So 19 months ago (Dec 2020), I posted the part 1 of this pair of posts with the first decks of the HSS History’s Hope. In that post I was also making videos of how I create the deck plans. This post is just the completed deck plans for the rest of the ship, no videos. I didn’t do the videos for two reasons. Primarily, I just didn’t have the time to sit down and do the recordings. I worked on these 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, until they were done. The second was that there really wasn’t anything new as far as map creation goes while making the maps for these decks so any videos would have been more of the same. That said, here are the remaining decks of the ship.
The Deck Plans
All of these decks are drawn at 1 square = 1 meter and the full resolution files are at 140 dpi so each square is 1/2″ in size (the size of the chits from the original game) and line up nicely with the grid sizes (70 pixels) of at least Roll20 and possibly other virtual tabletops.
Engineering Deck
First up is the engineering deck.
Engineering deck. Click for full sized image.
There’s actually a lot more there than just the engineering areas but we’ll start with those. Across the bottom of the map (left to right) we have the primary life support machinery that handles air and water filtration and circulation, a robotics shop, robot storage and the astrogation telescope dome, engineering and life support control, a machine shop, and the communication and scanner systems controls. The two little rooms on each end are storage.
The large rooms across the top are all life support food storage. The one on the left closest to the elevator is actually a freezer. At the top is the laser battery turret and on either end of the deck are the access passages to the engines.
Common Deck
Common deck. Not sure how I ended up with an extra row of squares across the top outside the ship. Click for full image.
This deck is the common area for the ship. It contains a theater (right side) for both entertainment and meetings/briefings. Along the bottom are some small offices where crew can study and/or work. This is also the dining hall with the galley and attached pantry.
Airlock & Medical Deck
Airlock & medbay deck. Actually I do know how there was an extra row at the top of this deck and the previous one. I started with the file for the Science Deck (from part 1) that has bays that stick out a bit so the map had to be bigger. Click for full image.
This deck has the ship’s airlock, along with storage for space suits for all the ship’s crew. Also on this deck is the ship’s medical bay with a small office, sickroom, and operating room. Finally, the deck houses the ship’s lifeboat (left) and a small launch (right).
Recreation Deck
Recreation deck. Click for full sized image.
The central feature of this deck is the gym area. That blue area is a mat, not a pool. Off of the gym is a sauna (left) and steam room (right). This deck also house the remaining four staterooms for the crew not housed on the crew decks from the previous posts.
Bridge
The bridge. Click for full size image.
The final deck is the bridge. It houses the main computer and stations for the pilot, astrogagor, gunner, and engineer. Access is by a ladder through a hatch in the floor from the officer’s deck.
HSS History’s Hope cutaway to show deck placement. Click for a larger image.
Deck Order
The decks are arranged as follows on the ship from bottom to top as shown in the image to the right. Most of the decks are 3m tall with 2m between decks although the cargo deck is nearly 5m tall and the engineering deck is 4m tall.
Cargo Deck
Science Deck
Engineering Deck
Common Deck
Crew Deck
Crew Deck
Crew Deck
Airlock/Medical Deck
Recreation Deck
Crew Deck
Officer’s Deck
Bridge
What’s Next?
It took me long enough to finish these deck plans but they are finally done. The next thing I have planned for this ship is to create a full technical manual for it. So the next step is for me to add annotations to each deck and write up the detailed descriptions for each room. There might be some tweaks as I start looking at it for the details but they will be small. These decks, plus the descriptions from earlier posts should be enough for anyone to use the ship in a game if they desire.
Some time soon I’ll be posting an updated map of the travels of the ship as recorded in the Detailed Frontier Timeline I’m creating. They are actually over halfway to their destination but I haven’t published a copy of that map recently.
This is going to be a two-parter, mainly because I haven’t finished all the deck plans. The reason is that instead of just drawing the deck plans, I decided to record myself doing so and make a set of how-to videos about how I make the deck plans, similar to what I did for drawing the Rosegard maps (part 2, part 3, part 4) a couple of years ago. But because of that, I haven’t had a chance to record all the videos with everything going on. This post will provide links to the maps and videos I have finished, and the next one (hopefully sometime next month, I hope to record the rest over the Christmas break) with provide the rest of the decks.
