I really struggled this past month in getting the updates out on a daily basis. They came out eventually, but often in bunches instead of one or two a day. As I’m writing this blog post, I’m a week behind on posting. I’ll try to get those caught up soon. As always, you can follow the @StarFrontiers twitter account for the daily updates, this is just a summary from the past month.
This month, the UPF and some of the militias begin to increase their ship rosters, the first Saurian Ark Ship headed toward the Frontier departs, the Gullwind continues its flight from Dramune, and the HSS History’s Hope gets lost once again via a misjump.
Date (FY)
Events
61.081
Construction of the CMS Swallow complete at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. The ship begins its maiden voyage to its home system of White Light.
61.082
– Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the Streel shipyards (Pale, Truane’s Star).
– The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the YS02 system completing the YS02-YS03 jump route. They begin decelerating and plotting the jump back to YS03 to begin the next leg of their journey.
61.083
The seventh Saurian ark ship is completed and begins its shakedown cruise.
61.084
Garulus Tylappar discovers Chukkas, a protected and beloved species of Inner Reach (Dramune), in shipping crates marked as “Foodstuffs” he was contracted to deliver to Malco Enterprises on Darkworld Station (Outer Reach, Dramune). (SFKH1)
61.085
Worried about being discovered with the new knowledge and unwilling to turn the lovable chukkas over to the Malthar, Garulus takes his ship, the Gullwind, and makes a fast jump to the Cassidine system.
61.086
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes completes its shakedown cruise. With its crew fully assembled, it is tasked with exploring the region beyond Theseus. With over 20 days until the exploration module is complete, the ship will jump to White Light and back to verify that everything is in working order. Calculations begin for a jump to the White Light system.
61.087
The CMS Flitter arrives at Clarion Station (White Light). After a final inspection, it is added to the Clarion Royal Marine roster and enters official service.
61.088
Initial calculations complete, the UPFS Elanor Moraes begins accelerating for the jump to the White Light system.
61.089
After a couple of weeks of discussions the CDC delegates reach an agreement with the new Consolidated Nebula Energy Group to supply resources to the new company’s power plants.
61.090
The Gullwind, having not slowed down upon entering the Cassidine system, completes its astrogation calculations and makes the jump to the Madderly’s Star system. It doesn’t slow down here either.
61.091
The CMS Swallow arrives at Clarion Station (White Light). After a final inspection, it is added to the Clarion Royal Marine roster and enters official service.
61.092
The HSS History’s Hope successfully returns to the YS03. While the engineers work on the drives, the astrogators begin plotting the jump to the next system, a white dwarf-M star binary 11 ly away. This will be the longest uncharted jump yet of the trip.
61.093
A Flight patrol in the outer Kazak system stumble upon the patrolling sathar cutters. One of the cutters is destroyed but the other escapes. One of the Flight assault scouts was also destroyed.
61.094
With reports from agents in the Frontier that Strike Force Nova has recently left Truane’s Star to return to Prenglar, the sathar decided to stand down in OFS019 and start preparing for a major push on the Frontier.
61.095
The newest Saurian ark ship completes its shakedown cruise and begins loading passengers and supplies for its journey into the unknown.
61.096
Having left the remains of Patrol Group Virgo in Truane’s Star, Strike Force Nova arrives back at Morgaine’s World (Prenglar).
61.097
– The UPFS Eleanor Moraes arrives safely at Clarion Station (White Light). After a full checkup of the ship, they begin the jump back to Minotaur (Theseus).
– The surviving sathar cutter in the Kazak system makes the jump back to the OFS019 system.
61.098
After double checking the jump calculations, the HSS History’s Hope begins acceleration to jump speed. Their destination is designated YS05.
61.099
After an extensive debrief of the crews, Strike Force Nova stands down for maintenance. Almost all of the ships enter the PGC SCC at the same time. Several civilian ships are removed from the shipyard to make room, upsetting their owners.
61.100
– After completing overhauls on the ship’s engines, the Gullwind departs the Madderly’s Star system for White Light.
– Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 95%.
61.101
Owners of ships ejected from the PGC shipyards lodge a formal complaint with Starfleet and the Council of Worlds. However, the UPF charter grants Spacefleet this power during “times of crisis” which the CoW has invoked after receiving the reports of SF Nova and the sathar buildup in OFS019.
61.102
Encouraged by their reception by CDC, the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group (Groth, Fromeltar) send delegates to Terledrom (Fromeltar) and Inner Reach (Dramune) to meet with energy suppliers there.
61.103
– The HSS History Hope attempts to jump to YS05. Unfortunately, the calculations were off and the ship misjumps to an unknown star system with a small M dwarf instead of the binary system they were aiming for.
– They designate the system YS06 and start working on figuring out where they are at.
61.104
The ship bearing the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group delegates headed to Terledrom (Fromeltar) suffers an in-flight explosion, three of the four delegates are killed. No other passengers are injured but the ship is disabled. Rescue ships from Terledrom dispatched immediately.
61.105
Repairs of the Triad Starship Construction Center (Cassidine) bring it up to 95% capacity.
61.106
Sathar begin what they expect to be a final push on the Sauria system. A massive fleet, dwarfing anything seen since the attack on Truane’s Star 60+ years ago, leaves the SCC at OFS228 and heads to Tischen via OFS177.
61.107
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes arrives back at Minotaur Station (Theseus). All systems working flawlessly. The crew takes three days of leave while waiting for the exploration module to be completed.
61.108
Investigation of the damaged starliner reveals that the damage was deliberate sabotage and not an accident. Star Law takes over the investigation.
61.109
– The Gullwind departs the White Light system for it’s final destination at Minotaur Station (Theseus)
– After six days of around the clock work, the astrogators on the HSS History’s Hope determine their location. They overshot their target by nearly 8 light years. The good news is that this system was to be the next one on their trip. The bad news is that they have two uncharted jumps back to a known system.
61.110
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes’s extended exploration module is complete at the Minotaur starship construction center (Theseus). The ship’s crew docks with the exploration module and pull it into a holding orbit as they begin final preparations for their first jump.
