Tag Archives: Knight Hawks

Economics of Spaceflight – part 1b – Starliners

Last week we looked a bit at the logistics of running a passenger transport system between the various worlds and saw that if you wanted daily flights between all the worlds, you’d need over 600 ships.  And that would only give you 250 people moving between each world each day.

Now you can change that a bit by making the ships a bit larger or increase the passenger density. But it gave us a feel of what assumptions or changes you need to make to your setting if you want a certain level of interaction between the worlds.  Or if you limit the number of ships and passengers, some ideas of what impacts that has on the culture and setting.

In this article, I am going to look at the financial side of the passenger transport business.  We’ll start by actually designing our starliner to get an idea of costs and expenses, look at ticket prices, and decided if it is even worth it.  Then we can talk a bit about other changes that we need to make, if any, to make this all make sense.  Let’s get started. You might want to settle in. This one is a bit long.

Our Ship

If we’re going to look at economics, we’re going to need details on the ship.  In the last article, I based everything on a HS 10 starliner. We’ll detail that ship out and look at its cost. 

Hull and Engines

As a HS 10 ship, it will have three engines, which from the discussion last week, are atomic.  I realize now that as a passenger liner, maybe we don’t need the power of the atomic engines and can get by with ion engines. Surprisingly, in the discussion that the previous post generated, no one mentioned that.  It would also save on the overhaul time as ion engines don’t need that so the ship could be turned around in port more quickly.  But for now, we’ll stick with the atomic engines.

Cabins

The next major question is how many of the various passenger berths we have of each class.  We have a total of 250 berths.  Journey class are the standard.  Interestingly, the only safety requirement listed in the rules is that a spacesuit has to be provided.  You don’t actually have to have lifeboats for everyone. First class berths are more expensive and require more cabin space, cargo space, and facilities for the passengers. And do need access to a lifeboat.  Storage class cabins are cheaper for the passenger and have minimal storage space, but are more expensive to install in the ship, costing as much as a First Class cabin. With the standard starship construction rules, these tradeoffs really don’t affect the design of the ship other than the final cost as the system doesn’t really account for the space and facilities needed.  So for this analysis, I’m going to roughly base these ships on our modern airlines, with most of the cabins of the base Journey Class category with a few First Class and some Storage Class.  The breakdown will be 40 First class, 180 Journey Class, and 30 Storage Class.

Crew

The other major decision is the size of the crew.  We will need to purchase cabins and life support for them as well.  The rules give no guidance on this.  Looking at cruise ships, it is about a 1-to-5 ratio, crew to passengers.  Some of that, such as janitorial and maintenance work, will get automated away to robots on our star liner, but then we’ll need people to look after the robots as well.  We’ll design the ship around a crew of 50.  We’ll talk about the breakdown later when we have to figure out what they are paid.

Ship Vehicles

While we only need lifeboats for the First Class passengers, we’re going to have lifeboats for all of the passengers (except Storage Class, that’s just one of the hazards of the cheap fare, you are frozen and can’t get to a lifeboat) and the crew.  And we will toss in 10 escape pods so not everyone has to make it to a lifeboat.  As the final vehicles, we’ll add in 5 large (10 being) launches for shuttling people around between the station and ship, 2 small (4 being) launches for the crew’s use, and 2 workpods for ship maintenance.

Spacesuits

We are required to have spacesuits for all of our non-Storage Class passengers.  Plus we’ll have them for the crew as well.  Technically, each species has its own style of spacesuits adapted to their physiology.  The rules, however, only distinguish between vrusk and non-vrusk as they are only really concerned with cost and the standard spacesuit is 1000 cr. while the vrusk suit is 1,500 as they require more material.  If we assume that vrusk make up one quarter of the crew and passengers, and we build in a bit of buffer in the numbers to account for varying numbers of the different species, we’ll get 80 vrusk spacesuits and 220 non-vrusk ones.  This is 300 total, which is exactly our crew and passenger count but remember that the 30 Storage Class passengers won’t be using one so we actually have 30 extra.

Robots

There will be a number of robots on board to handle things like cleaning, maintenance, some food production, etc.  We’ll design the ship to have 50 robots, basically doubling the crew size.  These will be a mix of level 3 and 4 service and maintenance robots, will possibly a small number of security robots.  Overall the average cost of each robot will be 4,000 cr.

Other items

There are a number of other items that go into building the starship such as radios, intercoms, computers, portholes, Velcro boots for crew and passengers, toolkits, etc.  We’ll add those in as appropriate and list the details in the final stats when presented in the next section:

PGCSS Prenglar Glory

Here are the full KH stats for the ship along with its price tag, fully fueled.

HS: 10
HP: 50
ADF: 3
MR: 3
DCR: 50
Engines: 3 Class B Atomic, 6 fuel pellets each

Communications Equipment:  Videocom radio w/ 4 extra panels, Intercom system: 5 master panels, 400 standard panels, Subspace Radio
Sensors: 400 Portholes, radar, camera system, starship astrogation suite
Weapons: None
Defenses: Reflective Hull
Life support capacity: 500 beings, 200 days with full backup
Passenger Accommodations: 40 First Class cabins, 180 Journey Class Cabins, 30 Storage Class cabins
Crew Accommodations: 50 Journey class cabins
Vehicles: 10 escape pods, 14 lifeboats, 2 workpods, 5 large launches, 2 small launches
Computer Level: 4 (175 FP)
Computer Program: Drive 5 (64), Life Support 1 (4), Alarm 3 (4), Computer Lockout 4 (8), Damage Control 3 (8), Astrogation 4 (24), Cameras 1 (1), Robot Management 4 (16), Information Storage 3 (8), Communications 2 (6), Installation Security 3 (12), Computer Security 4 (16), Maintenance 2 (4)
Backup life support computer: Level 1 (4), Programs: Life support 1 (4)
Robots: 50 level 3-4 maintenance, security, and service robots
Other equipment: 220 non-vrusk spacesuits, 80 vrusk spacesuits, 300 velcro boots sets, 5 Engineer’s toolboxes, 10 sets of Magnetic shoes
Cost: 5,658,000 Cr.

The Ship’s Crew

Now that we know the design of the ship, we need to decide on crew makeup.  This will determine the wages owed as we operate the ship in the space lanes.  This is going to be an approximate mix.  The exact details may vary ship to ship but will give us a starting point to figuring out the operating costs when we get to that stage.  The crew makeup I settled on, allowing for round-the-clock operations is:

  • 2 Pilots – level 5 – necessary to operate a HS 10 vessel
  • 2 Astrogators – level 3 – It’s an established route so these could be even lower level
  • 2 Engineers – level 4 – as discussed last week for effecting the engine overhauls
  • 4 Technicians – level 4 – assistants to the engineers and helping with on-board maintenance
  • 4 Roboticists – level 4 – maintain the ship’s robots
  • 2 Computer technicians – level 2 – basic computer operations and maintenance
  • 10 Safety and Security staff – level 3 (beam) – assisting passengers and keeping everyone in line
  • 3 Doctors – level 4 – for maintaining the health of crew and passengers
  • 10 Food Services staff – level 3 – cooking, maintaining hydroponics, servers, etc
  • 11 other staff – level 2 – any other duties, entertainment, etc.

Now some of those, such as security, food services, and other could slosh around a bit depending on exactly want you want on the ship and what roles all those robots play, but this mix give us a starting point.

The Economics

Okay, with the ship squared away, let’s look at the income and expenses of running this ship. 

For this analysis, we will be looking at a single jump.  This means that we’ll be covering the 14 days from departure from one station until the ship is ready to depart the other one.  The Knight Hawks rules are based around yearly or 40-day “months”.  So we’ll often be scaling the values from the rules to cover just the 14 day period.

Let’s dive in.

Income

There is really only one source of income on a starliner, paying passengers.  The KH Campaign Book, page 44, covers the operations of a starliner.  We’ll start with the Spaceliner Bookings Table.

This table tells you how many of your berths a ship will fill traveling between different population worlds.  Now to be honest, I believe that this table really represents the situation if there were lots and lots of travel available.  If there is only a single ship flying between the two worlds each day, it will probably fill every berth every trip.  And depending on the route, it might be higher than that given by the table.  For example, traveling from Prenglar (high population) to Dixon’s Star (outpost) gives only a low fill percentage but in truth, most of those people are actually going to Truane’s Star (medium population) and so the ship would be fuller.  But I’m going to leave those details as an exercise for you to do for your version of the Frontier. I’m going to take the table at face value here.

This ship is flying between Gran Quivera (Prenglar) and Triad (Cassidine), which are both high population worlds.  According to the table the ship will fill 80+2d10 percent of its berths on any give trip.  We’ll just deal with the average which is 91%.  That means on an average trip we will fill 36 of our 40 First Class cabins, 164 of our 180 Journey Class cabins, and 27 of the 30 Storage Class berths.  Sometimes it will be more, sometimes it will be less but that’s the number we’re going to use.

The jump from Prenglar to Cassidine is 7 light years.  That means that a First Class ticket costs 1400 cr.  A Journey Class ticket costs 700 cr. And a Storage Class ticket costs 210 cr.  Given the number of berths being filled, that means that our income for any single jump is 170,870 cr.

That’s our gross ticket sales.  We need to fit all of our expenses for a trip into that number.  So let’s look at our expenses.

