Strange New Worlds 1, Part 4

A quick note - Strange New Worlds 1 - Part x titles are because I am still working on the 1st world and the prep for getting there. Once I start playing, I'll probably tag these posts with Strange New Worlds or something so I can find them again. 

Anyway, poking through my spaceship collection, and as much as I like the 0Hr ships, they are not normally a good fit for Traveller due to the lack of sufficient fuel. Which I can ignore honestly - there are interstitial spaces for fuel. And I don't want to use the classic Scout ships as I want something a bit larger, and dare I say, more of a rag-tag sort of thing as this is a private/governmental excursion. Plus, if I have minis, I can make pictures :) 

Anyway, I wanted support craft and the 0Hr Trinity fits the bill in a different way than expected. This ship, if I translate it to Traveller terms, would be a battletender almost: the primary ship has the jump drive and carries 2 externally docked ships. Which are almost as big as the main ship. If I convert the lower decks, which are drop pods, into fuel tanks, and replace the 2 flight decks on the support ships also as fuel tanks, it then is close enough! The support ships, when joined to the main ship, can transfer fuel. 

Separation

Plus, each of the 3 ships can carry shuttles. This gives us 3 long term ships for scouting out a system - get enough distance between them and with shared sensors a good 3d mapping of the system should be relatively straight-forward. I'll have another post with the worked-up details for these ships. 

I am also thinking of sending along a fuel tanker. While I'll have fuel scoops on the support ships at least, it may be that they will want to jump into an empty hex. The Humboldt ship is mostly tankage so could carry reserves. Though that ship is a bit more cramped, so thinking the crews may want to rotate to the larger Trinity ships.

Fuel Tanker

Thinking this tiny fleet of 2 jump-capable craft and 2 additional large support craft, along with a bevy of shuttles, will work for my joint exploration trip. While also not having too many NPCs around.

Neither ship will be new - decades old probably. But definitely space-worthy for long voyages. They'll have their annual refurb and maintenance done just prior to leaving, giving us a year before we have to worry about that again.

Still to do:

• Translate the ships to Traveller. The tanker will be 1G, 2J ship, the main Trinity ship 2G/2J, and the support ships probably 3G/0J. But I'll have to work out the tonnages based on the ship information and go backwards from there
• Names for the ships!
• Plan the fleet hierarchy as this is a joint venture. Who is in charge of what. I know we'll need 4 ship captains, and that the 2 support ship captains are under the main ship, but the tanker is its own thing. But there needs to be an expedition head, quite possibly Juila Johon as she is one of the big financiers of this operation and wants to live the glory days.
• Finalize the ship charter and all that. Mostly from the previous post but maybe make some boilerplate legal-like thing. Just for fun.
• Generate the main NPCs. The vast majority, until needed, will just be roles.

And then start the exploration! And dice rolls! And read through the World Builder's Book for ideas, maybe even create my own tables. And re-read the Traveller Solo book as there is the Scout Survey Campaign in there. And I think I've got the 2nd edition as I bought the 1st. So there will be more things to do. 

Finally - I've been with my new company 3 months now. Still a bit stressed but a lot less than I was before. My manager is really nice as are all the people I've dealt with. And will never see - this is the 1st job I've had that is fully remote from the start.