Tag Archives: History's Hope

HSS History’s Hope Deck Plans – part 2

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.

  1. Cargo Deck
  2. Science Deck
  3. Engineering Deck
  4. Common Deck
  5. Crew Deck
  6. Crew Deck
  7. Crew Deck
  8. Airlock/Medical Deck
  9. Recreation Deck
  10. Crew Deck
  11. Officer’s Deck
  12. 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.

Let me know your thoughts below.

HSS History’s Hope Deck Plans – part 1

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.