Expenses

First up is fuel.  We have three atomic engines and each jump uses a fuel pellet in each engine.  Since each fuel pellet costs 10,000 cr., each jump costs us 30,000 cr. in fuel.

The next obvious cost is the crew salaries.  Daily wages for characters with spacecraft skills are given on page 54 of the KH Campaign book.  Daily wages for characters with AD skills are given on page 60 of the AD Expanded Rules book. For the “other crew” line I just uses 10 cr. x level as their pay rate and for the food services crew I use 10 cr. x level+1.  I’ve also ignored the fact that characters may have multiple skills and the pay rate is just based on their primary skill level.  With the crew as detailed earlier, the daily cost for the entire crew is 3,690 credits.  Which means for the 14 days of our trip, the crew wages come to 51,660 cr.

After those two, the next largest cost is maintenance.  The ship has to spend 15-16 days in maintenance each 400-day year at the cost of 1,000 cr. per day.  In 400 days, a ship can make 400/14= 28 trips 8 days left over.  That means that we can make 27 trips a year.  So each trip needs to save away 16000/27 = 593 credits to cover that expense at the end of the year.  To be safe, and cover other unexpected maintenance costs, we’ll stash away 1500 cr. each trip.

We’ll also need to pay the crew during those 16 days as well so we need to save away a total of 59040 credits to cover wages.  That means each trip needs to save 59040/27 = 2187 credits which we’ll round up to 2200.

Each trip consumes life support.  According to the rules, refilling the life support system on the ship costs 15000 credits every 200 days or 75 credits a day.  Thus our 14 days of operation use up 1050 credits worth of life support.

Another expense is an office at each end of the line where passengers can come to buy tickets.  The rules state that this costs 500 credits per 40 days at each station or 12.5 credits a day.  With two end points that’s 25 credits a day or 350 credits of expenses for the 14-day period.  We need to squirrel way a bit of funds to cover the 16 days in maintenance but it’s not that much and we can assume it’s covered by the extra maintenance money we saved.

Finally, there are docking fees.  Here we are going to use the number given on page 32 of the module SFKH1: The Dramune Run, where it says that the standard rate for docking fees is 2000 credits a month.  Assuming that is the 40 day “month” we’ve been using, that works out to 50 credits a day or 250 credits for the 5 days in port during each run.

Tallying that all up, we get that the operating expenses for the ship total 86,810 credits for each leg of our run between Gran Quivera and Triad.

That seems pretty good.  We’ve got just over 170,000 credits in income and just under 87,000 in expenses.  Which is all well and good if there aren’t any taxes, and if the ship is paid for.

Now the rules don’t explicitly give rates for taxes, tariffs, and other fees associated with interstellar travel although they do talk about varying the rates for wages, docking fees, ticket prices, etc. that can affect the income or expenses for our ship.  And in the AD rules, when talking about PC and NPC character wages, it says to assume half of all their income goes towards living expenses and talks about raising/lowering taxes to adjust the amount of money the PCs have.  And local governments and the UPF need to get income from somewhere.  I’m going to leave the taxes issue up to you for your campaign.  But a corporate tax of say 5-10 percent of gross sales might not be unreasonable. 

Paying for the ship

But now we come to the biggest expense, at least during the early years of operating the spaceliner. How did we pay for that ship in the first place?  Maybe this is a mega-corp and they had a huge budget and could just pay for it outright.  They still need to recoup the cost of the ship but at least don’t need to take out a loan.  If it’s a smaller organization, they may have to get a loan for the cost of the ship, either in part or in full.  Let’s look at those two scenarios.  And we’re going to ignore taxes.  Subtracting our expenses from our income, that leaves us with 84060 credits after each trip. 

First, the mega-corp, paid in full option.  Assuming every one of those net credits earned goes into paying back the cost of the ship (which from above is 5,658,000 credits), it would take 68 trips to pay off the value of the ship.  At 27 trips a year, that’s two and a half years to recoup the cost of the ship.  If there are unexpected costs, it will take longer.

Let’s look at a smaller organization that has to take a loan.  Pager 42 of the KH Campaign book gives the monthly payment on a 10,000 credit loan amortized over a number of years from 1 to 20.  Now, the game was written in late 70’s to early 80’s and the interest rates back then were high, on the order of 10-15% for low risk ventures.  So the interest rates for starship loans, which are considered high risk, are set at 4% every 40 days or, over the 400 day year, an APR of 48%!  That may seem a bit high, even by late 70’s standards and especially today, but we’ll go with it as that is what is in the rules.  If you want to do the math and come up with a different interest rate for your setting, go for it.

We’ll start by looking at a 10-year loan.  Using the table on page 42 and the cost of the ship from above, and assuming we finance the whole thing.  The cost of the loan is 230,903 credits every 40 days or 80,816 credits every trip.  We had 84060 credits left so that’s good, the net difference is still in the black at 3,244 credits.  But we have to account for that 16-day maintenance period where we still have to pay the loan but aren’t making any income.   The loan cost for that 16 days is 92,362 credits.  Spread over the 27 trips in the year that comes to 3421 credits that need to be saved.  Which puts us in the red by 177 credits.  Considering we had a bit of buffer in our maintenance budget, to the tune of about 850 credits, we can cover that small deficit from that.

So that means, if we have a 10-year loan for the entire value of the ship, we can just break even if the ship operates continuously and don’t have any problems for a decade.  It can be done, but it will be tight.  But if we run into unexpected problems, we’re going to be in trouble.  We could look at a longer loan, but beyond 10 years, it doesn’t really help.  Even a 20-year loan only puts us at 1454 credits in the black each year but takes twice as long to pay off and we end up paying twice as much for the ship.

That’s just to break even, there are no profits beyond the wages for the crew so hopefully the owner is part of the crew or they get no money for the first decade.  And that is the economics for a run between two high population worlds were we basically fill the entire ship each trip.  On a run with fewer berths sold, there would issues on the scenario where the ship was financed. Also, if there are any taxes, we would really be in trouble.  It looks like any fraction of the ship that can be paid for up front will make the operation be more financially stable.

Some Variations

This article gives you a baseline for operating your starliner.  I will leave most of the variations up to you but look at one.  Some of those variations include, but are not limited to, changing ticket prices, changing the mix of berths, shortening the time in port so you make an extra run or three each year, selling more (or less) of the berths, different crew expenses, and using ion engines instead of atomic engines.  I’m just going to briefly look at the variation where we fill the ship completely every trip.  Which may very well be the case if there is only a single flight each day between worlds.

In this case, the only real change is that have 13 more paying customers across all three berth classes.  That means that our income goes up to 188,300 credits an increase of 17,430 credits.  Since our expenses don’t actually depend on the number of passengers (the life support costs probably would, but we ignored that), that is all extra profit.  In this case, we are now 17,253 credits in the black after each trip, assuming we keep the 10-year loan.

And that means we either have some profit for the owners and can save a bit for other unexpected expenses, or we can shorten the loan term a little bit.  We were right at the bleeding edge as far as the loan went and were already in the point of diminishing returns with respect to lengthening the loan.  With a full ship every trip, we could shorten the loan period from 10 years to 5 years and still have a 5,400 credit surplus.  And reduce that actual amount we pay for the ship (principal and interest) by 57%, a savings of 9,921,303 credits, which is enough to buy almost 2 more ships!  The total cost of the 10-year loan was just over 23 million credits, four times the cost of the ship.  That interest rate is very expensive.

Conclusions

So, running a passenger liner between two high population worlds is doable.  It might be tight for a few years (up to a decade) if you can’t pay for at least part of the ship up front and have to finance it, but it can be done.  Runs between smaller worlds might not be possible using the table from the rules to determine the number of berths filled.

This also gives you as a setting designer some ideas of knobs to turn to tune things in your setting or describe what PCs see as passengers on one of these ships. 

What did I miss?  What other variations might we look at?  Have you ever had PCs try to run a passenger liner?  What happened?  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Economics of Spaceflight – part 1a – Starliners

My Starship Construction in the Frontier post generated a lot of discussion in the Star Frontiers group on Facebook. In some of the discussion, the commenters seemed to be making the assumption that I wanted to increase the number of ships flying around and that my post was advocating for ways to do that. I actually don’t have a strong feeling one way or another. In fact, I’m much more in the camp of small numbers of ships.

What I’m really looking at, and am interested in figuring out, are the implications those small numbers have and whether or not it makes sense to increase the numbers. Or if you don’t, what that implies for the realities of life in the Frontier and how that impacts the player characters.

I’m interested in questions like, if you only have a small number of ships across the Frontier, what does that mean for interstellar commerce? What impacts does that have on interstellar travel? Who owns the ships? What do they cost? And questions like that.

Since that starship construction article came out, and the ensuing discussion, I’ve been thinking more and more about this and have decided to do a series of articles on the topic. They will all have the Economics of Spaceflight title and a similar tag. In this first article, I’m going to look at interstellar passenger travel.

From the Rules

Let’s start by looking at what the rules say about these ships, which it calls starliners, and interstellar travel. We’ll begin with the description given on page 6 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book:

Spaceliners. HULL SIZE = 6-15. Spaceliners (passenger transports) are built in a wide variety of sizes. Modern spaceliners are fast, quiet ships, capable of providing the wealthy passenger with any conceivable luxury. Many of the older liners are smaller, somewhat decrepit vessels that promise only the fundamental requirements of life support. The number of passengers carried by a spaceliner is about 25 times the ship’s hull size. For example, a spaceliner with a hull size of 10 can carry 250 passengers. Engine durability varies as much as size on spaceliners. Some will require an overhaul after three jumps, while others will be able to make 8 or 10 interstellar trips without maintenance.

