Freighter Deckplans

[tonyg]

Corrected your typo (6.75 m^3 as opposed to 6/75 m^3).

I'd have to have my books handy to corroborate, but yeah, it sounds about right.

Not to me, consider:

1)A 173 sq meters is about a 13m x13 meter (40x40 foot) room. Compare that to the size of the shuttlebay is about 20 times the size of it's storage space. For 2 spaces, most shipc can get a shuttlbay that can hold it's size in small craft. This typically means that the ships in a shuttlebay wouldn't fit in the cargo bay if they were being transported as cargo. Your typical Size 2 craft takes up at least 2 spaces.

2) Consider the size of the typical officer/crew quarters on a starship in TOS or TNG. 25 cubic meters works out to about a 10x10 foot room. I find it sort hard to consider that you typical officers quarters (especially in TNG) are about a third the size of the ship's total cargo capacity.

3) Look at the size of those cargo bays in TNG. The ones I see are bigger than a 4.3 meter cube (14 ft cube).


4) Real world ships can carry a lot more cargo than their Trek counterparts. While I don't expect a cruiser to be able to carry as much cargo as a dedicated cargo hauler, I find it difficult to accept that a 20th century cargo ship carries 30 times the cargo of a Galaxy class starship.

5) Most sources for the cargo capacity of a Constitution class starship give it a capacity of 190,000 deadweight tonnage. If we use a 1 ton/cubic meter ratio (the density of water, although, admittedly starships don't sink, so they could hold use a higher number) that gives the Connie a capaicty of 7,600 cargo units. Knock off even half for fuel, crew and the like, and that still leaves around 3800 cargo units. Even if we assume that the ship is carrying something dense like gold, that would still leave around 190 cargo spaces.


6) On a similar note, most of the values we get for cargo capacity and amounts stored on the varius ships works out to a lot more that what we see with the current cargo capacitties.


7) The freighter and tanker designs that Don wrote up in Spaceships have cargo storage much greater than can be explained with the ship design rules. For example the Class III tanker is Size 6 holds 480 cargo units. That would require it spending 84 spaces on cargo capacity. Pretty tough for a ship built with 81 spaces. Likewise the Size 3, 39 Space Altair-class freighter needs to spend 44 spaces just for cargo.

8) Two crampled little Defiant class starships can carry the same amount of cargo as a big roomy Galaxy class.

9) Try building an actual cargo ship. Even if you can save about 90% of the ship's soaces for cargo you wind up with a pretty tiny amount of cargo.

10) The Kobiyashi-Maru a 237m long tanker in ST:II has a cargo capicty listed of 97,000 mt. That fits in well with a modern 247 m longAframax class tanker with a capacity of around 80,000 mt

11) A runabout takes up 60 cargo units.


The problem is that cargo space in CODA is a lineal function, but strorage space is actually a cube function. That is, a ship that is twice the size of a small ship can hold about 8 times the cargo of the smaaler ship. I understand why the ship design rules don't work that way for weapons engines an the like (it would make everything more complicated and more time consuming). Still, we wind up with ships crrying minisclule amounts of cargo.

[tonyg]

How about this:

A Galaxy-class starship has a Cargo Capacity of 100 units; 110 for the uprated version.

But, the same ship has spent 6 spaces towards shuttlebays, and can carry 12 runabouts worth of small craft. Each runabout takes up 1495 cubic meter(23x5x13) or about 60 spaces. Each runabout can be fitted with a cago multimission pack (that fits inside the runabout) and carry 40 cargo units (any for only 4 points of spaces too).

So 12 runabouts can carry 480 cargo units. That's over 4 times the cargo capaicty of the Galaxy class ship that they are all being hauled around in. And that is fitten in a shuttlbay that is holding 720 cargo units worth of ships.

All for 6 spaces, although those same 6 spaces spent on cargo only hold 30 cargo units.


Why don't we make cargo space the same as shuttlespace? And while we are at it we can use the 5 cargo per size like they use for the runabout?

So something like:

Base Cargo Units: Size^3 cargo units
Each addtional space spent towards cargo adds another Sizex5 cargo units.

Maybe double that to Sizex10 for dedicated cargo haulers an tankers.


This way the cargo hold is a better optin than the shuttlebay.