit within the outer hull somehow.

Spherical and rounded hull shapes are a nightmare to design for. About 40 years ago, I drew out by hand a spherical free-moving spacecraft intended as a planetary defence vessel, one of a fleet, and that was horrendous, as (well, if you're me anyway) I had to keep checking how the outer circumference affected the internal space for different parts of every vertical level, and having to keep changing things because they'd no longer fit at the size intended, and so forth.

Unless there are strong reasons not to do so that make sense in-game, there's no physical necessity from our reality to have streamlined forms for spacecraft at all. Doesn't look so "Hollywood movie pretty", I grant you, but...

Don Anderson Jr.

I don't really tread into sci-fi to much, other than watching movies. Is this from cosmographer? It looks pretty cool so far. How many levels to the ship, just one?

DaltonSpence

The spherical primary hull will have ten levels, 5 decks above the center line and 5 subdecks below. I created a spreadsheet to calculate the floor, ceiling and mid-deck radii assuming a 0.5 meter deck thickness giving a ceiling height of 2.5 meters in the rooms. (Corridor ceilings will drop an extra 25 cm to provide crawlspace.) I've added interior walls and doors to the primary hull deck 1. Subdeck 1 will have an identical profile.

The four diagonal open heavy doors across the ring corridor are emergency pressure hatches that will slam shut if pressure is lost in their sector. The two small side rooms in the 3 o'clock position along the exit corridor will be washrooms when I get around to them.

Should I put the bridge/command center in the 9 o'clock outer room on Deck 1? Maybe expand it to the rooms on each side? What should I put below it? Should I add windows along the parameter? What should I put in the other rooms?

I think I'll redraw the secondary hull so it's more angular to make the deck plan parameters easier to calculate.

Don Anderson Jr.

Yea angular is fine if a ship never enters atmosphere. (depends on the sci-fi I guess.)

I mean if is is super tech advanced there really is no need to have the Bridge to the outside. Maybe more inside and protected like a bunker. They could easily have 360 spherical display in the bridge (think Cerebro in Xmen)

Interested in how the exterior is going to turn out.

DaltonSpence

If anyone can point me to a texture for the hull that resembles the white complex details of a Star Wars ship I'd appreciate it. I'm considering making Deck 5 a sensor dome and Subdeck 5 a weapons pod but that's in the future.

Wyvern

Don't forget an alternate bridge to command the vessel if it's liable to see combat. Even if the primary bridge is buried deep, that's no guarantee it'll survive the first minutes of an encounter, as it's the classic place to aim for if your targeting is good enough.

Bridge location is heavily dependent on the tech too, as Don notes. Normal windows are useless for anything other than pretty views of whatever's close-by, for instance, so some tech for even "normal viewing" is essential to avoid endlessly wondering if that faint star's a faint star, a massive enemy vessel or a missile heading directly at you. Even massive craft become near-invisible dots at astonishingly tiny interplanetary distances after all!

Dalton, not sure what you're meaning by "texture for the hull that resembles the white complex details of a Star Wars ship", as I thought there were various bitmap options for the rectangular plate effects on imaginary craft like this in Cosmographer already. The Dundjinni Archives have more variants too, and Storyweaver Highspace, for instance. Maybe you're meaning some other kind of texture though? (I'm not very up on Star Wars tech, as I've long found it too unbelievable to be interesting.)

DaltonSpence

I'm going to flatten the ship a bit so it only has five decks instead of ten. Here's the profile cutaway.

In the corridors between decks there is a crawlspace and utility access way making the headroom 2.1 meters. (That turns out to provide the bare minimum crawl way height of 80cm with 5cm deck plates.) The large space at the end is for the "impulse" drive. I'm thinking of making the "warp core" next to it extend three decks as well. (Or maybe all five; that way it could be ejected in an emergency.) Below is the exterior hull view. The black lines on the secondary hull represent edges of flat plates.

And here is the current deckplan for Deck 1 in the middle.

You may notice I've added a bridge. I've included some details in the corridor to provide access to the crawlways. And finally the external hull view.

DaltonSpence

I decided to work on the design of her sister ship the ICS Majestic Virtuosity which has a slightly simpler hull shape that will be easier to fill. (Only the top and bottom decks will have a different profile.) The drive systems remain the same in both ships.
Here are the internals I have so far. You may notice I've filled the secondary hull with bunkrooms for enlisted personal. Each bunkroom contains two bunk beds (4 crew), a cabinet and a writing desk and is attached to washroom (most are shared between two bunkrooms but a few have their own). Both bunkrooms and bathrooms are custom symbols (2 of each) that I constructed by defining the furnishings of each room as its own symbol and exploding the furniture symbols they contained into their component images. This reduced the number of symbol references in the the map by at least 75%. I'm considering moving the quarters either up to Deck 2 or down to Subdeck 1 replacing them on Deck 1 with common facilities. Officers will have quarters in the primary hull (which I'm still designing). (224 enlisted should be enough. How many officers should they need?)

Since this a different ship I'll start a new discussion for it. (Yes, my ICS ship names are deliberately pompous. )