Open Frame

An open skeletal frame with no exterior covering.

Spaceship hulls are rated by size from 1 to 20. A fighter has a type 1 hull whereas a battleship has a type 20 hull. The hull is the framework for every spaceship and each hull size includes a specific number of hatches, decks and engine mounts. Note that two hulls of the same hull size can be built in very different shapes. The term hull size is simply a measure of how much material is needed to make the hull. A shuttle of hull size 3 might be a saucer-shaped vessel with chemical drives firing out one of the flat sides of the disk whereas an assault scout of the same hull size is a long, sleek ship equipped with two atomic engines.

Space station hulls are shaped and rated differently. They begin at HS 20 and go up to 60 (although a really advanced civilisation may have hull sizes well in excess of this). As with ships however a space station design must begin with the selection of a hull. Some stations are designed and built to serve a specific purpose and are not equipped to serve as bases for spaceships. Space stations can be used for agriculture, scientific research and planetary defence. Stations designed for planetary defence are designated fortresses and can serve as bases for military ships. A fortress may even have a small complement of fighters that can be launched and re-armed there.

Length: This is the base minimum length in metres of the ship for that hull size. The bigger the size class the larger the size of the vessel.

Hatches: Airlocks are pressured exits to and from the vessel, they equalize the pressure on either side and fill with oxygen before allowing entry into the vessel, most also decontaminate people passing through in order to prevent people from carrying any alien infections or contaminants onto the ship. Every ship has one airlock for every size class, airlocks can vary such as the canopied cockpit of an interceptor, or the rear hatch of a shuttle, the retractable cargo lifts and ramps of a freighter and so on. An airlock always takes three rounds to depressurise, re-pressurize and open. Also those with Decontamination capabilities as appropriate to the type of Airlock provide a single re-save if an individual is infected with a disease or similar, if the save succeeds then the disease is cleansed from the individual.

Passengers: When designing a ship you must ensure that there is adequate life support to handle the number of passengers as well as crew. For every 10 x10 metres squared of space the ship can have 1 airlock and carry 1 passenger.

Length

Soft Steel

Dwarf Matter

Internal Combustion

A hydrocarbon burning reciprocal engine.

480,000 kms

Ion Protolight Drive

Jump Drives work by drawing a vast amount of energy and using it to literally pull a hole in space known as a "jump conduit" to a transitive plane called "jump space". In Jump space distance and time does not work the same way in as it does in real space. Thus by travelling through Jump space vast amounts of distance can be traversed in a far shorter time. Tech level 10 only.

Normally local curvature of space caused by massive objects and gravity effects can prevent the safe use of a jump drive, but they are great across the void between stars. Some Jump drives are capable of dropping in and out of intersecting subspace wormholes, navigating the contorted space using pure mathematics, because the reality outside the ship is beyond the ability of the senses to understand. One miscalculation and the ship drops into a black hole or becomes trapped in a recursive time loop. 

Whenever our space-time is distorted or torn, or large amounts of energy released (explosions) there are subspace effects; wormholes and Transwarp Conduits are good examples where subspace plays a part in the effect.

Subspace fields (the kind that move starships around) are intentional manifestations of subspace in our space-time, caused by the controlled release of energy in a warp field coil. These fields have many effects, often depending on the intensity.

* They leave subspace distortions behind even when they're gone.
* An object placed in a subspace field has a reduced inertial mass relative to things outside the field.
* A symmetrical field ("Warp bubble") with enough power can create an entirely new universe, but it may not be stable.
* An asymmetrical field can propel the generating ship at the speed of light; nested fields propel the ship at the speed of light relative to the field beyond.
* A subspace Soliton wave can carry a ship at the propagation speed of the wave.
* A field can be embedded in an object.
* Overlapping static warp shells can create an artificial subspace barrier in a localized region of space-time.

You can think of subspace as being the "medium" in which our space-time exists. The nearest parts (nearest being measured by the energy it takes to access them) are tightly coupled to our own universe, and can be thought of as being mapped to our space-time. This is what sensors generally read, and what the subspace fields of warp drive are interacting with. Slightly deeper parts can connect points in our universe to others. Wormholes and Transwarp Conduits are this sort of thing. Deeper still are the "untamed wilds", and, even further down are entirely separate universes, all held together by subspace.