Welcome to June! Regular readers my have noticed that this post is a day early as I usually post on Tuesdays. That’s because this month, I’m hosting the RPG Blog Carnival and we need to get this month’s topic, Organizations, kicked off. This post will replace tomorrow’s regular post as the first post of the month. But don’t worry, the next installment of the Detailed Frontier Timeline will be up next week.
If you’re new to the Expanding Frontier, welcome. After you’ve read today’s post, maybe you’ll stick around and take a stroll through the archive and hopefully find something else of interest as well.
The Topic – Organizations
When I volunteered to host a month of the blog carnival, I had already had in my mind to do some development of new and existing organizations in my game. I had already done a few posts on the topic and thought it would be a great topic to get input from other creator on how they handle different organizations in their settings. Plus it would give me the motivation to flesh out a few more of my own.
I’m using the term “organization” here very loosely. It could be anything from a megacorp, like I detailed in my post about the Streel Corporation, a small private company (e.g. Obar Enterprises), a religion, a governing body of a planet or city, or a band of adventurers. It could be a single business, a sports team, or a knitting club. Guilds, cults, and secret societies are other examples. Anything that has two or more people involved and some sort of order or hierarchy counts. The sky is really the limit.
Maybe like me, you want to flesh out one or more organizations in your setting an share them as part of the carnival. What makes the organization unique? How does it stand out in your world? How do the player characters interact with the organization, if at all?
I remember a business from a fantasy game I played in when I was in high school. It had been created by a retired character in an earlier campaign run by the GM, he wasn’t part of our game. It was a chain of establishments that were a combination of high-end tavern, inn, casino, and other attractions. You could find them in almost every major city. But they only accepted silver coins. You could not pay in gold, copper, nickel, or brass (the various other coins of the world). Only silver. Apparently, the retired PC who set up the original inn, which he created as a safe house, had something happen to him that made him leery of every other coin type. It was a great, safe place to stay, you just had to have a lot of silver on hand to pay your bills.
Or maybe you have a unique set of rules for handling the way various organizations interact with one another. I remember when I read Stars Without Number, the faction rules were so interesting I almost wrote a little mini game based just around that set of rules.
Another topic that comes to mind is how you keep track of all the organizations in your game and what they are up to. Do you have lists of all the projects they are working on? Or maybe you just have short descriptions of their aims and goals and when something happens, you attribute it to the organization most likely to have done it.
Those are just some ideas I’ve had of things to write about as I’ve contemplated this topic the last little while. I’m sure you’ll have others. Share your ideas by linking to this post in yours, and posting a comment here once your post is up. At the end of the month, I’ll gather up all the posts from the comments and consolidate them in to an organized list to provide a handy reference.
And with the kickoff out of the way, it’s time to turn our attention to a semi-secret society in my game universe, the True Yazira Society.
The True Yazira Society
True Yazira Society Logo, a stylized tree shaped like the leaf of the major tree species from Yaziria with the society’s initials forming the branches.
I teased this organization back in my posts for the February Blog Carnival, whose topic was Legends and Lore. As part of that month’s posts, I did two posts on the legends and lore of the yazirian species in my Star Frontiers game universe. The first, Yazirian History, I covered the background of how the yazirian race came to be in the Frontier. Most of this is general knowledge to yazirian characters. In the second, Legends & Lore – Yazirians, I covered more less known information including things the characters may not know. It was in this post that I introduced the True Yaziria society.
Creation
The True Yazira society was formed about ten years before the first sathar attack. It was created by surviving members of the old Warhon’s guard, supporters, and retinue.
When news reached the yazirian colonies that the only ship to be lost in the exodus was the one carrying the royal family, many believed that foul play by the Family of One was involved and that they didn’t want to give up control of yazirian society on the new worlds. This was most strongly vocalized by members of the royal court and the Warhon’s personal guard that were already in the Frontier.
It was at this point that the “accidents” and disappearances started happening. Many of the most vocal dissidents died or simply vanished. Fearing for their lives, many of the royal court and royal guard took the opportunity to emigrate to the Prenglar, Cassidine, and Truane’s Star systems were there were multi-species worlds and where they would be out of the direct influence of the Family of One.
As part of this second exodus, these yazirians formed the True Yazira society. The members initially consisted of those fleeing the yazirian worlds but that would change over time.
Aims and Goals
The initial aims of the society were really just mutual protection and support. Coupled with a desire to preserve as many of the traditions of their homeworld as they could in their new environment. First and foremost in the beginning, the members of the society worked to keep track of each other in order to keep them safe from the Family of One and alert one another if someone went missing. The other major aim was to support one another as they settled in these new worlds among aliens species. Contact with the humans, vrusk, and dralasites had started only a few years before and the society provided a social outlet for yazirians to meet and just be themselves.
As word reached the members of the actions being taken by the Family of one on Hentz, as well as the other yazirian colony worlds, the True Yaziria society’s goals expanding to opposing the actions of the Family of One. Many members returned to the yazirian worlds, either permanently, or as regular business visitors, to both monitor and actively work against what they felt were encroachments by the Family of One on the true yarziran way of life. These early efforts were quite fruitful, and the society was gaining momentum, most rapidly on the worlds other than Hentz where the Family of One was centered.
And then the sathar attacked. While the actual devastation was confined to the Truane’s Star system, the repercussions would be felt all over the Frontier. Most of the membership of the society living on Pale were killed in the sathar attack, as whole cities and towns were obliterated in single strikes from space. In the decade after the attack, when everyone thought a fresh attack could occur at any moment, the focus of the entire Frontier shifted and the concerns of the True Yazira society were far from the concerns of the average yazirian citizen. The Family of One worked efficiently and effectively during the crisis and people just came to accept their leadership.
In the intervening decades the aims of the society have shifted somewhat. They still oppose the Family of One, but their efforts are much more behind the scenes. Openly, they focus on cultural preservation and teaching about traditional yazirian values from their homeworld. But behind the scenes, many members still work to limit the power of the Family of One and to get equal treatment for yazirians everywhere regardless of world or clan. These efforts have been much more effective on the worlds other than Hentz. They have given up on completely ousting the Family of One from its position in yazirian society but rather now focus on neutralizing its influence as much as possible.