All of the maps are drawn at 140 DPI or 70 pixels per grid square which is exactly the size needed for Roll20 and most virtual table tops.
Getting Started/Cargo Deck
The first video shows the set up of my drawing environment and then we draw the first/lowest deck on the ship, the cargo deck, which is also the simplest. Here’s the video:
Here’s the final map for the Cargo Deck.
Cargo Deck map. Click for full-size image.
This map is fairly simple, there is the elevator and ladder well, the main cargo bay, and two smaller sealed cargo bays on the right side. These smaller rooms have secure doors that can be locked. There is the main cargo bay doors at the bottom of the map. These open downward to form a loading ramp to get into the cargo bay if landed on a planet’s surface.
Crew Deck
There are two videos for this deck. The first one fixes some minor issues with the cargo deck and then gets to work on the crew deck. The second one adds in the portholes for the deck.
This is actually the deck plan for five different decks on the ship as they are all the same except the Officer’s Deck which has a ceiling access to the bridge deck. Here is the final map for these level.
Officer Deck. The only difference between this and the other decks is that the dashed square (which represents the access to the bridge) is absent on the other decks. Click for full-sized image.
Once again the deck is fairly simple, consisting of four nearly identical cabins, with one being slightly smaller due to needing to access the ladder well.
Each cabin has a bed, desk, table, several chairs, wardrobe and private bath.
Science and Exploration Deck
This is the final deck for this installment. This is the deck that houses all the exploration equipment (atmoprobes, remote probes, landing drones), the ships laboratory, a small lifeboat and workpod, and the hydroponics and life support system.
And here’s the deck plan.
Science and life support deck. Click for full-sized version.
You may notice that this deck looks a bit different than the end shot in the video. As I mentioned in the video, I forgot about the life support machinery when I was drawing it. I’ve gone back and fixed that mistake.
The missile silhouette is the atmoprobes, the are two of them, one on top of the other, The two bays on the left with nothing drawn in them are the landing drone (top) and remote probe (bottom) bays. The area on the right is the laboratory and the large area at the bottom is the hydroponics bay (left) and life support machinery (right).
This deck changed the most from my original sketches due to the creation of the 3D model. You may notice that the three bays at the top “stick out” from the the basic shape of the ship. As I was making the model and working on the hull, I found that there was more space available given the angular shape I gave the hull. So I was able to extend these bays out instead of having them take up space from the hydroponics and life support area and still be within the sloped edges of the hull. You can see the cutouts for these bays doors on the model.
Final Thoughts
There are only three maps here but they actually represent 7 of the 12 decks in the ship so on some level, I’m over half done. This is a short post, although if you watch the videos, you’ve got a bit more than an hour and a half of viewing ahead of you.
I had hoped to finish all of the deck plans but I’ve been crazy busy this month (among other things I start my new position as a computer science professor today) and just haven’t had the time to dedicate to this project as I’d like. So I decided to do this post for today and finish up the other ones in a future post.
It’s taken me a long time to get to this point but I finally have sketches of the ship embedded in the center of the Outpost Osiris asteroid. These are my initial roughs that I will fill in with details as I complete the write-ups.
The scale on the images is 5 meters to the square. This ship is quite large with a “wingspan” of nearly 200m and a length of over 300m. It consists of five decks each of various sizes. I’m going to try to do a 3D render of the shape of the ship at some point.
The bold outer outline in each of the following images represents the outer hull of the middle deck (deck 3). It is shown on each of the images to allow you to compare the other decks to the overall size of the ship.
Only parts of the ship are going to be physically accessible in the module. Other parts are fused with the rock of the asteroid or crystalline structures piercing through the body of the ship in the central cavity of the asteroid. I’ll be deciding exactly what is obstructed and what isn’t as I work on the module details. I know for sure that the engines are not accessible and that the phase shield room (deck 3) and power core (deck 4) are undamaged as is the starboard airlock. Some of the robot storage areas will be accessible as will at least one cryo bay (so the characters can find some desiccated Pursale remains) but beyond that, I haven’t decided what to make accessible. That will come at a future date.