KH Campaign Book, p. 6

This gives us a bit of information right off the bat. First, we have the range of hull sizes for these types of ships and the number of passengers per hull size. I’ll have more to say on that latter concept later. It also seems to imply that there are a bunch of these flying around as it describes various generations of ships. Other bits, such as the comments on engine overhauls, tell us that they typically sport atomic engines (as ion drives don’t need overhauls) and indicate some of the properties of the Class B and C atomic engines which the rules haven’t covered yet if you’re just reading through the book.

In the original Alpha Dawn Expanded Rules book, pages 49 and 50 talk about they modes and costs of interstellar travel. It lists three “classes” of travel accommodations and their costs:

  • First Class – luxurious accommodations with the best rooms, food, and and best access to survival gear in the case of an emergency. 200 Credits per light year traveled.
  • Journey Class – This is the standard accommodations. 100 Credits per light year traveled.
  • Storage Class – In this class, you travel as frozen cargo. 30 Credits per light year traveled.

More details on the accommodation types are given on page 21 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book.

Travel time is one of the areas where the Alpha Dawn (AD) and Knight Hawks (KH) rule sets conflict with one another. The AD rules say that interstellar travel occurs at the rate of one day per light year, while the KH rules, require 10 hours (one day’s work) per light year to plot out the jump, but actually making the jump takes 8.7 days regardless of the distance. Reconciling and clearing that up is a whole article in and of itself. We’ll save that for a future date. For this article, we’re going to assume that it takes 9 days to make a jump, regardless of the distance.

Of course that probably means the cost of a ticket should be fixed as the same number of resources go into making a jump regardless of the distance but for now we’ll go with the AD rules ticket costs.

If the PCs come into possession of a starliner, either via salvage, original constructions, or some other means, the KH Campaign Book (p. 44) provides guidance on what it costs to operate such a ship, how much of the ship is full on any given trip, and the risks involved. We’ll come back to those numbers later as well.

How Many Passengers – revisited

For this article, we’re going to be looking at a HS 10 passenger liner which falls in the middle of the range specified in the KH rules. According to the rules, this ship can carry 250 passengers. The question is, does this make sense?

A modern cruise ship, roughly the size of a HS 10 starliner.

Let’s look at some sources. A HS 10 ship is roughly the size of a modern, large cruise ship here on Earth. These ships typically hold up to 2800 passengers and 1200 crew, for a total of 4000 people, or 400 per hull size. But that’s the maximum capacity and typically means 4 people to a cabin. If you’ve ever been on a cruise ship, you know those cabins are small, typically 15-22 square meters. Now this is roughly the size of a Journey Class cabin on our starliner (16-24 square meters), the difference being that that size on our starliner is for a single being, not a group of four. That immediately means we need to cut our passenger estimate down by a factor of four putting us at about 700 passengers.

The other thing our starliner has to deal with, that a cruise ship doesn’t, it life support. On a cruise ship, air is free. And while there is probably some recycling of water, it’s not a closed loop with full filtering needed. And cruise ships tend to stop and replenish supplies every couple of days unless it’s a long trans-oceanic cruise. So they don’t carry a lot of food on board. In the Frontier, ships are typically designed to carry half a year of food and the systems to process the air, water, and waste onboard which eats up more space on the ship.

Then you have all the lifeboats, spacesuits, and other ship’s vehicles that our starliner has to have. Cruise ships have lifeboats but the passenger density on them is going to be higher than the ones on our starliner and the some of the lifeboats on cruise ships are inflatable. That’s not going to happen on a starship. Those eat up space as well.

Finally, a cruise ship has a lot of the upper decks exposed to air. That doesn’t count against it’s volume but provides a lot of communal space for the passengers. That space needs to exist on starliners as well but has to be enclosed within the hull.

Between the extra life support machinery, the communal space, and the ship’s vehicles, that could easily reduce the capacity of the ship by 30 to 70 percent depending on how you figure it. 250 passengers is just 36% of the 700 passenger number we had left above. It’s possibly at the low end, but reasonable.

Another point of comparison is the volume based rules I created for starship generation. In that system, which accounts for passageway, cabin space, and storage space, I designed a ship the same size as a HS 10 ship in the KH rules. It had a total of 100 First Class cabins, 1250 Journey class cabins, and 200 Storage class cabins. And that includes the cabins for the crew, the size of which the rules don’t address. For this I’ll assumed 50 of the Journey class cabins are for the (lots of robots on Frontier ships). So the total capacity is 1500 passengers, which is a little large. However, this system doesn’t currently account for communal space which could easily be as much or more than the space taken up by the cabins. So if we cut that number in half we’re back to 750 passengers, similar to our initial estimate from the cruise ship.

The bottom line is that while 250 is probably a bit low, it’s not unreasonable and the actual number might be only a factor of 2 or 3 higher. So we’ll go with 250 passengers for our analysis.

A Typical Journey

The Starliner

Okay, we have our ship, it carries 250 passengers. What does a typical journey look like? For this example, we’re going say this ship makes the run between Gran Quivera in the Prenglar system and Triad in the Cassidine system, a jump of 7 light years. We’ll look at the finances later, right now we are going to just look at logistics.

We’ll start the journey at the point when the ship is all loaded and ready to depart Gran Quivera for Triad. The first step is the jump to the Cassidine system. It takes just under 4.5 days to get to jump speed and the same amount of time to slow down. We’ll assume the total travel time is 9 days. In truth it could be up to 11 days depending on the orbital dynamics of the two systems and how accurate the jump is but we’ll go with 9 days.

After docking at the station around Triad, the ship has to do a number of housekeeping activities. First, the passengers have to disembark, then the interior of the ship needs to be cleaned. And new provisions need to be taken aboard. Then the passengers and the luggage for the next trip need to board.

Since this is a HS 10 ship, it has three Class B atomic engines. These engines require an overhaul after every three jumps. Since there are three engines, it makes sense to stagger the overhauls so that you do one after each jump. You’re always doing an overhaul each time in port, but you are only doing one and that make it reasonable. We’ll also top off the fuel pellets in the engine we’re doing the overhaul on. We’ll assume that the ship has two level 4 engineers on board that work alternating shifts so that maintenance and overhaul work can proceed around the clock to be as efficient as possible.

Let’s look at time scales. If a cruise ship can load or unload it’s 2800 passengers in a single day, I think it’s safe to assume that our 250 passengers can be loaded and unloaded in a single day as well. So that requires two days in port for those two operations. Refueling one engine takes on average 7 hours. The engine overhaul takes on average 38 hours. That’s a total of 45 hours of work. Assuming it is split between the two engineers, either working together on 10 hour shifts or around the clock on alternating shifts, that takes two and a quarter days. We’ll call it three to account for any variations and potential issues that come up. The provisioning and cleaning can occur while the engine work is happening. So our ship spends 5 days in port and then is ready for the return journey to Gran Quivera. So far we’re up to 14 days.

The trip back is exactly the same. It takes 9 days to make the jump, and another 5 days in port before it’s ready to leave. That is a total round trip time of 28 days.

The Shuttle

That’s the main part of the journey. You also need some way to get the passengers from the surface of the planet up to the station to board the starliner. That means you’re going to need a shuttle. For comparison, a Boeing 737 is about the size of a HS 2 ship. And it carries 175 people and their luggage. A Boeing 747 is about the size of a HS 3 ship and it carries 416 people plus luggage.

Now the trip up to the ship isn’t that long. As the Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels commented about his 1985 trip on the Space Shuttle Challenger:

Space is so close: It took only eight minutes to get there and twenty to get back.

That was at 3g and we probably want to be a little gentler on our passenger but it shouldn’t take more than a half hour to get into orbit and an hour back. They will need acceleration couches regardless and those take up a bit more room than a typical airline seat but not by much. It’s completely reasonable that a HS 3 shuttle can carry the 250 passengers for our space liner.

That means that we’ll need one shuttle at each system. If we let our spaceliner carry more than the 250 passengers, we’ll need more shuttles as well.

How Many Ships Do We Need?

With one ship, every 28 days we can move 250 beings from Gran Quivera to Triad and another 250 beings in the reverse direction. If this is the only ship running the route, there will only be a single trip once a month between the worlds. If you miss your flight, you’ll have to wait 28 days for the ship to be back. And if you want a round trip then you will spend at least 5 days in the destination system assuming you fly back out immediately when the ship leaves, otherwise it will be 33 days (or longer) after you arrive before you can catch a ship back.

Of course we can increase the frequency by adding more ships on the route. Let’s say we want a flight leaving every day. That’s easy enough. It’s a 28 day round trip for a single ship, you just need 28 ships and means you have a departure and arrival every day. And that allows you to move 250×28 or 7000 beings each way between the two systems in that same 28 day time period.

Regardless of how often you have interstellar departures (as long as it’s not more than once a day), your one shuttle can supply all of those ships. So even though you have 28 starliners, you only need a single shuttle at each system to handle the passenger traffic.