Membership and Organization
Initially, members of the True Yazira society were all members of the royal court or royal guard and refugees from the yazirian colony worlds living on the mixed-species worlds or the worlds of other species. With the return of some of these yazirians to the colony worlds, the society began to grow there as well. Anyone who expressed displeasure with the operations and ideals of the Family of One would often find their way to True Yazira. On the non-yazirian worlds, many joined simply for the comradarie of fellow yazirians in their new alien homes.
Today most of the membership of the society is fairly old and consists of first generation colonists who still remember Yazira itself. While there are new recruits of the younger generations, their numbers are relatively few but growing. Some of these younger members are truly interested in preserving and sometimes restoring practices from Yazira, most are there for the opposition of the Family of One and its policies and practices. The old world doesn’t mean as much to this younger generation as they have never seen it.
The society is organized in to chapters and councils. The chapters are the local organizing body and typically cover a single town or small region. Although in the larger metropolitan areas such as Port Loren, or Point True, there might be multiple chapters each covering a part of the city.
Councils are the higher level organizations. Each world has a single council that coordinates activities across all the chapters of the world. Each chapter has a representative that attends council meetings and votes for the interests of the chapter. This representative also has the responsibility to make sure that the chapter members adhere to any decisions of the council. Typically, the council representative is the head of the local chapter.
There is also a Frontier wide council consisting of two representatives from each of the world councils. This is the governing body of the society. All current members of this council are former members of the royal guard or royal court.
Activities
In the early days of the society, the members openly opposed the actions of the Family of One although they did so as individuals or groups and never in the name of the True Yazira society. And in return, the Family of One actively hunted down these members of the society, although that was done clandestinely as much as possible.
Openly, and in the name of the society, the early members organized activities and cultural events for yazirians on all the worlds of the Frontier where chapters were organized. They also welcomed any visitors of the other species in the Frontier to the events as a way of teaching them about yazirian culture.
After the sathar attack, the opposition to the Family of One became much more clandestine and behind the scenes. They supported organizations that opposed the practices of the Family of One with money and manpower but took much more of a supporting role than active involvement. They have worked extensively, especially on the worlds in the Athor, Gruna Garu, and Scree Fron systems, to get equal treatment from GODCo on those worlds and limit the control the Family of One exerts on the govenments of those systems.
At the same time, the society has actively stepped up the cultural and historical activities on worlds all around the Frontier, working hard to preserve the cultural heritage of the species and the histories of their homeworld. In the last decade they have launched a major effort to interview and record all surviving members of the species who actually lived on Yazira and participated in the Great Exodus. All of these stories are available for anyone to listen to.
As the society is slowly recruiting younger members, many dissatisfied with the actions and policies of the Family of One, the opposition is becoming more vocal and open once again.
Once recent activity which the society is indirectly a major supporter of, is the voyage of the HSS History’s Hope, a small exploration craft currently trying to chart a way back to the system that they believe to be Yazria. The Family of One suppressed the location of Yaziria shortly after the yazirans arrived in the Frontier claiming a computer crash wiped all details of the location and routes there. With the recent discovery of a system that might by Yazira in the right direction from the Frontier, many members of the society were quite excited. The support for the mission was quite spontaneous and not an organized event. However, most of the crew of the ship are members of the society and much of the mission’s funding comes from members as well. While unintended, this means that the mission has the ability to call on the society for assistance if needed. You can expect to hear more about this relationship in an upcoming post and in upcoming events in the Detailed Frontier Timeline.
Closing Thoughts
That’s my first organization for this month’s carnival. I intend to do at least one more later in the month and have new organizations be a regular feature on the blog. I created the True Yazira organization as part of the Legends and Lore blog carnival entry and have since tied it in to several events in my setting. It hasn’t come up with any games I’ve ever run but that is sure to change in the future.
I can’t wait to see what other organizations my fellow bloggers come up with and other aspects of using organizations in games they discuss. Be sure to check back regularly to see what new posts have been added to the comments and come back at the end of the month for the wrap up and summary post.
What do you think of the True Yazira society? How would you use an organization like this in your game? What more would you like to know about this society? Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section.
For the first session of the game, I wanted to keep things fairly simple as we’re still getting a feel for the format, and how much can be done in a single session. So we started with a fairly basic scenario, a young girl has gone lost in the mountains near her home and the PCs are hired out to find her (hopefully alive) and bring her home.
Long time readers of the blog, and those that listened to the beginning of the “A New Can of Worms” actual play, will recognize some of the setting and characters. I’ll start with an outline of the adventure, and then talk about the players and how they handled things.
Lost in the Mountains
Background
Alyssa Tinnett, a young woman in the village of Rosegard, went out “adventuring” in the region around the village after school last day-day. She took her “adventuring pack”, which included a small tent and sleeping bag, rations, water, rope, an all-weather blanket, and a pocket tool. She also took her sword, a gift from the yazirian Talnor at the Streel mine compound, which he has been teaching her how to use. She’s done this in the past and typically returns before it gets dark and the next night-day cycle starts. This time she didn’t return.
It’s late fall on Pale and as a farming village, the citizens are quite busy bringing in the harvest. Her parents and grandparents went out searching for her but were hampered by the darkness of the Pale night. They put out a job request to several mercenary companies in Point True and the contract was picked up by Galactic Task Force (GTF). The PCs were assigned to the job.
What happened
Alyssa’s Campsite. Click for larger image.
Her adventure started out like all her other ones. In this case, after playing in the woods with some of her friends for a while, she went north from the village while her friends returned home. She intended to check out the artificial dome that the sathar agent at the Streel compound was using as a drop point and then continue further north to the small canyon in the mountains to the north. She got to the small camping site that some of the older kids had once set up in the canyon and got her tent set up. After that, she shouldered her pack and started further up the canyon.
A short time later, she heard the sounds of something behind her but nothing was immediately visible. A few minutes later, she got to the top of a small rise in the canyon and looking back saw a pair of large bird creatures, something akin to a giant (1m tall) chicken. She recognized them as Nuks from some that had been killed around the village several months ago. With her way back to the campsite cut off, she began hurrying up the canyon looking for a place she could hide out.
The entrance to the cave. The ramp is about a 45 degree slope. Click for larger image.