So here are the five decks of the ship, from bottom to top.
Deck 1 – Shuttle bays
This deck primarily contains 8 shuttle bays, a storage area, and the ship’s two underbelly laser batteries. The large engines out on the wings also extend down to this part of the ship but are not accessible from here. The large storage area here contained colonization supplies.
Deck 2 – Robots and Tech
This deck has another large storage area for colonization supplies, as well as the robot storage areas and a tech shop. There are also two more shuttle bays on this level as well as the first of many cryo bays containing rows and rows of the (once) frozen colonists.
Deck 3 – Crew Deck
This is the largest deck of the ship. It contains the engineering section, access to the engines and the crew quarters for the active crew. There is a large garden area, dining an food storage, as well as several cryo chambers. There is also an aft observation deck, forward sensors, and the ships two forward facing laser batteries. The airlocks are also on this level as are some of the ship’s workpods. The phase shield generator is located on this deck in the very center of the ship.
Deck 4 – Cryo Bays and Power
This deck consists almost completely of cryo storage bays containing colonists in frozen storage. The only other ship system on this level is the ship’s power core, which amazingly wasn’t destroyed when the ship unphased into the asteroid.
Deck 5 – Bridge
This deck contains the ship’s bridge and medical facilities, a few more smaller cryo bays, as well as the ship’s launches and some more workpods. It also has the upper laser battery.
Next Steps
This is the ship as built when fleeing the Pursale homeworld and fully functional. By the time the PCs discover it, it has been embedded in the asteroid of millenia. Many of the parts of the ship are fused with either the rocks of the asteroid or crystalline structures in the central cavity. All of the crew and colonists are long dead however some of the robots, along with some parts of the ship’s machinery has survived.
The next step is to figure out which parts of the ship are still accessible and create the actual maps for the game along with the description of the various areas.
The intention of this part of the adventure is for the players to make their way onto the ship, overcoming the last of the ship’s defenses, and attempt to obtain the phase shield generator off the ship and install it on their own. They then need to feel the outpost as their tampering has caused the ship’s power core to enter a self-destruct mode that cannot be stopped.
The details of the ship are still fairly malleable so let me know if there are any major ship systems or details that you think I missed.
I had intended to have this post up on the first but I’ve been a been sick and under the weather. I’m mostly recovered and back to work. This is the follow on post to my Osiris Base – Rough Sketches post where I present the final maps.
In working on the Ghost Ship Osiris module, the next portion of the adventure deals with the PCs rescuing the mining and administrative crew at the outpost from several Pursale robots that the scavenger crew set loose. In order to write that part of the adventure, I needed a map of the base.
I presented the rough sketches I did in the previous post. This one presents the final versions based on those sketches, along with some short descriptions of changes made. Details of the individual rooms will be in the final module. So let’s take a look:
Asteroid Cross-section
First up we’ll start with the cross-section map showing where everything is placed relative to one another.
Click for full sized image
The asteroid is a fairly small one for the outer belt, measuring only 1.4 km long and 1 km wide. Nova Vista was interested in it because of the anomalous readings generated by the presence of the Pursale ship at its core, although they didn’t know the cause at the time.
The main docking and mining level is on the asteroid’s rotation axis to facilitate ships docking with the base. “Below” that are the crew’s living level and the power level.
The mines mostly run through the upper part of the asteroid (as displayed on the map) although a shaft has been started into the “lower” section.
Finally there is a shaft that runs straight into the heart of the asteroid to intersect with the cavity containing the Pursale ship.
Docking/Mining Level
This level contains the base’s docking bay as well as the mining facilities, storage, and technical facilities.
Click for full size image
This level ended up almost exactly as I sketched it out. The only real tweaks were to the exact sizes of some of the room.
I just realized that I need to tweak this map just a bit as it looks like the docking bay is inside the asteroid. In reality it sticks out a bit and the silhouette is part of the asteroid that sticks out below it.
Crew Level
This level holds the living and recreation areas for the crew as well as the base’s main computer, offices, and communications and sensor arrays.