But that’s not the whole story. Each of those ships needs to have annual maintenance performed and that will take on average 15-16 days per ship. Which means once a year, each ships needs to be pulled out of rotation for one cycle to have it’s maintenance done. That means we need a spare ship to fill in while it’s out of commission. If you’re running a ship every day, you’ll actually need two spare ships to cover the gaps as the repair time on 28 ships is longer than a year and there will be some times when two ships are in maintenance. The shuttle needs annual maintenance as well, but that only takes on average 8-9 days as it is a smaller ship. If you only have 1-3 flights in that 28 day period, you can get away with a single shuttle and squeeze in its maintenance between runs, otherwise, you’ll need two of them to cover the maintenance periods.

My rendition of the AD star system map. Click for full size version.

That’s the numbers for a single system. There are 17 inhabited star systems on the AD map (not counting the Zebulon system) for a total of 19 jump routes. If there is a single flight along each route, once a month, you need a starliner for each leg plus a spare. And a shuttle in each system. That’s 55 ships. Of course that ignores the fact that some of the systems have two inhabited worlds (23 in all) and you’ll need more shuttles at those worlds and some ships to move passengers between the two planets in the system.

Now 55 ships (or 67 to account for the two world systems), isn’t too bad, but that is only a single trip every 28 days. If you want a daily trip between systems, you need 30×19 starliners (570 ships) plus 2×17 shuttles for a total of 604 ships. Again, accounting for the two planet systems, that’s another 6-12 shuttles and anywhere from 6 to 168 interplanetary starliners depending on how frequent you make the trips (6 shuttles and 6 ships for once every 28 days and 12 shuttles and 168 ships for daily trips).

With the starship construction centers only capable of supporting about 1500-2300 ships, we’re now looking at about one quarter to one half of the total ship capacity of the Frontier just to connect the worlds for a few hundred people moving between each system each day.

If you want more people moving between the worlds, you have several choices. First, you can make the passenger density higher and make each ship carry more. But that’s only realisticaly a factor of 2 or 3. As another option, you can make the starliners bigger. But remember, if the average ship size increases, the total number of ships the Frontier can support goes down. The final option is to increase the number of ships that the Frontier can support.

Implications

What this all means is that you have to make a decision about interstellar travel. If you have few ships, then trips are few and far between and not a lot of people will be traveling between worlds. Your characters should expect to spend months or years on a single world with all their adventures there, as getting tickets to move between worlds could be relatively rare depending exactly on how you structure it. It also probably means they won’t have their own ship as they are too rare.

Additionally, unless there are daily (or every other day) flights between each world, then it will take a long time to travel across the Frontier with layovers of several days to weeks in each system depending on the frequency and scheduling. If they are traveling between worlds, then there will be even longer spans of time (above the already long base travel times) between adventures and your plots need to account for those long time scales.

This article was focused simply on the logistics of travel and the number of ships it would take to support that. I didn’t even address the costs and economics of each individual flight. That will be part 1b at a future date.

What are your thoughts on the number and size of passenger liners? How do you handle it in your game? What other implications have you thought of that I didn’t cover? Let me know in the comments below.

Agriculture Ship Model and Miniature

I had originally planned to start in on the models from the Privateers boxed set after I finished the freighter from the Federation ships box, but a discussion on the starfrontiers.us site put agriculture ships in my brain and, since we had some silhouettes and a counter for these ships, I thought I might make a model of one of those first. Let’s look at these ships.

First of all, here are the images we have to work with:

The black and white drawing is from page 7 of the Knight Hawks Campaign book and the inset is the counter.

Both of these images show a long, spindly fuselage, a bit of a structure at the bow, behind the domes, and at the tail, and of course, the big agricultural domes themselves.

Now, you can debate as to whether or not these ships actually make sense or not. Especially as depicted here. And that’s part of what the discussion on the starfrontiers.us site was all about, but they are included in the game so I figured I’d take a crack at making a model. While I’ll stick with this basic idea, I’m going to make a few changes.

The Model

Here’s an image of the final Ag ship model. As you can see, it differs a bit from those silhouettes. Let’s talk about what I did.

First, I decided to make this model a hull size 10 ship, which for these types of ships, is a little on the small size. The rules say that Ag starships are typically hull size 8-16 while system ships have hull sizes in the range of 10 to 20.

As pictured in the silhouette images, the ships seem to have a single large chemical engine mounted at the tail. That sort of makes sense for a system system ship but just barely. If they are just floating out there collecting sunlight, then everything is growing in zero-gravity. On the other hand, if you want some sort of gravity in the ship, you need to be constantly accelerating (no artificial gravity in Star Frontiers). In the latter case, chemical drives don’t really make sense. So I decided to give the ship ion engines instead. For the model, I used the same engine design I created for the minelayer miniature. It the same size (a Class B engine), but I used two struts to attach them to the hull in this case.

The other difference with the engines is that I used three of them instead of just one. The ship construction rules call for three engines on a hull size 10 ship so that is what I went with. I guess a single Class C engine would do the trick but let’s stick to more standard designs for now.

Like the images, this model has a long, skinny fuselage. But it’s kind of hard to see as I added a bunch more to the ship. The bit at the end is modeled on the tail of the ship in the black and white image. You can’t see it in the model image above but the section right under the domes is also thicker like in the silhouettes. And I also used the same style bow.

I modeled the domes on the image from the black and white image rather than the counter and just put four of them on the ship. On a larger ship, I would probably keep them the same size and just add more of them as is represented on the counter.

The main difference between my ship and the images is that I added some large storage tanks below the domes, and piping to connect them. I figure this is where the extra nutrient solutions, air, and water are stored as they are cycled through the domes. I also figure this area contains the processing machinery.

Another thing I added was lights on the underside of the bow. If you click on the model image above, you can just see them. There is one pointing at each dome. These are powerful, full-spectrum lamps that can be turned on to provide illumination to the domes when the ship is not pointed directly at the sun. Or maybe they are used all the time. If you’re flying around the system, constantly keeping the ship at 1 g, there are going to be many times that you don’t have the domes pointed at the star. In any case, they are a small feature on the model.

This model was created at 1/3000th scale, or 3 meters on the ship equaling 1 mm on the model. This is the same scale I used for the sathar Destroyer and CDCSS Nightwind and roughly the scale of the UPF Frigate, Destroyer, & Minelayer. When I start making a new set of ships after finishing the privateers, the models will all be made at that scale. The fuselage of the ship is 240 meters (80 mm) as is standard for a HS 10 ship. It’s a lot skinnier than a typical HS 10 ship, 15-20m diameter compared to 40, but I figure the extra hull goes into the domes and the storage tanks. With the engines added, the model is 92.67mm long, giving the ship a total length of 278 meters. Across the widest point of the domes it is 56.66 mm or 170 meters.

Printing

With the model complete, it was time to print it. The image at the right shows the hull size 10 Agriculture ship (black) next to the Nightwind freighter (green) and sathar destroyer (red, painted). Unfortunately, the black resin prints don’t photograph very well.

For the most part, the print came out very well. But it needed a lot of supports under the domes. For this print, I printed it upright, just as pictured (and how I’ve printed all the other ships) and used the default supports that the printing software supplied. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite enough support under the domes. Mainly, the supports could have been placed better and on the edges of the domes, not just the underside. The result was that the physical shape of the underside of the domes is a little warped, rounded were it should be flat and angled. I think in the future, I will print the model at an angle, tilted 30-45 degrees. It will require much less support material and the surfaces will come out better as the printer has issues with large horizontal surfaces that are not touching the build plate.

Up Next

Next up is working on the Privateer models. I haven’t done any modeling recently due to all the life changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic but will be getting back to it in the next week or so as life has finally settled down to somewhat of a routine.

I also plan to revisit this ship in the future and create a HS 20 version with more domes. That will probably have to be printed in parts as I don’t think a full scale HS 20 ship will fit on my printer, It’s a bit larger than my print volume, at least printed vertically.

Like all the other models, I’ll be adding this to my Miniatures Price Table if you want me to print you one, and putting the model up on DriveThruRPG on my 3D Models page if you just want to grab the model file and print it yourself.

What do you think of the Ag Ship. Have you ever used one of these in your game? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Freighter Model and Miniature

The model and miniature this month is a recreation of the small freighter model that was part of the Federation Ships boxed set. This is the last model I needed to recreate to complete that original set. With this one done, they are now all available.

The image to the right is the original miniature from the boxed set. I hadn’t tackled this particular miniature in the past mainly because I was initially focused on the military vessels. But I was also a little worried about recreating the shape of those struts and all the detail at the tail of the ship. But with lots of experience behind me, it was time to reproduce this miniature.

The Model

Let’s start with the final model and then I’ll talk a bit about what it took to create.

I started with the main body/oval shape at the bow of the ship. My version is a little more rounded than the original as I just used a stretched sphere for this part. To get the exact shape would have taken creating a custom curve and then doing a rotate_extrude() to make the 3D shape (and then squashing it to make it flattened). I’m happy with how this turned out although I originally expressed some desire to revisit that bit of the model.

The tail of the ship is just a long column that the cargo pods and bits at the end are attached to. That was added next.

Then came the cargo pods. These are a recreation of the original miniature (although the rings around the top and bottom are probably a bit thinner than the original). Interestingly this was the part of the ship that generated the most commentary on the Facebook group when I posted this picture. Everyone wanted me to get rid of the double container and make one big one. Which is something I’ll probably do in the future but for now I’m keeping to the original model.