After a while, she came to a steep rock formation that she thought that the nuks wouldn’t be able to scramble up and climbed to the top of it where she found the entrance to a cave. Exploring a bit into the cave, the slope on the inside was even steeper and extended nearly 100 meters into the mountain. Turning back to the entrance, she saw the nuks at the base of the slope. One of them jumped up trying to get at her but slipped back down. She retreated further into the cave but after a half hour and the nuks not leaving, she got bored and decided to do a little spelunking.
Carefully descending the steep interior slope, the cave opened up into a wide long cavern with some side passages branching off to the left. Following one of these side passages, she discovered another large cavern, although not as big as the first. However, as she moved out into the center of that cavern she must have disturbed something as she passed the entrance because there was a large crash and several tons of boulders tumbled down nearly completely blocking the entrance. There was a small opening, but too small for her to fit through.
After searching around for an hour or more, she couldn’t find any way out of this room back the way she had come. There was a passage to her left, and another straight ahead. The first was on her level but the second was up a 20 meter cliff that angled back out over the ground beneath it that she couldn’t find a way up. Exhausted, she curled up in her all-weather blanket and went to sleep, planning to continue looking for a way out in the morning.
Adventure Outline
The adventure consists of several small steps and encounters that I outlined as follows:
Area around Point True. The locations to the NE of Rosegard are locations from the A New Can of Worms game. Click image for larger version.
This occurs in the GTF headquarters at Point True. The PCs are given the basic information from the Background section above and allowed to requisition any equipment (within reason) that they feel they will need. They are told that they will receive their regular daily pay rate (20 cr/day for my new players) and a 100cr bonus each if the girl is found.
If none of the PCs ask for it, their handler issues them an radiophone in addition to any other gear they request. Once they have their gear, they are flown by aircar to Rosegard. As each aircar can take 3 PCs, there may be more than one. It’s a 30 minute aircar ride but a 4-5 hour drive. The aircar drivers will remain with the aircars at the city center while the PCs are out exploring.
Meeting with the family
This part of the adventure mostly occurs in the city hall building of Rosegard. As they land they are met by the mayor, Genio Washy, Alyssa’s parents, Larroy & Camryn Tinnett, and Alyssa’s grandparents, Steven & Janie Hite.
During this discussion they PCs can learn any of the “What happened” information that the parents might know as well as anything about Alyssa from her background. They know she went north as she told some of her friends and they told the parents when Alyssa didn’t return. They can also learn about the connection Alyssa has with Talnor from the Streel compound.
Tracking Alyssa
This bit of the adventure occurs in the valley surrounding Rosegard as depicted in the map below. I drew the map with Inkarte which doesn’t really have sci-fi assets so it has a bit more of a fantasy feel but I whipped this up in about 30 minutes (mostly relearning the interface as I haven’t used it in years). I then added the annotations in GIMP.
This is the referee version of the map with all the relevant locations marked. Click the image for a full sized version. There is a player version with none of the annotations as well.
The sathar dome is the natural place to start and the villagers can give exact coordinates for its location. It’s about 10 km from the village. The PCs can either walk there (a couple of hours) or have the aircar(s) drop them off (a few minutes). The dome itself is a light-weight, fiberglass pole frame, with a cloth covering. It looks like it was once naturally camouflaged but the grasses and such on it have died and it now stands out against the terrain. It is very light-weight and is about 3 meters in diameter. It is staked down to prevent blowing away but lifting it up reveals that there is nothing under it.
The terrain north of the sathar dome. Click for larger image.
Alyssa’s tracks are easy to find and the PCs can start tracking her north. The terrain is very wild and untouched as only the villagers occasionally come up here. There are small game trails in places and Alyssa seems to be following them and making for the small creeks running through the valley. She’s not trying to hide her tracks so they are relatively easy to follow as the paths have pockets of sand where the tracks are very visible. The waterways are 1-2 meters wide and at most a few tens of centimeters deep. They flow north to south on the map (into the valley from the canyons and then down out the bottom of the map).
Some time after the PCs leave the sathar dome, but before the reach the creek, they will encounter a young sathodragon. As they come up over a rise, it will be on another rise about 150-200 meters away. The sathodragon will see them and rush to attack. If it drops below 50 STA, it will try to retreat and escape.
Shortly after they cross the creeks for the first time, Alyssa’s tracks will be joined by those of two nuks. This will continue until they find her campsite and the destroyed tent with lots of nuk tracks around. As they follow her tracks from the campsite, the nuk tracks will continue to follow her prints.
A bit further on, she seems to become aware of the nuks behind her and the tracks indicate that she’s moving faster and at one point, as the path goes right along the edge of the creek, they vanish. She jumped sideways into the water and then went 20-30 meters upstream in the water before emerging. The nuk tracks are confused at this point but they eventually found her tracks upstream and continued to follow her.
Sometime after the campsite but before the PCs reach the cave entrance, they have an encounter with a pair of Pale mountain lions. On is waiting in ambush near the path and the other is another 20-30 meters up the mountain waiting to pounce as well. If either is reduced to less than half stamina, they will both retreat and try to flee.
Fighting the nuks
Eventually the PCs will arrive at the entrance to the cave. The two nuks are milling around here still not having given up the pursuit even though it’s been nearly 20 hours. When they see the PCs they will immediately rush to attack and will continue attacking until killed.
Exploring the cave
With the nuks dispatched, the PCs are now free to enter the cave. It should be obvious from the lack of tracks leading away and the fact that the nuks were hanging around trying to get up the slope, that Alyssa went in.
I based the cavern roughly on Carlsbad Caverns in Carlsbad, New Mexico. I downloaded a map of the Carlsbad Caverns and then modified it slightly for use in the game. The original map can be found here. Below is the map I used for the game with the relevant locations marked. I took some liberties with the elevations but otherwise used the map as is. If you’ve never been to Carlsbad, you have a long steep decent into the main cave. It’s fairly open in real life, and I closed it up in the adventure, but the blue path is the switchback path you take to get down to the bottom as it is very steep going straight down.
The map of the cave system. Click for full sized image.
As the PCs are exploring, remember that the only light they have is what they brought with them. They are not going to have large vistas and in some cases may not be able to see the other end of the cave.