Subspace is not in an alternate reality, or "place", or space-time where things go or at least, they don't go in the world of Star Trek. It is not entered by a starship at warp. A ship creates a subspace field which acts like another universe very tightly coupled to our own. If I was inside such a field and you were outside, we could conduct a conversation, shake hands, etc. But when the field is powerful enough and asymmetric, it is propulsive.

Nested decoupling fields magnify the effect considerably. But the ship still interacts with everything in our universe, and vice versa, as the level of subspace in which the field exists is so tightly coupled to our own that it appears no "fancier" than say a magnetic field if you're looking closely at it.
The weakest subspace fields do appear very similar to traditional fields, like magnetic fields.
They have associated particles Tetryons and Verterons which are only of importance when dealing with subspace.. basically Verterons mess up an equipment trying to create or manipulate subspace, and Tetryons are only stable within subspace but highly unstable in normal space.

To keep Special Relativity happy subspace doesn't need to follow the rules of relativity. Subspace might have a unique reference frame and everything enclosed in a subspace field has the reference frame of subspace.

A powerful, asymmetric subspace field is established around the ship by the warp nacelles. The field is composed of nested layers each pushing against the one beyond it. This drives the ship forward at a super-luminal velocity. The nacelles are powered by a tuned plasma stream from the warp core Matter/Antimatter Reactor (M/AMR). Injectors feed the plasma into warp field coil segments at specific times, causing pulses to run the length of the nacelle, front to back. This peristaltic flow causes the push of the nested warp fields, and moves the ship forward.

Travel Times

Astrogation Computer

Many starships but not all contain auxiliary ship and mission control stations. These stations do not require constant attention and are only manned when necessary. Two science stations provide real time data to the command personnel and are used by mission specialists who have to coordinate activities with the bridge. The Mission Ops station provides support to the Ops officer and coordinates secondary objectives. The Environmental Systems station allows monitoring and control of the support systems aboard a starship and can serve as a deputy operations management station in a crisis. The Engineering systems' monitor duplicates the Chief Engineer's primary status displays from the Main Engineering section.

Beamer Cooling Booster

Basic Security; this provides numerous onboard cameras, and the ability to channel an electrical charge into the floor of the ships airlocks which causes D10 electrical damage each round unless the target has some form of protection or insulation.

Intermediate Security; this provides all of the above, plus microphones. In addition the vessel is compartmentalized with heavy duty blast door at major intersections of the vessel. These doors are 200 HPs, allowing each compartmentalized section to also be air tight and thus in the case of explosive decompression only lose access to that breached compartment. This also means that via the environmental control a ships captain can also drain the air out of a specific section of the vessel. 

Advanced Security; this provides all of the above in addition to this the vessel now has at least one of the following mounted in each corridor -
Electrified floor (does D10 electrical damage)
Retractable laser Rifle mounts in the walls (3D10  damage).
Sleep Gas dispensers (fall asleep for 30 minutes)
Force Fields (These cannot be crossed unless disabled first).

Landing Drone

Larger version of atmoprobe which also tests soil and collects cultures.

Medlab

Fully equipped medical facilities for treating 1 person per ranking of lab.

Passenger Cabin

Suitable for one person. It comes with life support, food dispenser and holovid screen. An extra facility is the automatic decor control which changes in order to compliment the mood of the occupants. It is activated by sensors of heat and pheromones. Two or more can be bought and connected to make a larger room to contain more people. A first class cabin must be at least 6 meters square. A journey class cabin must be at least 4 meters square.

Tractor beam

These are designed to carry information on the registry codes, owning faction and home port of the ship, thus allowing the rapid return of salvaged vessels. Any ship which does not return a transponder request can be assumed to be a pirate vessel and may be attacked with no legal consequences.

Although starships are designed to work in non-atmospheric environments very few are designed to resist the pressures imposed on their hulls by immersion in deep water. This system of air-filled cushions allows the ship deploying them to maintain a neutral buoyancy if it is forced to land in water. The cushions are filled either from compressed air bottles (in emergencies), or using the ship's atmospheric hydrolysis life-support system to provide the air (for routine use).

Energy Screens do not so much deflect attacks as absorb them, activating a field that neutralizes destructive energy entering it. However the field itself is neutralized when it absorbs the barrage. In this way the screen overloads and becomes useless after so many attacks.

Accelerator

x10

-25%

Increases the damage of any energy based weapon by a factor of 10. Available to military only.

Fission Cannon

D12 x100

1500 metres

Disrupts the molecular attraction that holds matter together causing said molecules to fly apart.