Next up was the engines. Since these are different than the engines on most of the other ships, but similar to those on the minelayer, I’m assuming that these are ion engines as well. The engines themselves were easy enough, just some cylinders will a sphere at the top. The hard part was getting the curve of the struts right.

That shape is not one that OpenSCAD can do natively. At first I looked at doing some linear_extrude()’s of a few stretched circles. But that wouldn’t give me the curvature that the strut has. So I went looking for an OpenSCAD module that would allow me to extrude along a curve and vary the scale along the extrusion.

The first one I found was the “Extrude Along Path” module by gringer. However, it didn’t allow me to do the scaling the way I wanted or at least easily. So I went looking for another option. What I found was the “path_extrude with scaling” library by tpchuckles. This module built on gringer’s Extrude Along Path module and added in the scaling in a way that was easy to use.

Now that I hd the tool, I just need the path to extrude along and how much to scale at each point. To figure this out, I took another picture of the mini, this time with a ruler for scale (seen at right). This is actually a different mini that had a primer coat on it. Next, I imported the picture into Inkscape. I then scaled it so that there were 10 pixels to a millimeter. This would allow me 1/10th of a millimeter resolution when I was making measurements. Next I drew a curve onto the image down the middle of each strut and then averaged the two curves. This would be the path that the extrusion was to follow.

The next step was to get the scaling at a number of points along that curve. The question was, how many points would I need. As you can see, the entire strut is only a little more than half an inch (about 17mm) in length. I could go really finely detailed but that would be overkill. But if I didn’t have enough, it wouldn’t look smooth enough. I ended up just looking at it and finding points where either the path made a significant change or the width of the strut had a change in curvature (the derivatives changed for those who remember their calculus). In the end, I picked 12 points along the path.

Once I had the points I then drew a line perpendicular to the path that touched the two edges of the strut. With all that done, I read off the coordinates of each point and length of each perpendicular line segment. That gave me the points for the curve and the scaling in one dimension. The scaling in the other dimension came from just making a few measurements with the calipers at a few points along it’s length since the strut is mostly the same thickness with a big of flaring as it approached the main body of the ship.

With all that done, I plugged all the numbers into a few arrays, called the path_extrude() function from the module and out came the strut. I had to do a few small tweaks but it worked quite well and generated the shape you see in the image above.

The final bit was all that stuff at the back of the fuselage. As you can see from the two images of the original miniatures, it was kind of hard to see. But working carefully between the two miniatures, and looking at both sides of each, I was able to tease out a structure. I have the advantage that I don’t have to get molten metal to flow through a mold in making these models so I can go with slightly finer and more defined features in my models than appear on the original miniatures. I had already noticed this on the bigger UPF ships, especially the cannons on the battleship and light cruiser. I took advantage of it here as well.

Printing

With the model complete, it was time to print. Nothing really exciting here, it was a fairly straightforward print. I printed it nose up like I did all the other ships and, standing 41 mm (1.6″) tall, it took about 4.5 hours to print. Given that there isn’t a lot of detail on this one, it might be possible to get a good print with it lying flat which would reduce the print time to about 1.5 hours but require a bit more support on the “down” side of the ship.

Here’s the final printed miniature next to the original (unprimed) mini.

A few things stood out to me comparing the two, some of which I’ve already mentioned. One is the shape of the bow. The other is the rings around the cargo pods. They probably need to be a bit bigger on the model as they didn’t stand out as much as I was expecting.

The other major difference is the details at the back of the fuselage. I think in the end I made them a little bit smaller than on the original. That said, there is more detail in the printed one than in the original.

I also noticed that the engines have a bit of a wobble to them but that can be cured in future prints with a little more support structure to hold things steady.

Up Next

At some point I’ll revisit this model and tweak the cargo pods. Both to make the ring around the top and bottom more defined, and also to make one or two more different shaped pods and produce miniatures with the different cargo containers. The great thing about working in OpenSCAD is that the cargo containers are just a function. Write a new function for the new shape, call that one instead, and viola, you’re done with a new miniature. But for now, I’m happy with the way this one turned out.

Next month’s model will be an agriculture ship. This will be a new creation as there is no existing mini for this type of ship. There was some discussion about it recently on the various Star Frontiers social media hubs and that inspired me to make that model before tackling the privateer minis.

You’ll be able to order this mini from the Order Miniatures page here on the site if you want a printed miniature, or grab the model from my 3D Models page on DriveThruRPG if you have your own printer.

Let me know your thoughts, comments, or suggestions in the comment section below.

Pirate Frigate Model and Miniature

It’s the second post of the month and, as is becoming somewhat of a regular feature, it’s time for a new miniature. This time around we are looking at the Pirate Frigate.

This model is another recreation of an original TSR miniature. The original Pirate Frigate was include in the Sathar Ships box of miniatures along with the Corvette and Pirate Assault Scout and the three sathar ships (frigate and light and heavy cruisers).

The Pirate Frigate completes the set of models from that box. It’s only taken me three and a half years. When I first started this 3D modeling hobby, I began by creating a sathar destroyer miniature to start to fill in the gaps in the miniature line and to make a model for the ship that I had created a full set of deck plans for. I then went on in short order to do every other ship in the Sathar Ships box except for the Pirate Frigate.

The main reason was the guns mounted on the side of the ship. At the time, I knew that the 3D printer I had access to was not able to print that fine of detail. The other reason was the finer detail itself. I was just starting out and didn’t have the skill needed (or maybe it was the patience) to actually build that model. I did try scanning the miniature with a 3D scanner we had just acquired at work, and which I was testing, in an attempt to create a model that way, but that never really worked out. It turns out that the shininess of the metal miniatures make the laser scanning beam give weird results. And so this model languished on my todo list for many years.

But now that I have a high resolution printer that can print the detail on the miniature, the wait is finally over. And after tackling the UPF ships, modeling the details on this one was actually fairly easy. I’ve gotten more confident in my skills and more willing to take a little artistic license instead of trying to make an exact copy, although this one is really close.

The Model

3D render of the pirate frigate model. It has a cylindrical fuselage with a tapered, conical nose cone and two large gun turrets sticking out from the side.

Here’s the finished model. There isn’t a lot to say about this model. Other than the guns, the shape of the model is fairly straightforward with only a few simple details added to the surface.

One bit that you can’t see from the image but is quickly apparent if you are holding the miniature is that the body of the ship is not perfectly round. Rather it is squished somewhat so that it is largest along the axis where the guns are mounted (about 8mm across) and smaller perpendicular to that (about 7mm). I modeled the ship round and then applied a scaling factor to the fuselage to squish it slightly.

The hardest part of the fuselage was actually the nose of the ship. That tapered, pointed shape at the ship’s bow is not a shape my modeling program can create natively. I can stretch out spheres, and I can make pointed cones, but that rounded cone shape is not part of the core system. There might be a library out there that someone has written that will do it, but I haven’t found one (or looked very hard).

For those trying out OpenSCAD, it needed to be a series of short straight lines instead of a simpler smooth curve because OpenSCAD doesn’t work with the spline() object that a smooth curve creates in the exported .DXF file. So you have to go and make a series of small straight segments to approximate the curve. The model is so small that you can’t even see the small segments and it looks smooth.

Instead, what I did here is similar to what I did for the body of the sathar destroyer. I took an image of the original miniature and, in Inkscape, modeled the curvature of the nose by a series of short, straight lines. Once I had the shape correct, I exported the curve as a .DXF file which I could import into my modeling program (OpenSCAD) and then create the nose of the ship from that imported shape. (Using the rotate_extrude() command). I then had to scale it a bit to get it to be the right size.

The final bit of difficulty was the guns. This is what held me off from creating this model years ago. But now, armed with my calipers, rulers, magnifying glasses, and a lot more experience, I was able to make short work of the gun. It didn’t hurt that I have several of the original miniatures so I could look at all of them and use the ones in the best condition to make the measurements and understand the details. Like the fuselage, the guns are compressed slightly along the same axis but to a different extent. So they are scaled and added separately to the main fuselage.

Overall, this model took about four and a quarter hours. At least an hour of that was getting the nose cone right and remembering that I needed to use small line segments instead of a curve to define the shape.

Printing

3D printed miniature next to the original.

The image to the right shows the printed miniature next to the original metal one. I forgot to include a ruler for scale but he miniature is 53mm (2.1″) tall, tip to tail. The white residue on the printed model is from evaporated isopropyl alcohol that I use to clean the excess resin off the print. I’ve since started flushing the models with soft water before curing them and don’t have that residue any more.

The guns I created are not quite as skinny s the ones on the original metal minis but are pretty close. I could make them skinnier but don’t think it necessary.

Up Next

That completes the Sathar Ships boxed set. You can order any and all of these models on the Order Miniatures page here on the site and I will print and ship them to you. If you want just the 3D model files, they are available on my 3D Models page on DriveThruRPG. Since this model recreates an old mini, the file is just a pay-what-you-want product and can be downloaded for free if you desire.

Now that the Sathar Ships box is done, it’s time to finish the models from the Federation Ships box. The only remaining model from that box is the small freighter model. That will be the subject of my next Model and Miniature post, either late this month or, more likely, the second week in March. After that, I’ll be starting in on the ship models from the Privateer boxed set.

As always, leave your thoughts, comments, or suggestions in the comment section below.