If they are calling out as they explore, Alyssa will respond when they are by the cave-in location. There is a small opening, about 15-20 cm in diameter that they can look through and see her once she comes over to it. They will not be able to move the rocks as several of them are quite large (read tons). They can move some but not make the opening any bigger. Given time and effort, a dralasite without any gear could squeeze through the opening to get to her but she still can’t get out.
Alyssa will explain to the PCs about what happened and tell them about what looks like an exit at the top of the cliff on the other side of the room she is in. She hasn’t explored the large room in the upper left of the map yet as she will have just woken up when the PCs arrive.
Eventually, the PCs will find a way to the cliff face and can get her out. It’s 15-20 meters down and an overhang above the room floor where Alyssa is located. They will need to figure out a way to get down to her and get her back up (hopefully they brought rope).
Returning home
With Alyssa safe, the PCs just need to get back to Rosegard with her. If they think of it, they can simply call for the aircar(s) to pick them up. If they think to do this, the aircars will arrive in about 15 minutes and there is enough room for one to land at a time and load them up.
If they decide to hike back, they will have an encounter with either a quickdeath (from the AD rules) or a pack of lesser quickdeath. It’s up to you based on the abilities and strengths of the party. Obviously, their main objective should be to protect Alyssa. The quickdeaths will retreat if severely wounded or if one of the pack is killed.
Once returned, the village and family will be quite thankful. Alyssa will get a serious scolding from her parents. If the PCs wish to stay for the evening, there will be an impromptu celebration party in their honor. Several of the Streel mine employees, including Talnor, will come down for this. Talnor will also give Alyssa a talking to which she will appear to take more seriously than the warning from her parents. While a bit shaken by her ordeal, the resiliency of youth will quickly kick in erasing the worst of teh adventure and her natural xenophilia will kick in. She will spend a good portion of the party trying to talk to any of the non-human PCs and find out more about them, where they are from, etc.
Rewards
The PCs will get the 20cr of their pay and the 100cr each for returning Alyssa. In addition, there is a 250cr bounty on each nuk that they can split between the group. If they managed to kill the young sathodragon, that is worth another 1000cr to split between the PCs. Finally, if they managed to kill any quickdeaths, those carry a bounty of 2000cr each.
Of course they need documented proof to claim the rewards. Photographs of the corpses (taken with their chronocoms) will suffice. If they don’t have any documentation, the villagers are willing to send someone up to the locations the PCs give them to get pictures for them. GTF will give them the money immediately even though it will take a few days for the Pale government to issue the reward, which will then just go straight to GTF.
Additionally, the PCs should receive 1-3 XP for the adventure depending on how well they did.
How It Played Out
When I ran this, we had three PCs: Dhuggo (dralasite), Arzdran Garvox (yazirian), and Joey Rufus (humma). They picked up some weapons and gear at GTF HQ and headed out.
After meeting with the parents, they also talked with Alyssa’s friends that had been in the woods with her. After stern words from Joey to Alyssa’s folks about their parenting techniques, the team head up to the dome where they picked up Alyssa’s trail and started off. None of the PCs actually had a tracking skill but two of them had Scout as a secondary skill area so they only had minor penalties since the trail was easy to follow.
The fight with the sathodragon went fairly quickly, Joey used his jumping ability to good effect to get behind it and keep it at a distance while Arzdran and Dhuggo fired on it with their lasers. Wounded, the sathodragon fled into the trees and escaped leaving a trail of blood. The sathodragon didn’t do too well only scoring a single hit on Joey. Joey applied first aid to himself (he’s the medic) and was nearly back to full STA. They marked the spot and continued on. The idea was that if Alyssa’s trail ended and looked like the sathodragon had gotten her, they would come back and track it to its lair to try to find her body.
Continuing to follow Alyssa’s trail they found the nuk tracks and the destroyed tent. Getting a bit worried, they hustled on. Luckily, Joey made a INT roll and noticed the closer mountain lion waiting in ambush for them. Again employing his jumping racial ability, he sprung over the lurking cat landing a few meters beyond it and unloading into it with his laser rifle. Then he notice the one further up the mountain beyond him. He was now between them with his teammates some 20 meters away. However, startled by his jump, and wounded by the laser fire from Joey and Arzdran, the mountain lions decided this was too much work and bounded off, leaving the PCs alone.
The fight with the nuks didn’t go as well. As the creatures rushed the PCs, Arzdran got a shot off wounding one. Joey jumped over them again to the base of the slope up to the cave entrance. The wounded one went after Dhuggo (wielding his nightstick) and the other one turned around to go after Joey. The PCs were doing well, severely injuring the one attacking Dhuggo, but then Dhuggo got a little cocky and started showing off (the player said he started pointing to the mountains, Babe Ruth style, before making his attack) and missed horribly (rolled a 97). The nuk on the other hand didn’t miss and took a bite out of his arm. They managed to finish off the nuks but Dhuggo took a total of 30 STA damage and Joey was wounded a bit more.
As Arzdran examined the cave entrance and kept watch, Joey did a bit of rough field surgery getting Dhuggo patched up and back on his feet.
They then entered the cave and decided to go left once they got to the cave floor. So they almost immediately found the cave-in. Having been calling for Alyssa, she responded to them and they were able to talk to her through the rockfall. She told them about the cliff on the other side of the room she was in. As Joey and Arzdran set off further into the cave complex to try to find a route to her, Dhuggo passed Alyssa all his gear through the small opening and started squeezing his way through.
After taking some twists and turns the others found their way to the top of the cliff where they could see Dhuggo sitting and talking to Alyssa down below. Using rope they brought with them (they had asked about climbing gear back at the GTF HQ and I had told them they shouldn’t need it so I retconed them having it since the reason they didn’t have it was my fault), they hauled Alyssa and Dhuggo up and made their way back to the cave entrance where they called the aircar to come pick them up. It was a little tight with five in a vehicle built for four but Dhuggo and Alyssa were both small and so they made it work.
Getting back to the village, they learned about the bounty on the sathar creatures and one of the villagers offered to go back to where the nuks were to get pictures as proof. They stuck around for the impromptu celebration and the after a while, with a few hours to kill before the day was over and they needed to head back, had the aircar drive fly them up to where they had the fight with the young sathodragon.
