Saturday, June 8, 2024

Gagarin Class Survey Vehicle

In looking for ships to inhabit my Northwest Passage subsector, I've been doing a lot of flipping through 2300AD material. I love the ship designs in 2300 and will be using a lot of the larger designs as is. However, it lacks tailsitters, crafts in which the decks are stacked to take advantage of the ship's own thrust to simulate gravity. This makes sense, the chemical rockets in 2300 can't burn constantly for that continuous thrust, so tailsitters aren't practical in 2300. This isn't so for Northwest Passage, which uses fusion torch drives similar to (though a bit more modest than) the Epstein Drive from The Expanse, so tailsitters are the norm for ships too small for spinning habitation drums. I particularly liked the design of the ISV-2 Independent Scout from 2300 and decided to redesign it as a tailsitter for my own purposes.

I mean come on, the thing is just begging for it with that cylindrical design and naturally seperated deck sections the perfect width to be decks of their own if flipped on their side.


Anyway, here's the deck plan and its stats for CT. It does differ from the ISV-2 in some ways. It has a smaller crew complement, for one, but with two double bunks instead of one per cabin you could cram 6 or 7 more crew onboard if you like 2300's abundance of specialized engineer crew positions (or want a more realistic amount of personnel redundancy on your out-of-supply, rugged exploration vessel).

Streamlined: No
Tonnage: 100t
Dimensions: 7m Diameter (at widest), 30m Length
Crew: Captain, Astrogator, Sensor/Comms Operator, Science Officer, Pilot, Medic, Engineer
Reaction Drive: A (Maximum Acceleration 2G, Cruising Acceleration 1G)
Jump Drive: A (Jump-2)
Power Plant: A
Computer: Computer/1bis
Fuel: 40t (4 Weeks Operation/1 Jump-2, 4,000Cr for Unrefined, 20,000Cr for Refined)
Sensors: Military Grade Lidar, Radar and Telescope
Small Crafts: 10t Orb Weaver Class Lander (Carries 3 Passengers)
Drones: 10x Sensor Drones
Armaments: None, but vessels serving as auxiliary recon craft for the Federal Navy are often retrofitted to carry torpedoes in the Drone Bay and Lander Bay, sacrificing the Orb Weaver and half of the Drone complement.
Cargo Space: 2t
Cost: 32.1Mcr
Maintainance Cost: 2,675Cr/Mo

A couple things that aren't depicted on the deck plan are the ship's external communications and radiator bits, which look pretty much the same as they do on the regular ISV-2, and the orientation of the flight seat on Deck 7. Deck 6 and Deck 7 are actually mostly contiguous, with a catwalk comprising Deck 7's floor overlooking Deck 6. The flight seat is at the center and adjusts to lie perpendicular to the walls during burns, much like the Rocinante's flight seat.

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