Click for full sized image
This level ended up being a little “shorter” that I had sketched it out. When I started drawing in the rooms, I realized that the individual apartments in the housing area were a little large. As is, the smaller ones are about 1000 square feet and the four larger ones about 1,200 square feet. Plenty big enough for a single person.
I had also drawn the offices a little big as well, but even drawn smaller in this map they are very spacious.
The sensor and communications room is off by itself since it needs to be on the surface of the asteroid.
Power Level
click for full sized image
This level is quite simple and just holds the base’s nuclear reactor.
The reactor is fairly self contained but does have a maintenance access airlock as well as a fuel loading/waste removal port.
Other Features
The mine shafts don’t have a map as they are twisty, turny, and loop back on themselves in three dimensions as the mining followed the ore veins through the rock.
The Pursale ship will be mapped separately in a future post once I figure out what the inside of it looks like. I’ll leave it for you to speculate which end is the front and which is the back.
What’s Next?
Next on the docket for the Ghost Ship Osiris adventure is to detail what is happening in the base when the PCs arrive and what they have to do to secure the base. I’ll be generating the base staff, along with their locations and conditions.
While I’m working on that, I have some more notes from the Death at Rosegard adventure to write up and post as well.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on the maps, feel free to let me know below.
I’ve been working on the antagonist’s ship for the Ghost Ship Osiris module and now have the basic ship design down. This is a larger vessel, used by Thrawl and his scavenger crew to collect materials around the frontier and transport them for sale. It’s relatively well armed and with the larger crew, can even take on smaller vessels if it wants to. I still haven’t come up with an actual name for Thrawl’s specific instance of this ship but am simply calling the general ship type the Scavenger Transport. In this post I’ll talk about how I designed the ship.
It starts by deciding exactly the roll the ship is to play. I knew I wanted it to have a large cargo area, a bigger than normal crew (to provide muscle in scavenging operations), be relatively well armed, and relatively fast for a vessel of its size. The last bit is because in the module, it needs to be on par speed-wise with the PCs’ ship. And a fast, armed ship isn’t too bad for a crew that works a bit on the shady side of the law. Also the ship has to be able to carry a smaller personal runabout for the captain, again needed for plot reasons.
Given that basic plan, I sat down with the FrontierSpace rules and started picking out systems and features of the ship. Now to be honest, I had a bit of behind the scenes help as Bill has created a spreadsheet to use for basic ship design that helps a lot. That tool is not generally available but I believe Bill is working on a more detailed starship generation system that the basics provided in the core rules. In any case, I was able to determine all of the ships systems, components, and statistics using the spreadsheet. Using that information, I created a basic ship characteristic sheet.
There’s no picture of the ship yet as I haven’t completely designed it and don’t know what it looks like. But now that we have the specifications for the ship, we can start working on the deck plans.
Initial sketches
As I do with most of my ship designs, I start with paper and pencil. I have a nice little Moleskin graph paper notebook that I use to sketch out ideas and designs in so I started by drawing a side and top view of roughly what I wanted the ship to look like. It can be seen here in the upper left of this scan of two of the pages from the notebook (Note: on this an all other images in this post, you can click on them to get them at their full resolution).
Scan of two page of my design notebook showing the rough sketch of the ship (top and side views) plus whats on each deck (on the left) and the lower deck sketch on the right
The initial plan was to have three decks, each smaller than the one below forming a somewhat pyramidal or wedge shape. The larger box in the back that spans the upper two levels was to be the hangar for the runabout. The lower level would be taller than the other levels as it contains the cargo bay.
Once I had the basic outline, I started mapping out what I wanted each level to contain. I basically went through all the specifications and figured out which deck the machinery, storage, and hardware would be for each of those systems. You can see that list in the middle of the first page.
The basic breakdown was this:
Level 1 (bottom) – Cargo bay, shuttles and workpods, and many of the ship’s weapons and defenses along with other bulky systems such as life support and power storage.