Tracking it back to it’s lair, they tossed in a couple of doze grenades which knocked it out completely. They tied it up and called back to HQ to ask if they wanted the thing alive. Receiving an affirmative, they were told that a flying transport truck would be there in an hour to collect it and to hang tight. In the mean time the doze gas wore off and the creature struggled to get free but they had done a good job with the knots (I believe someone rolled a 01) and in its weakened state it couldn’t escape. Joey injected it with a StayDose to try to knock it out which seemed to work. Securing it in the bed of the airtruck when it arrived, they followed the truck back for a while to make sure everything was good an then flew ahead to base to get back home.
All told it took us about 3 hours to play through this.
Thoughts
That’s the adventure and how it played out. I’m still working on getting the audio and video of the game session on-line. So at some point in the future, you’ll be able to listen (or watch) how it ran.
What I’d be interested in is what you think about the information presented for running the adventure. How was the format? Would it be helpful to me organized differently? If you were running this, is there information you would want that wasn’t there? Are there details missing? On the flip side, did I include too much in places? Is there anything too constraining?
Tell me what you think and how I could improve these write-ups in the comments below.
This is a young sathodragon, the creature that the sathar use to make cybodragons. This young specimen doesn’t have the cybernetic implants. These sathodragons stand around 1 meter at the shoulder and are 2-3 meters long.
These creatures are offspring of the cybodragons that were seeded on Pale during the sathar invasion. A female sathodragon will lay a clutch of 3-7 eggs (1d5+2) but the first one to hatch will eat the others so these creatures are typically found alone as they are fairly territorial without sathar influence.
As with all sathar bioconstructs on Pale, there is a bounty by the Pale government for the killing and/or capture of sathodragons. The bounty for a young cybodragon offspring is 1,000 cr.
Type:
Medium Omnivore
Number:
1
Move:
Fast (60 m/turn)
Stamina:
120
Attack:
70 claws / 55 bite
Damage
3d10 claws / 4d10 bite
Special Attack:
None
Special Defense:
None
Native World:
Unknown, found on Volturnus and Pale in the Frontier. Typically found in the mountains, plains, and forested area of a world.
Iguana image by Rjcastillo. Click image for original file
The Pale mountain lion is a large feline-like creature similar to mountain lions on Earth. Typically 1.4-1.8 meters in length, these creatures stand about 1 meter at the shoulder. Stealth hunters, they like to ambush their prey and can move quietly through their native terrain. They typically hunt either singly or in pairs.
Their claws are toxic to most creatures. A successful attack that does damage injects a venom that is S5/T10 in strength. Antitox will neutralize the poison with a successful Neutralize Toxins skill check. The venom effect lasts for the first four successful attacks of an encounter, after which the creature must wait several hours for the venom to build back up.
Type:
Medium Carnivore
Number:
1-2
Move:
Fast (70 m/turn)
IM/RS:
8/75
Stamina:
100
Attack:
70 claws / 60 bite
Damage:
2d10 claws / 1d10 bite
Special Attack:
venomous claws – S5/T10 poison if claw successfully attacks
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
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.
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.
This month sees the final leg of the trip for the remaining ships of the Discovery Squadron and it’s final disbanding, the HSS History’s Hope gets back on track on it’s exploration mission, avoiding it’s assailants in the YS01 system, and a new ship emerges from the Minotaur shipyards that will play a pivotal role in the history of the Frontier. Spacefleet also begins construction on the ships for Strike Force Meteor.
As always, you can follow along daily on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed if you don’t want to wait for the monthly summary. I’m a few days behind at the moment with my Twitter posting but I should get caught up in the next day or so.
Date (FY)
Events
61.051
– The Sathar starship construction center in the Liberty system completes 2 destroyers.
– Strike Force Nova jumps into the Zebulon system. They begin decelerating toward Volturnus.
– After much deliberation, the sathar high command decides to send two of its new cutter ships to the Kazak system to scout out the UPF and Rim forces there.
61.052
Construction begins on a new UPF assault carrier at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar). This is the first of the new ships commissioned for the new Strike Force Meteor group to be built around the battleship already under construction.
61.053
– Shakedown cruise complete, passengers begin loading onto the newest saurian Ark Ship.
– The HSS History’s Hope detects emissions from another ship in the YS01 system, assumed the be their previous assailant. However, the ship is far away on the other side of the system. They believe that they will be able to get out of the system before it could catch them, even if they were already detected.
61.054
Construction begins on a new Spacefleet light cruiser, part of the new Strike Force Meteor, at the CDC shipyards (Triad, Cassidine).
61.055
Strike Force Nova arrives at Volturnus (Zebulon). The two Truane’s Star militia assault scouts are released to return to their home system. They begin accelerating toward jump speed.
61.056
– Construction begins on two destroyers for Spacefleet’s new Strike Force Meteor at the Hentz (Araks) shipyards.
– Deceleration, plotting, and engine repairs complete, the HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for their jump back to YS02. Signals from the other ship in the system change and it seems to be accelerating toward them. However, its distance makes an intercept nearly impossible.
61.057
– Construction begins on two frigates for Spacefleet’s new Strike Force Meteor at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards.
– Sathar cutters arrive in the outer reaches of the Kazak system and begin a slow deceleration as they gather data on the system.
61.058
Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 85%.
61.059
After several weeks of short intra system runs, the CDCSS Mystic embarks on its first interstellar journey shuttling several CDC managers to Fromeltar to meet with members of the new Groth Energy Corporation.
61.060
– The HSS History’s Hope makes the jump to YS02 without encountering the other ship which was still 1.3 AU away when the jump was made. They begin decelerating and plotting their next jump, which after more study of the astrographic data, will be back to YS03, a jump of 6 ly.
– Upon arrival in YS02, the HSS History’s Hope sends a subspace message back to Histran informing their organization of the presence of the hostile ship still in the YS01 system and their plans to continue onward. They YS01-YS02 jump data is not transmitted.
61.061
Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar)
61.062
Sathar starship construction center in OFS019 completes a cutter.