Meson Battery

D20 x100

2300 metres

Create a point of decay at the target causing a high energy explosion.

Mine Layer

N/a

N/a

This is designed to drop mines throughout space at predetermined intervals. It uses a rack dispenser arrangement where the mines are moved up to the hatch dispensed and the next one moves up into place. The smallest version holds 10 and it can be bought in increments of 10. Any vessel with a mine layer can drop one mine per round with a distance between them equal to the distance covered by the vessel based on its speed. Typically vessels dropping mines slow right down in order to cover as much of the area with mines as they can, minimising the distance between them. In this way if a mine explodes and another mine is within the blast radius that mine too explodes and as a result the damage is increased for every mine exploded in addition to the original.

Rail Gun III

5D6 x20

1600 metres

Torpedo Launcher

N/a

N/a

Each launcher can hold up 1 torpedo per Hull Size.

All missiles are intelligent with advanced electronic tracking systems and manoeuvring jets that allow them to pursue their prey relentlessly. They have a +4 to Thac0 and can attack once per round until they hit, are destroyed, or run out of fuel. The guidance system works by attacking anyone the pilot has designated a foe prior to launching the missile.

Even if the missile misses its target it may still damage him. If the target is caught within the blast radius it takes half damage.

Missiles have a top speed of Mach 25 in an atmosphere.

Information on Nuclear missiles can be found here.

Torpedoes are identical to missiles but are much larger and slower. They have a top speed of Mach 10 in an atmosphere.

Hull Size 5-30. Freighters can be built in a wide variety of sizes, and most have much longer ranges than shuttles. These vessels can be used for many jobs. They are used to transport minerals from mining centres on asteroids or uninhabited planets to large processing centres. In star systems where several planets are inhabited, they may carry passengers between those planets. 

Hull Size 20-60. These are large outposts that orbit planets and serve as a base of operations for other ships. They have no means of propulsion aside from station keeping thrusters. They are constructed in orbit around a planet and stay there through their entire service. Space stations vary widely in size and cost. Most spin so that centrifugal force will simulate gravity around the station's outer rim. It is not uncommon for a station to have a population of several thousand more or less permanent residents.
Space station hulls are ring-shaped, with a dock for space ships at the centre of the ring. Any type of ship may dock with a station depending on its size and may use its weapons to help defend the station. Starships and large system ships cannot land on planets, so they transfer cargo and passengers while docked at space stations. Shuttles are used to transport goods and passengers between the station and the planet's surface. Larger stations carry large quantities of supplies that are loaded onto ships as they are needed.

Space stations usually serve as bases for spaceship operations and as links for space-planetary communications and travel. At major starship air docks and military bases, as many as six or eight Type 25 stations may be linked in a line, but these orbiting giants are rare. The types of ships that can be docked at various stations are listed below. Not all space stations fit the descriptions above. Such stations are designed and built to serve a specific purpose, and are not equipped to serve as bases for spaceships. Space stations can be used for agriculture, scientific research and planetary defence. Stations designed for planetary defence are designated fortresses and can serve as bases for military ships. A fortress may even have a small complement of fighters that can be launched and re-armed there.

Spaceships can be built only at Spacestation Factories. Every construction centre is rated as a Class I, Class II or Class III centre. All centres consist of at least one Type 20 space station. The docking bays of these Spaceship Construction Centres are large, open areas. Often specific docks in the bay may be enclosed to contain air pressure, so workers do not need to wear spacesuits; these are called airdocks. 

Class I Centres can construct any type of military or civilian ship. 

Class II Centres can construct any Military hulls of type 6 or smaller and hulls for civilian purposes of type 14 or less. 

Class III Centres are used only for the construction of system ships, since installing and adjusting jump engines requires equipment that is not available at these smaller centres. Any size civilian system ship can be built at a Class III centre, but these centres will never be used for the construction of military vessels. 

The breakdown of a crucial spaceship system is a matter of grave concern to all spacers. While routine maintenance lowers the chance of a breakdown it does not eliminate that chance entirely. Factors such as the age of the ship and the length of time since its last annual maintenance affect the likelihood of a system failure or breakdown. The chance that a new ship will break down on any given voyage is only 1%. For each five years that the ship has been in service add another +1%. Unless the referee has a specific reason for declaring a ship to be a certain age consider most spaceships to be 2D10 years old. If a ship misses its yearly maintenance add +5% to its break down chance. If more than two years have passed since the ship was in the shop add +10%.