Level 2 (middle) – Crew quarters and living space, sensors, ion cannon, engineering and tech spaces
Now that I had the basic plan, it was time to start getting into details. I started with the lower, largest level which can be seen on the second page of the scan above. On limitation of working in my notebook (which is 8.25×5 inches, 5 squares to the inch) is that there is only so much space to draw in. I probably should have sketched at 2m/square but did the sketch at 1m/square.
I stared by working out the cargo bay size. Assuming that one CU from the game rules is about a cubic meter, I figured out how big the cargo bay needed to be (see the notation on the left page) give that the bay itself was 6m in height. From there I started adding in the other features that were supposed to be on the ship.
After I finished this deck I compared it to the top view sketch that I created. I realized that the width matched pretty well assuming that the sketch was done at 3m/square except that the detailed sketch was 6m too short. So I made a note about that (on the upper right) to remind me to stretch it out a bit when I finally got down to drawing it. With the lower level done and an approximate scale, I started in on the next two levels.
The middle (left) and upper (right) decks of the Scavenger Transport, to scale with the initial, lower deck
I actually skipped deck 2 to start and did the upper deck first. The reason for this is that I needed to know where the deck access would be so I could connect everything up. I knew I wanted the bridge at the front of the deck spanning the entire width and the runabout hanger at the back. The Laser Battery is actually mounted at the top of the ship so I put it in the center of the deck. I wanted a conference/meeting room off the bridge that was also connected to the captain’s suite. Picking the left side for the conference room determined where the Captain’s Suite would be. That put the elevator on the right and I added in the main computer, some life support space and small toilet off the bridge. This deck was done.
On deck two, I knew I wanted to put the crew cabins and living area in the back of the ship and the working areas center and forward. I actually started this level by putting in the two elevators (one to the deck below and one to the deck above) so I knew how the rest of the design had to work around them.
Next I added in the engineering spaces around where I wanted the engine access tunnels to be. Then came the location of the Ion Cannon (which extends out the front of this deck, not shown) at the front of the deck and then just started filling in details.
Also you might notice that I don’t have the roundabout hanger extending down into deck 2. It would have filled the space where the rec room is and a bit more. That was because as I was doing the sketches, I didn’t look back at my side view (the deck sketches were done several weeks after I made that side view sketch) and I completely forgot that that was my intention. So I decided to just extend it up more instead of down, making the ship even more pyramidal in shape.
Now, if you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that I forgot a fairly important feature that any good spaceship needs. (I probably forgot several but one is definitely going to be added in). Can you spot it? I’ll call it out when I get to drawing up the level it occurs on.
Slightly more detailed drawings
With the sketches done, it is time to start in on final drawings. I do my drawings in Inkscape and if these were going to be the final plans for this ship, they would end up with much more detail that you’ll see here. However, I knew that for this ship at least, I would be sending of the drawings to Bill to create the final version. The reason is that he has a specific style that he has used for ships in FrontierSpace that I can’t quite recreate yet. He had already done the PCs’ ship for this module in that style so I needed him to do the final drawings to match. More on this later. But that means that all I really need to do is get a good working drawing with the spaces mapped out for him to work from.
I like do do these drawings at 50 pixels per meter and 100 dpi. This is mainly due the fact that I started doing maps in Inkscape to digitally recreate some of the original Star Frontiers maps and those maps were all a two squares per inch. Give the preponderance of virtual table tops and the need for maps for those systems, I should probably shift to 70 pixels per square since that seems to be the default for those systems. However, since Inkscape is a vector drawing program, it’s really easy to scale the final map up (by 40%) to reach the desired scale. So I’ll probably stick with what I’m using since the math is easier.
Anyway, I start by laying down a grid. I know how big the ship is going to be so I create an image that is big enough to hold the ship plus 1 square larger on each side. Inkscape has a great extension to draw grids (Extension->Render->Grids->Cartesian Grid) so just use that to make the base grid:
Next I import the scans of my sketches and place them on a layer behind the grid. I have to rotate and scale the sketches so that they match the grid I just created. The sketch for the cargo deck looks like this:
You’ll notice that the sketch doesn’t go all the way to the end of the grid. Remember I said I needed to stretch it out? The final grid is larger than the sketch to accommodate that.