61.063
Sathar cutters in the outer Kazak system complete their deceleration and continue to collect data on the Rim forces in the system. They relay that Strike Force Nova seems to have departed the system.
61.064
The two Truane’s Star militia assault scouts arrive back at Pale station. The crews are given a three week leave while the ships are overhauled and repaired in the shipyard before rejoining regular patrol duties.
61.065
Memorial Services held in Valencia City (Clarion, White Light) for the crew of the Clarion Royal Marines frigate lost battling the sathar in the Zebulon system.
61.066
Sathar begin mobilization for final push into the Saurian system.
61.067
After 100 days all of the newly hatched Eorna infants are still alive and growing healthily.
61.068
CDCSS Mystic arrives at Groth Station (Fromeltar) without incident. Its maiden interstellar voyage went off without a hitch.
61.069
After months of data collection and analysis, scientists believe they have cracked the structure of the signals from OFS200. Some of them are voice transmissions in an unknown tongue that sounds similar to recordings of sathar voices.
61.070
The HSS History’s Hope successfully makes the jump from YS02 to YS03 and begin their deceleration and plotting of a jump back to YS02.
61.071
– Summer ends on Alcazzar. CDC begins pulling staff in preparation for the long winter.
– Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the CDC shipyards (Triad, Cassidine)
61.072
With the release of the findings about the signals from OFS200, the Anti-Satharian League stage demonstrations outside the Council of Worlds and Spacefleet headquarters demanding an immediate attack on the system to eradicate the worms.
61.073
Loading complete, the sixth saurian Ark Ship departs the Sauria system in search of a new world away from the sathar.
61.074
After over a year of rebuilding and new ship construction, the sathar begin gearing up for final push on the Sauria system.
61.075
Sathar starship construction center in OFS138 completes a heavy cruiser.
61.076
Repairs of Triad Starship Construction Center bring it up to 90% capacity.
61.077
Construction of the CMS Flitter complete at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. The ship begins its maiden voyage to its home system of White Light.
61.078
After spending ten days in port, the CDCSS Mystic loads passengers for a return trip to Triad (Cassidine). The CDC delegation remains on Groth (Fromeltar) to continue negotiations with the Groth Energy Corporation.
61.079
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes emerges from the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyard and begins a shakedown cruise as the final members of the crew begin to arrive in the system.
61.080
Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 90%.
Way back in issue 10 of the Frontier Explorer (has it really been over 5 years?!?) I wrote an article entitled “How Many Ships Are There?” (p.27) where I examined the number of starships that could be supported in the Frontier given the stated number of starship construction centers and the ship construction and maintenance rules. The answer came out to be around 1500 ships, not a lot to spread around the 17 systems and Spacefleet.
Starship construction image by Scott Mulder
In that article I talked about some of the implications of that small number and some of the ways you could increase the number of ships flying around. If you haven’t already read that article, I recommend you do so as I’ll be building on some of the work there. Although it’s not necessary to follow along.
While I’m very much in favor of small ship numbers, I think that even this is too small for the setting and in this post I’m going to examine the numbers and methods of ship production and maintenance and see what impacts that has on ship numbers.
At least part of the desire to look at these numbers stems from some campaign background work I’m doing related to the Second Sathar War and how the Frontier would respond to the new Sathar incursion. So let’s get started.
The Baseline
To start with, we need to have an idea of what the base production and maintenance rate in the Frontier is so we can see how changes we make affect that.
When I wrote the article for the Frontier Explorer, I created a Python program that would simulate the starship construction centers, their waiting queues, and handle all the book keeping. That is how I generated the numbers for that article. So the first step was to dust that off and get familiar with the code again. If you’re interested, it is in this GitHub repository. There is no documentation and it’s really rough but you’re free to play around with it.
There are actually two different programs in there. One is the simulation I used for this post and the Frontier Explorer article and the other is one I’m using to keep track and generate the sathar starship construction efforts for the Detailed Frontier Timeline project. Both are really rough (although I do have some unit tests). Caveat emptor.
Since we’re just going to be looking at variations, I’m not trying to reproduce the exact numbers from the Frontier Explorer article. In fact, I’m going to use a very different distribution that gives me more ships as a baseline than the number from that article.
For this article, the distribution I’m going to use is one that has roughly equal numbers of ships hull size 1 to 10 (~6.6% each) and then falling off beyond 10 so that there is only about a .5% chance of building a HS 20 ship. This weighs the distribution toward smaller ships. As I pointed out in the original article, the smaller the average hull size of the ships flying around the Frontier, the more ships the canonical starship construction centers (SCCs) can support. The average hull size of ship produced is 6.5.
I’m also making a few other assumptions. First, I’m treating these all as civilian ships, so any ship can be built at any SCC as long as it is less than that SCC’s maximum hull size limit. Also, I’m not factoring the hull availability rules into the simulation. I’m assuming any size hull is always available. Finally, I’m ignoring the “only system ships” restriction on the smaller Class III construction centers. I’m only interested in counts, not types.
The other “feature” of the simulation is that it doesn’t really handle the queuing of hulls waiting to be built in the best manner. It simply looks at the available space and finds the next ship in the list that will fit. What this means is that larger ships tend to get passed over as there is never any room for them. This also tends to skew the ships sizes toward the smaller hull sizes over time.
Image by Scott Mulder
With this ship distribution and those assumptions, the SSCs listed on page 9 of the Knight Hawks Campaign book can support about 2300 ships. Which is already a significant improvement over the 1500 ships from the original article. If you’re curious, reversing the distribution (ramping up to HS 11 and flat thereafter, only allows the system to support about 1250 ships).
Supporting More Ships
Now with that baseline, let’s look at increasing the number of ships we can support. There are several factors that go into the final number: total capacity, ship size distribution, construction time, and maintenance time.
I’m not going to play with construction time. That actually would have little effect on the total number as the steady state is purely based on the other factors, which are somewhat related to each other. Let’s look at some options.
Double the Number of SCCs
Image by Scott Mulder
The canonical set of SCCs has a total capacity of 510 point of hull size across the nine lists construction centers that can be under construction or in maintenance. Let’s start by just doubling that number. Let’s add 9 more SCCs across the Frontier that are clones of the existing nine. We’ll keep the other parameters the same and start up a new simulation.