UPF Minelayer Model and Miniature

This is not the post I had planned for this week, but since I’ve been up to my ears getting the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready to go, I didn’t have time to do the post I had planned. You’ll probably get that one next week.

With the Assault Carriers (UPF & Sathar) completed, it was time to tackle the last of the UPF ships needed for the Second Sathar War game: the UPF Minelayer.

Now, this is a bit of an interesting ship to do the mini for. If we look at the counter from the game (shown at right), those familiar with the miniatures produced by TSR will realize that a miniature already exists with that silhouette.

This is the miniature labeled on the blister pack as the Sathar Cutter. This particular one is missing one of it’s cannons but it’s a really close match for the shape on the counter.

This isn’t the first time that TSR messed up the labeling of ship images as the counters and the “Ship Identification Guide” in the Tactical Operations Manual don’t match up. We can probably assume that they had this miniatures and its silhouette and since the cutter doesn’t have game stats (until fans created them – see Frontier Explorer issue 2 – Friend or Foe), they used the image for the UPF Minelayer but didn’t change the name on the blister pack. In the blister pack, it is sold with the Sathar Frigate so my guess is that it was supposed to be a sathar ship but the silhouette was used for the UPF Minelayer by accident.

In any case, it poses a bit of dilemma. We need to make a ship that at least sort of looks like the counter to continue with the theme of the miniatures I’ve been creating but it also can’t look exactly like the sathar ship. This is also why I saved this miniature for last as you could always use the Sathar Cutter mini as the UPF minelayer in your game as it matches the game counter. So with that background out of the way, let’s look at the ship.

UPF Minelayer Miniature

Since I’m not planning on matching the shape of the silhouette on the counter exactly, I want to look at the broad features of the silhouette for inspiration. In my mind there are four main features to be considered:

  1. The body should be somewhat roundish and elongated
  2. There should be two side lobes off the main body
  3. There should be two guns mounted forward on the main body
  4. The engines should be long and skinny.

Now that last one doesn’t match with any of the engines on any of the other UPF ships. However, I’ve always felt that the minelayer, unlike the mainline ships, used ion engines instead of atomic engines. It’s really more of a system ship that does its work before the battle starts so it doesn’t need the performance of the main warships.

And the game stats bear this idea out. Ion engines are limited to an ADF of 1 and that is what the minelayer has, unlike all the other ships which have an ADF of at least 2. So these long skinny engines can be the UPF ion engines instead of atomic ones.

The two guns really aren’t an issue either as the minelayer sports a pair of laser batteries in addition to the mine and seeker missile dispensers. And the other features are just things to keep in mind while designing the ship. The minelayer is listed as hull size 7, so in the end, the ship should be a bit bigger than the UPF Destroyer when it is all done. With those design constraints, let’s get to work.

The image to the right shows the finished model. Instead of the smooth rounded body of the Sathar Cutter, I chose to go with a more angular squashed cylinder and then add cylindrical lobes to the side somewhat like the UPF Assault Carrier.

The two laser batteries are mounted on the front of the ship and the engines are long, tapered to the back, and, although you can’t easily see it in this image, angled slightly inward at the back as are the engines on the silhouette.

Beyond that I added some surface features reminiscent of the other UPF vessels and then a bunch of small cylindrical indentations on the back of the fuselage to represent the mine dispersal system. In the model, they are all at different angles so that mines are spread out as they are ejected.

Printing the Miniature

With the model made, it was time to print. Since this is a relatively small miniature, the print only took about 5 hours. Here is the UPF Minelayer next to the sathar cutter and UPF frigate, as well as a ruler for scale.

The engines didn’t come out as straight as I’d like. I’ll need to add some more supports to them on future prints to get them to hold the right positions.

As you can see, the ship is a bit bigger than the cutter and the body is bigger than the main part of the frigate as well. It’s also bigger than the destroyer although I don’t have a picture of that one. While it’s not as long, it is about as thick and much wider so I feel that it came in at right about the correct size to be just a bit bigger than the frigate and the destroyer.

This model just about used up all of my grey resin so I’ll probably be printing in the black or white resins until I get some more grey ordered. The grey (and white) take longer to print as they are opaque resins and need more curing time but I definitely like the look of the grey miniatures. At least they photograph better than any of the others.

Up Next

I finished this model a couple of weeks ago so my Patreon supporters already have the model file. I’ll be posting it on DriveThruRPG shortly with all the other models on my 3D Models page. I’ve also added it to the Miniatures Price List here on the site.

That completes all the UPF and Sathar ships. I’m probably going to revisit the fighters soon as I need to make those models more friendly to FDM printers. The models I created work on an SLA printer but the wings are too thin (by about a factor of 5-10) to print on a regular FDM printer. I want to make the models easier to print on FDM printers (or at least versions that are) before I post those models on DriveThruRPG.

But before I do that, I’m going to tackle the last military vessel that I haven’t reproduced from the original miniature sets, the pirate frigate. That’s a ship that came in the Sathar ships box of miniatures along with the pirate assault scout which I have already reproduced. I’ve already started on the model, so once I get issue 27 of the Frontier Explorer out the door, I’ll get back to it.

Once the pirate frigate model is complete, I’ll be in a position to start offering “module packs” of printed miniatures that contain all the ships needed for the Knight Hawks scenarios from the various modules as well as the UPF Task Forces. I may need to make a few more models for some of those (the Gullwind and Elanor Moraes come immediately to mind) but that will give me some direction for future builds.

After the pirate frigate, there are just 7 ships from the original sets left to recreate: the freighter from the Federation Ships box and the six ships from the Privateers box. Those will be my next projects, interspersed with the models needed for the module packs, after reworking the fighters.

What are your thoughts on the minelayer model? Let me know in the comment section below.

Sathar Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

With the UPF Assault Carrier completed, it was time to tackle the Sathar Assault Carrier. This would complete all of the capital ships for both sides.

Now, way back when I started this blog, I posted the outline for a sathar assault carrier project. This is not the model that project was intended to create. When I made that project outline, I never imagined I’d be this heavy into creating miniatures. Although if I ever get around to actually doing that project, the end result might be fairly similar. One major difference, however, would be that all the surface features would be actual scale rather than selected for aesthetics as they are on this model. But that’s for some undetermined future date. Let’s look at the model I have created.

Building the Model

Like the others, for this model I’m working off the silhouette from the game counter, pictured to the right. As you can see, this ship is a bit more bulky and angular than the other sathar vessels which tend to be more bulbous and curvy.

That said, there are definitely some features that fit the typical sathar ship style. We have the long skinny engines with the spherical tip, long, extended nacelles for the engines struts, and a round head separated from the body by a skinny neck. The other features that stand out are the guns on the head of the ship and the rectangular shape of the lobes on the side of the ship. I’m going to assume that the latter are the location of the bays for the fighters.

image showing a small assault carrier being approached by an assault scout and exploration vessel

Now, there is another reference for the sathar assault carrier in the rules. The image to the left comes from the module SFKH3: Face of the Enemy. This ship (bottom) is described as an older, obsolete, and smaller assault carrier no longer in main-line service by the sathar fleet. In the module, it has been converted by the sathar to serve as a mobile base for larger scout craft instead of fighter craft. So while I will probably model this ship at some time in the future, I won’t be using this image as a reference for the assault carrier model.

Like the UPF assault carrier, the sathar assault carrier should be significantly larger than the light cruiser but not quite as big as the heavy cruiser. That gave me a bit of a scale to shoot for when building the model. Once that scale was decided on, I used the counter to get the rough shape of the head and body of the ship.

Here’s the final model (pictured to the right). The size of the body, neck, and head are taken directly from the dimensions on the counter.

Given the positioning of the guns on the counter, I assumed there were three evenly spaced around the head. Since the stats for the Assault Carrier include a laser battery, a rocket battery, and a proton battery, I figured that wasn’t too much of a stretch.

The size and shape of the rectangular lobes around the center of the ship are based on the counter as well. The height of the lobes from the center of the ship match the profile height from the counter and the size of the rectangle that forms the outer face, along with the width where it intersects the hull match as well. What is different is the detail on the face. The counter shows one large rectangular shaped detail that I decided to break into three smaller ones on each lobe. each of these represent a fighter bay giving the assault carrier the capacity (per the rules) to hold up to a dozen fighters.

The other major difference is the engines. Instead of the single, long engine depicted on the counter, I went with pairs of smaller engines, similar to the ones used on the heavy cruiser. Unlike the heavy cruiser, which mounted the two engines in each cluster in-line with the engine strut, for the assault carrier, I chose to mount them perpendicular to the engine strut. Additionally, these engines are slightly shorter, a bit thicker, and have a bit more spacing between them than the ones on the heavy cruiser. Otherwise, they are similar to the heavy cruiser engines and modeled on those engines.

It’s not obvious from the image of the model, which is the intention, but I started using a slightly different technique when modeling this ship. For all the ships in the past, I’ve set a global level of detail for round objects that was fine enough for the larger bits of the ships to look smooth. This resulted in way more detail on small objects (like the spheres around the upper body) than was needed and caused the rendering time of the model to be really long. Starting with this model, I’ve been specifying the detail at the individual part level, allowing me finer control and reducing the rendering time significantly since I don’t have to put as much detail into the smaller pieces.

