Everyone and their dog has done a version of the Classic Traveller starhips that we all know – the Type S, the A1 Boewulf, the A2 Empress Mavara and the Close Escort classes. This is my attempt at a deck plan for the Gazelle-class Close Escort.  I have tried to follow the deck plans in GDW Supplement 7: Traders and Gunboats and for the most part it was pretty easy.

There are a few things that struck me about the description of this ship, and the deckplans on pages 30-35 of Supplement 7.  The first was that the vessel is described as being designed ‘at a time when mutinies were a major threat to security.  As as result major bulkheads break up the ship into distinct areas – some for crew, some for officers and some common to both’.  To be honest, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  If all the potential mutineers serving in this class of ship were from the ranks, then why make access to the bridge a simple matter of going through the forward avionics bays? In fact why not, on a ship this small, just have a crew of officers.  I thought – bollocks. The reason for the bulkheads is the fact that the ship is armoured.  I represented this by drawing a thicker hull and lateral bulkheads. It is however, still a cramped little ship. Crew staterooms are all double occupancy and apart from the Captain’s cabin, the other officers personal space is very limited. The galley is tiny and I suspect that on mission the crew are eating reheated MRE type meals for the most part, stored in the cargo bay because there is no storage space in the galley worth mentioning. The second main thing is that this ship design cheats by having 400ton ship armaments on a 300ton hull. I thought the rules said 1 turret per 100tons. I know it has drop tanks that make it up to 400tons but to me that seems a bit cheaty. Still, at the end of the day if it was good enough for Frank Chadwick and Marc W Miller it is good enough for me.

Anyway – here is my attempt at the Classic Traveller ship.  I have omitted the L-Hyd drop tanks – for the sake of these plans they have already been jettisoned.

Full Sized Plans