Next we lay in the outer hull. This is done on a separate layer. In the final drawings, the hull will probably have some final thickness and shape to it but for now, It’s just going to enclose the space where the rooms and passages will be. Some may stick out slightly but it provides the overall shape.
Starting a new layer, I turn off the gray fill on the hull (so I can see the sketch, I could also just play with the opacity if I wanted) and start drawing in the rooms and adding doors. Once that is all done, I turn the gray fill on the hull back on (I’ve also turned off the sketch in the background.)
Now, if I were working on the final versions, I’d next go in and add details to all the rooms: consoles, chairs, desks, beds, whatever the room required to show it’s use and function. However, as I’m just sketching out space, this is good enough for now. So we add some labels to indicate what the rooms are:
Now that deck one is finished, it’s time to do deck 2. This is where I realized I was missing something important. Besides the ship bays and the cargo doors, there’s no way to get in and out of the ship. I seem to have forgotten the airlock. Now originally I was going to just run a passage and airlock through the side of the ship near the dining room/galley in the space labeled food storage, but as I started drawing the plans I realized I had more room over by the sensors than I thought based on the sketch and was able to add it in there. The final deck two looks like this:
On this deck, the sensor and airlock extend outside the edges of the hull boundary I drew. This ship isn’t designed for atmospheric flight so that’s not a big deal. I also added in the barrel of the ion cannon I didn’t add in the engine areas, just a small passage headed out to them. The engine compartment will probably actually start right on the edge of this map or just off it. They aren’t all that far away from the ships.
From looking at these plans, you may have noticed that there seems to be an awful lot of life support and food storage space. That is intentional. If you look back at the ship stat sheet, you notice that it has expanded life support. The ship is designed to be able to spend a long time out in space without returning to port so it needs lots of space to store food, air, and water as it doesn’t have a complete recycling system, only a partial one.
Finally, the top deck. This one’s not that interesting, just a bunch of rooms with a small passage connecting them.
Finally we need a cross section view that shows how all these things are placed in relation to each other vertically. As I said before, the cargo bay and the runabout hangar are going to be taller than the rest of the rooms on the ship, each with a 6m tall ceiling (most of the rooms off the cargo bay will be this height as well). The other rooms are going to be 3m in height.
The other decision I had to make was how much space to place between the decks. When I’m building ships for Star Frontiers, I typically use 2m between decks. However, for this ship, I decided that the minimum spacing would be 1m (you’ll see why I say minimum in a minute). That gives room for piping, duct work, machinery and such between the levels. That’s also what that big 2x3m area in the middle of the living quarters section is for, to allow for connections between the lower and upper levels.
With that in mind, I drew a rough side view of the ship and placed the decks, elevator shafts and other bits in there relative positions:
You can see in the front of the ship, there is a lot of space between the lower deck and the deck above. That’s why the 1m was only a minimum. You can also see the laser battery there at the top. The outline of the ship at this point is really rough and I’ll updated it later once I have all the details.
Next Steps
With the basic plans done, I’ve sent them off to Bill to get the final treatment. He was quite excited to see the ship and get to work on the plans so hopefully I’ll have those back relatively soon. I’ll post them when he sends them to me. In case you haven’t seen his deck plan style, here’s the PCs’ ship from the game in Bill’s FrontierSpace style.
I now have the original drawing for this particular ship so I’ll be working in the future to be able to match it for future drawings.
My plan at this point is to start producing a 3D model of the ship. With the basic plans and design done, I can start working on a model that accurately reflects it’s shape. There will be a bit of back and forth between me and Bill as I work on this so that the outline on the deck plans and the model match. Expect the next big post in this series to be on the creation of that model. I’ve been working on brushing up my Blender skills as I’m going to attempt to create the model with that software instead of OpenSCAD which I’ve used for all my models in the past. I like the programmatic aspect of OpenSCAD but Blender provides much more flexibility. However, I might do a hybrid approach like I did with the Assault Scout model I used in the Assault Scout Technical Manual.
So there you go. A new ship. It can actually be used as is in your games if you want. Everything from here on out is details. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions in the comment section below.