Printing

With the model done, it was time to print the miniature. As it turns out, this model is fairly massive. In fact, physically, it has more volume than any of the models I’ve created to date, even the UPF assault carrier. Here’s a picture of the sathar assault carrier along with the sathar heavy cruiser and light cruiser (and a quarter for scale).

The light cruiser looks kind of glowy because it was printed in a translucent resin and this particular print was hollow so the translucency really shows.

It sits right in there between the light and heavy cruiser but it is much fatter. It ended up weighing a couple of ounces, compared the ~1 ounce for the heavy cruiser and ~1/2 ounce for the light cruiser. It actually has some heft to it. I may consider printing these slightly hollow to save weight and bring the cost down. Here’s another picture with it next to the UPF assault carrier.

The two assault carriers side by side. One of the features chipped off of the aft fuselage of the sathar ship when I was trimming off the printing supports attached to it. I don’t think those supports are actually necessary and will remove them next time I print one.

As you can see, it ended up being a bit bigger even though they are supposed to be roughly the same sized ships. I probably made the sathar one a bit too big, but I like the way it turned out so I’m going to leave it be. It’s not too out of proportion to the other sathar vessels. Any downsizing I need to do will come with the next round of ships, which I’ll be designing to all be to scale with one another. However, with it being this massive, it makes sense that one of the sathar conditions for retreat in the Second Sathar War game is the loss of too many of these ships.

Up Next

That’s it for the Sathar Assault Carrier. I’ll be adding it and the UPF Assault Carrier to the Miniatures Price Table here on the site as well as uploading the model files to my 3D models page on DriveThruRPG. My Patreon supporters received the model files for both of these ships a while ago.

The next ship I’ll be tackling will be a new model for the UPF Minelayer. That may be ready by the end of the month.

Let me know what you think about the Sathar Assault Carrier in the comments below.

UPF Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

Unsurprisingly, December has been kind of hectic and I didn’t get as much time to work on this miniature as I had hoped earlier in the month but I managed to finish it in time for Christmas.

This is a model for which there is no original miniature so this one comes completely out of my imagination. Well, almost completely. Like the others I’ve created from scratch, we at least had the silhouette from the counter. Now this shop deviates significantly from the cylindrical shape of the the other capital ships in the UPF roster and actually looks a bit more like the UPF assault scout. It’s also radically different from the silhouette given in the UPF Campaign book that I’ll use for a different version. In any case, this was the basis I used for the model.

Building the Model

The first thing I needed to do was figure out a scale. According to the rules, the Assault Carrier is supposed to be hull size 16-18. This makes it a bit bigger than the light cruiser but smaller than or on par with the heavy cruiser. We’ll see how well I did with that later but based on the size of those models, I picked a scale and got started.

The first order of business was to get the basic body shape down. I knew that I didn’t what to make it as thick as it was wide since that would make it very, very massive. So while I matched the silhouette, I made the fuselage flattened rather than as thick as it was wide. I didn’t have any good idea what that circle on the silhouette was supposed to be so I just left it off. I suppose it could be a really big dome but it was right where I wanted to put the fighter hangars so I ignored it.

I again reused the standard UPF class C engine that I’ve used on all the other capital ships That makes it differ somewhat what from the silhouette as they are longer than depicted but that’s not really a big deal. The gun batteries at the nose are also a bit bigger than depicted on the counter.

With the basic shape done, it was time to add surface detail. The first thing I did was add in hangar bays for the fighters. Since an assault carrier can hold 8-12 fighters, I decided that this one would have 12 bays. There are three on each “face” of the fuselage. They are the three rectangular structures sticking out toward the back (thicker) part of the ship. Each one represents a bay for a single fighter.

After that it was just a matter of adding details to give it some character like the other ships. I turned out that there was a lot of surface to cover on this model, more than on the others. I reused some of the surface detail structures from the other models and created a few new ones for this model. I’m starting to build up quite a collection of objects.

The angled surfaces of this model provided some interesting opportunities to play with the relative rotation of the details having some parallel to the surface and other (like the hangars) not rotated to be at the same angle. For each face of the model, I composed all the surface features on a flat, vertical plane an then rotated it to be flush with the surface of the ship. This make positioning everything much easier.

When adding in all the detail, I struggled between how much regularity to include (e.g. identical, regularly spaced features) versus applying a bit of randomness. You can be the judge of whether I hit a good balance or not.

All told this model took about 8 hours of works spread out over a month of time, often in 15-20 minute increments here and there when I could find the time.

Printing

This post would have been up a bit sooner but there were some issues in getting the model printed. Well, printing was straightforward, but getting the final model rendered ran into some problems.

There is a lot of detail on the model and in the end, my laptop that I do the modeling on was unable to do the final render to the printable file at the high detail level I wanted. It kept crashing due to running out of memory. In the end I had to render it on my big computer (which I’ll probably do as a matter of course from now on as it has more memory and a faster CPU). And even then there was a weird problem in the rendering that I had to figure out. Since it took 2.75 hours to render, even on the big computer, that was not a fast process.

From this I’ve learned that I need to start being more selective and assign rendering detail at the individual element level instead of globally. The issue is really on the round pieces as you get lots of vertices in those parts that really are needed on the small parts but if you don’t have it on the larger pieces, you notice the individual faces. I’ve been setting the detail level high so the big pieces (the lobes and weapons balls in this model) look good but that’s been serious overkill on all the small parts. In the end, the raw model file for this ship was 381 MB. The next largest ones were the space station at 239MB and the battleship at 215MB. So that’s something I’ll be looking into on future models.

I finished the model Sunday afternoon and thought I’d have a print by Monday morning but all the rendering problems resulted in me not getting the print started until late Monday afternoon. It takes twelve hours to print so it just finished this morning. But it printed and it looks great. Here’s a picture of the side not shown in the model image above. It still has the printing supports on it as it’s not done curing yet. They will all get removed once that is done.

It’s still curing so I haven’t removed the printing supports yet.

I was very happy to see out it turned out. The details in the model image looked a bit over powering, maybe because of the color scheme the software uses. But printed, they looked just right.

Earlier I mentioned that we’d check in on how I did on picking the scale. Here’s a picture comparing the assault carrier with the battleship (left) and heavy cruiser (right). I probably should have included the light cruiser as well but didn’t. This image shows the side of the assault carrier that was in the model image.

The assault carrier should have roughly the same volume as the heavy cruiser. It’s shorter but much fatter. And going by the volume of resin needed, more than double the size. So on an empirical basis, I probably made it a bit too big but I actually think it looks just about right aesthetically. So I’m happy with it as it is. However, it’s way too wide to use as a chess piece if I do make a chess set with the ships so I’ll have to think about that.

Coming Up

I’ll get the model posted up on DriveThruRPG in the coming week (and updated this post with a link) as well as getting it added to my Miniature Price List page.

This finishes all the UPF models except for a new minelayer. I’m holding off on that one as you can use the sathar cutter miniature in a pinch since that one matches the silhouette of the counter in the game. I’ll revisit that model soon but next up is the Sathar Assault Carrier.

A year and a half ago when I started this blog, the Sathar Assault Carrier was one of my original projects that I’ve managed to not spend any time on. This will not be that version of the assault carrier as I wanted to create a full set of deck plans and a model that matches them like I did for the sathar destroyer. That’s a very large project. This version of the miniature will be created just as I’ve done with the UPF Heavy Cruiser and Assault Carrier – using the counter silhouette to give its shape and adding surface details based on the existing miniatures. The sathar ships are less cluttered so this should go faster.

What do you think of the UPF Assault Carrier? Let me know in the comments below.

UPF Heavy Cruiser Model and Miniature

The final model. Click for full sized image

Okay, with the UPF Battleship completed, I’ve now recreated all the original military miniatures. I still need to make the Pirate Frigate model and also the freighter and privateers but those are going to wait a bit. Before I tackle them, I want to finish all the ships in the UPF and sathar order of battle. These remaining ships are ones for which no miniature was made by TSR. There weren’t models for the fighters or destroyers either, but I’ve already made those. That leaves us with these missing ships: the UPF Minelayer (if you don’t use the sathar Cutter model), Assault Carriers for both sides, and the UPF Heavy Cruiser. The latter is the topic of today’s post. The image to the right shows the completed model. This post will talk about how we got there.

Sources

There aren’t a lot of sources for the Heavy Cruiser. For “definitive” images, we only have the silhouettes on page 6 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book (KHCB) and the game counter. You might be able to argue that some of the other ships depicted in the books are heavy cruisers, but nothing else is labeled as such. Since I’m saving the profiles from page 6 & 7 of the KHCB for a second set of miniatures I’ll produce later, we’re going to go with the image on the counter for our basic profile.

This is the image we have to work with. It has a relatively small head, wide fuselage segments and a fairly narrow “waist” region. We also notice that like the destroyer, this has a prominent cannon hanging under the bow of the ship.

Based on the data in the KHCB, the heavy cruiser should be between HS 16-18 and have 6 engines. Since the Battleship was HS 20, and the Light Cruiser is HS 12-14, this ship should fall somewhere right between those two ships in size. That’s what we have to work with, so let’s get started.

The Basic Hull

Building the basic hull was straightforward as I just had to measure the relative sizes of the various parts of the ship and scale them appropriately. There were two main deviations. The first was the engine region. The images on the counters show small engine structures. Since the light cruiser and the battleship both use the same engine design, I intend to reuse that engine here on the heavy cruiser as well. That necessitated making the engine region just a tad bigger than what is shown on the counter, and the engines will stick out further from the body of the ship.

