One response to “Solomani Yarmouth-class Frontier Transport (400tons)”

1. 

   Tom B

   July 6, 2023 at 12:58 pm

   I’ve been thinking about ‘multi-use’ ships. Build a ship with a fairly boxy ‘working space’.

   When you want it to be a plain cargo hold, you just lash things down (maybe have removable/hide-away lash points).

   If you have a need for space-sicle storage, they roll in a containerized solution for 10 or 20 low berths in that comes with its own battery power for a fair time the medic gets people setup at the starport and then the container is left alone throughout the trip.

   Same idea if you need fancier enviro for cargo or animals. They roll in a standard container that can have adjustable environment stuff (and it can hook to the ship’s data bus for monitoring). All contained and just stays in the container.

   Same idea if you were handling radioactives or biohazards, etc.

   One form of standard container could be a single stateroom (or double occupancy) – complete with its own fresher, light, temp, air, etc. This one might be slightly more complex in that it may allow you to have several of these ‘containerized stateroom modules’ to link to a single ‘common room module’ so passengers can be able to stretch it bit and interact. (Or not in the case of prison transfers). Monitoring would be available.

   The idea is the ship does not need to speculate as to what it will haul, it just has to be fitted out to handle standard storage containers. And the ship does not require different ship’s resources based on containers taken because the containers bring their own power, air, heat, cooling, food, water, etc.

   It also means you can load up the ship, seal the cargo deck, and no way and no how are occupants/animals getting out onto other decks so it is more secure.

   One double sized container (just to throw a size factor) could be a complete drop-shippable command center or a medical bay for disaster relief. There could be two ways to use this: Container crew doing work up enroute to be ready to hit the ground running (work through jump) or the crews could be cold frozen or in std passenger containers and the command center or medical bay could be all shut down saving battery and resources until it is deployed. It would probably come with 2 – 4 weeks of capacity for the occupants and maybe some patients.

   The idea of having the ability to quickly create a response package, put it on a medium sized freighter (say 400 dton to 4000 dton ship) and then just go to the area that needs attention and drop off the containers so that medical or command functions would immediately be up and running seems like a great way to deal with issues beyond a local mining outpost or a small farming planet – enough folk to justify a response, but not enough capacity to handle themselves so they need the response from experts/responders from off-world.

   I think that reaches to a higher level of organization and thinking about the multi-use ship than we see traditionally. (I’m Canadian and we’re always looking for ‘multi use’ vehicles… its another way of saying we could need to do anything but we can’t buy a spec built for every need, so we build the non-specific multi-use vehicle that can be reconfigured fast for situations. Not as good as spec built, but better than not having anything.

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