Running the simulation with the increased number of SCCs results in the Frontier being able to support about 4100 ships, and increase of 1800 ships of about 80%. It doesn’t double as the increased capacity allows a few more larger ships to get built right at the beginning and the average hull size of ships produced jumps from 6.5 to 7. Since the average HS is larger, the total number is less than 2x based on the 2x capacity.
Planetary Small Ship SCCs
What if we try increasing capacity in another way. Instead of just cloning the existing SCCs, let’s give each planet a small SCC that can only build ships up to HS 5 and can handle 20 hull size points of ships at a time. This represents each planet being able to build and maintain it’s own fleet of shuttlecraft and small system ships separate from the main SCC.
If you drop those 22 SCCs (I didn’t give one to Volturnus) into the Frontier, that adds in another 440 hull size points of capacity. Since we should skew to smaller hull sizes being built, we would expect to get a good increase in the number of ships, possibly more than double. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happens. since we didn’t change the distribution of ships we’re drawing from, these small SCCs get underutilized. The total only goes up to about 2400.
I think a bit of this is a queueing problem so let’s just run a simulation with only those new SCCs, but using the same input distribution. I this case we get the system sustaining an additional 300 ships with an average hull size of 3. Still not exactly what I was expecting.
But that distribution doesn’t really make sense. And I think there is still some sort of bug in my code that isn’t doing the queuing properly. So let’s give these smaller SCCs their own queue and distribution. We’ll only pick ships from HS 1-5 for them to build and just make it a flat 20% chance of each hull size. Running that simulation give us that the smaller SCCs can support ~7000 additional ships with an average hull size 2.9. Dividing that between the 22 planets gives us an additional ~320 ships per planet.
That definitely points to something strange happening with the queue when using all the SCCs in a single run. It’s supposed to be dropping the larger ships that are getting passed over after a while but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Or at least not fast enough to fill the smaller SCCs. I’m definitely going to have to look into the queue system I’m using and this may impact the baseline numbers as well (increasing them).
But that means that adding in these small SCCs at each planet increases then number of ships that we can have flying around from 2300 to nearly 9300, an increase of 400%. They are mostly small ships but that may be what you need for all the transport to and from the surface of the planet and within a star system.
Reducing Maintenance
The previous 2 variations just looked at increasing SCC capacity. What if we look at simply reducing the amount of maintenance that a ship needs in a SCC. If ships have to spend less time in the SCC for repairs, then that space is available for new ship construction.
The KH rules say a ship needs to come in every year for 1d10+HS days of repair. And every year they don’t adds a 5% chance of failure of a critical system on a jump and when they do finally get in adds 1d10 days of repair per year missed.
Let’s reduce that. For this try, we’re going to say that they only have to come in once every five years, and that it is still only 1d10+HS days of work to get the maintenance done. Maybe routine maintenance by the crew is enough. Maybe there are dedicated “repair yards” that can handle the work the other years. Whatever the reason is, we are not tying up the limited SCC space with ships undergoing maintenance. We’re going to jump straight to five year so we can see if this is a large effect or not.
Going back to our baseline configuration with just the canonical SCCs and the original ship distribution, this new maintenance requirement results in a new ship count of 6500 ships with an average hull size of 7.0. That’s an increase of ~280%. So we’re getting more and slightly bigger ships. I knew going in that the maintenance was the true bottleneck. I didn’t get quite as many more ships as I was expecting but it’s a significant increase.
However, the simulations I’ve been running only simulate 100 standard years. That’s usually more than enough time to reach a steady state and longer than the history of the UPF at the time of the Second Sathar War. Interestingly, in this simulation, it never really reached that steady state, the numbers of ships were still going up at the end of the simulation. So for fun, I rand both the baseline and the low maintenance option again for a 200 year simulation.
In that case, we did reach a steady state of the number of ships in the low maintenance simulation of 8500 ships with an average HS of 7.1. The baseline sim only went up to 2850 ships with an average HS of 6.25. We got more ships but on average they are smaller. So the low maintenance option represents an increase of 300% over that new baseline. But it’s going to take the Frontier some time to get to that level.
Conclusions
As expected, increasing the number of SCCs increases the number of ships that can be supported. The simulations have given some number to those increases. What I wasn’t expecting was the impact the queuing system I was using would have on the outcome. Obviously a queue that generates ships of the appropriate size for a given SCC distribution can have an effect on the final numbers.
What we found was that just doubling the number of SCCs with the same capacity profile basically doubled the number of ships. That’s probably a good rule of thumb. But if we increase the capacity and limit the ships to smaller hull sizes, we get a huge increase in the number of ships. Limiting the ships to HS 5 or less and with only an 86% increase in production capacity, resulted in a 400% increase in the number of ships.
The other unsurprising bit was that reducing the amount of maintenance required resulted in more ships being supported, I was expecting a nearly linear increase but that wasn’t the case. At least partially because we ended up with more of the larger ships which reduces the total capacity. What was surprising was in the low maintenance model, 100 years of simulation wasn’t enough to reach a steady state on the number of ships.
The truth is, you can have as many ships flying around as you want. If you have more, you can add flavor to your game to describe the extra ship construction capacity any way you want. Then just take the rules as written as the resources available to the PCs. There is more capacity out there, they just can’t access it.
What’s Next?
There are still more things to explore on this topic. Probably the most obvious is looking more closely as the algorithm I’m using to queue up the ships. That apparently has a bigger impact that I was realizing. It was supposed to model the process described in the rules for getting a ship into an SCC but maybe it’s not doing that well enough.
The other aspect might just be the ship distribution I’m generating. Another area to explore is looking more closely at the number and types of ships that are out there flying around and building up a “realistic” distribution based on that. I have looked at that issue in the past and maybe will do a post about it. It produces a different distribution than the one I used here but I’m not sure I really captured everything.
Another thing to consider is the distribution of SCCs. I did some fairly arbitrary changes for this article just to look at gross effects. A more nuanced look at increased capacity might be interesting.
What ideas do you have? Are there specific things you’d like me to explore? Let me know in the comments below.
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.