The second variation was in the bow or “head” of the ship. The rules say that heavy cruisers are all old ships. That, combined with the fact that the bow of the ship looks kind of small compared to the body of the ship, led me to make the decision to use the same bow portion on this model as I used for the light cruiser, similar to how I used the same head on the destroyer that I did on the frigate. This gives us the following basic profile.

Adding Details

Next I decided to reuse some of the major elements from both the light cruiser and the battleship. On the aft portion of the fuselage, I used the domed structure from the back of the battleship but only placed three of them compared to the battleship’s four.

Then on the forward fuselage, I used the cannons from the light cruiser placing four of those compared to the light cruiser’s three emplacements. I also add the external cannon onto the bow of the ship. Along the way I also added in the crenelated trim at the edges of the cylinder sections. That gave me this profile.

That was the relatively easy part as I was reusing major structures that I had created for the other models. After that it was time to work my way up the fuselage adding in random bits of machinery, piping, and other structures to give it a bit of surface character to match the other ships in the series.

For some of these bits, I reused some of the structures from the light cruiser and battleship models while for others, I just added things in that fit my fancy. In the end, the final model looked like this:

In the end, the model was 112.5 mm (4.4″) tall which put it right in the middle of the 94 mm and 120.75 mm heights of the light cruiser and battleship, respectively.

Printing

The next step was actually printing it. It’s all well and good to have a cool looking model, but if it doesn’t print, that doesn’t do us any good.

For this printing, I switched back to the grey resin that I had used for the light cruiser. It’s an opaque resin and takes about 50% longer to print but it photographs much better. The total print time with this resin was about 14 hours so I started the print before I went to bed and let it run overnight. When I got up in the morning the print was almost done. After it finished and I gave it some time to cure, I snapped a picture of the heavy cruiser model along with the light cruiser and battleship.

This shows the relative sizes along with a ruler for absolute scale. I think it turned out just fine and looks like a ship made from the same design templates.

Getting the Model and Miniature

I’ve added the Heavy Cruiser to the Miniature Price Table if you want to order a physical miniature. The cost for this miniature will be $5.50, the same as the sathar heavy cruiser. Anyone who joins my Patreon this month (Nov 2019) at the Crafter level will get a printed battleship and heavy cruiser miniature in December.

If you would like a copy of the model STL file, I’ve made the model available on DriveThruRPG along with all the other models. The cost of the UPF Heavy Cruiser model is $1.99. My Patreon backers received the model last week when I finished it.

Final Thoughts

What do you think about this model and miniature? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Next up is the UPF Assault Carrier. I’ve’ already started working on it so you can expect to see a post in December with that model and a printed version of the miniature.

I’m also considering making a chess set using the ships from both sides as the pieces. Is that something you would be interested in? Let me know.

UPF Battleship Model and Miniature

I thought I’d be done with this model and ready to post this last week, but the model ended up taking me about 50% longer than I had originally planned. And since I had guessed 10-12 hours, that was a significant time overrun. In the end, the model took about 17 hours to complete.

Click for full sized image

Let’s not bury the lede, here is the finished model, pictured to the right. With the engines, it stands 120.75mm (4.8″) tall (or long depending on how you look at it) and is a little less than an inch (23.7mm to be exact) in diameter at the widest point on the engines.

The extra time was spent in trying to get all the details just right. There are a lot of them on the battleship and it just took longer than I was expecting. However, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Let’s look a bit at the process.

Getting Started

This is a miniature that was part of the Federation Ships boxed produced by TSR. On the box, it said that there was “some assembly required” for the battleship miniature. This model comes in 10 different pieces. The eight engines are each separate and the main fuselage comes in two parts. Now, I picked up my miniature box(es, I have four now, only 2 of which didn’t have lead rot when I bought them) used on E-bay in the last few years. As such the previous owners had already glued the fuselage together in three of the boxes but hadn’t attached the engines. So this is what I had to start with.

One of the two originals I used to reference. The other had a paint primer coat applied. Click for full sized image.

Now, as I discovered while working on the Light Cruiser, those are the exact same engines on both miniatures, so I had already done the work to create them. I just had to make 8 copies for the battleship.

There were also a number of repeated elements on this ship, namely the three main levels of gun turrets, the structure around the waist of the ship, and the “grill” around the neck.

That’s what I tackled first. For the gun turrets, I created a model of each of the structures and then just placed four of each of them, ninety degrees apart, around the fuselage. For the structure around the waist, it was repeated six times, and the grill around the neck has thirteen bumps. That piece ended up being just a stretched and squished sphere rotated around the neck. Getting those pieces in place was the “easy” part and only took about five hours to do giving me a model that looked like this.

The gun turrets are the same as used in the Light Cruiser, but they are sitting on different base platforms. So while I could reuse the turret, I had to build the bases new for this miniature.

Adding the Trim

At that point I just started at the back of the ship and worked my way forward adding in all the little detail bits. When I got to the area between the gun emplacements, I would work one section at a time filling in the space between the turrets, rotating 90 degrees and repeating.

While there are some repeated elements across the ship and mostly on the bow or head of the vessel, almost all of the the little decorations on the surface are unique. So each one had to be measured with my calipers and reconstructed. In the end, that just wasn’t as fast (and there were a lot of details) as I had expected. When I hit the 12 hour mark, my original upper estimate, I was only up to the area between the upper guns and the model looked something like this. (I didn’t save an exact picture at the time.)

The details on the upper fuselage (right side in image) are only on the little bit you can see. Everything around the back side is still blank and the details between the gun turrets in the middle and bottom on this image are missing as well.

The one nice thing about filling in the details on the bow of the ship was that, unlike the light cruiser, which had irregular hexagons for the shape of the head, the battleship has a regular hexagon shape. That meant that the angles you had to tilt all the pieces were exactly the same on all the faces. That made lining things up much easier. Plus there are a number of repeated elements on the bow.

With that done, I added the cannon on the top and the model was finished. Here it is again in the same orientation as the previous two images.

Printing

As I learned from the light cruiser, these ships really need to be printed standing up. So that’s what I did. My biggest worry were the middle gun turrets. With the barrels facing down, each barrel was going to need it’s own support that would then need to be trimmed off. It turns out that those supports had to be added by hand as my printing software didn’t add them automatically.

click for full sized image

I had black resin in the printer at the time so that’s what I used to print this model. Unfortunately, the back resin doesn’t photograph as well as the green or grey. The image at the right shows the finished battleship model next to the Sathar Heavy Cruiser. Both still have their printing supports on. This was taken just after the battleship finished printing but I hadn’t cured it yet. The total print time was nearly 12 hours.

I also discovered after the fact that the vertical structures on back of the upper turrets that stick straight out need supports as well, which I didn’t add. They printed at an angle on the actual print. It looks fine, but isn’t what I had planned on.

I’m still amazed at the detail this printer can achieve. All of the details on the model show up in the print. Here the final printed miniature with all the supports removed.

click for full resolution

And here it is next to the original metal miniature (minus the engines).

You can probably spot a few differences and there are a few more visible if you’re holding them, but I’m really pleased with the way this turned out.

Getting the Model Files

I’ve already added the UPF Battleship to my Miniatures Price Table page here on the site if you’d like me to print you one or more of them.

Additionally, as I’ve been posting these models, people have asked me about getting the model files. To that end, over the last few week I’ve been publishing all the STL files for printing the models on DriveThruRPG. You can find them in the 3D Models section of my New Frontier Games storefront.

All of the models that are recreations of the original TSR miniatures are free, pay-what-you-want products. Any of the the models that are my original creations are listed with a small cost. I’ve posted all of the models I’ve created to date on the site with the exception of the UPF and sathar fighter models, and two models I’ve made based on deck plans created by Bill Logan. Those will be going up shortly, I just haven’t had a chance to get them posted. All future models will be posted there as well.

If you are one of my Patreon supporters at the Surveyor ($2/month) level or higher, I send you all the model files as I create them. Or you can support the creation of new models by becoming a patron or making a donation through the pay-what-you-want option on the models listed on DriveThru. And if you are a Patreon supporter at the Crafter Level ($30/month), I will send you a printed version of the miniature. Anyone who joins at that level this month will get the battleship mini.

What’s Next?

Now that the UPF Battleship is done, I’ve finished recreating all the UPF and sathar ships from the original boxed sets. I still need to do the pirate frigate, the freighter from the Federation Ships box, and the privateers to get all the original minis recreated.

I’ll tackle those, but first I want to fill in the order of battle for the two main sides in the Second Sathar War game so that people could potentially play out that game with a full compliment of miniatures. As such I still need to do the UPF Heavy Cruiser, the UPF Minelayer (if you don’t use the cutter miniature), the assault carriers for both sides. Of those the easiest will be the UPF Heavy Cruiser as it will draw heavily from the design of the light cruiser and battleship. I’ve already started working on that model. It might even be finished before the end of the month. It’s much easier to make my own designs than trying to recreate existing ones. Plus I have a lot of little details structures already designed from the other ships that I can reuse.

After the heavy cruiser, I’ll tackle the assault carriers and then the minelayer before going back to finish the recreations.

And that’s it for now. Let me know if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments in the comment section below. I hope you enjoy the miniatures as much as I enjoy making them.