In strict B-7 canon, the globe at the back is the engine and it doesn't give off any exhaust. It does glow on and off, though, when the ship is moving
(Yeah, I know, I'm sad.)
Space Corps Directive #7214
To perserve morale during long-haul missions, all male officers above the rank of First Technician must, during panto season, be ready to put on a dress and a pair of false breasts.
Ah, good ole' Mateen Greenway. The guy's a machine. The amount of fab stuff he generates is beyond belief.
I hear what you say about the green ball, but consider this - in the series the crew of the Liberator discover the race that built her and christened her DSV-1 (ooh, imaginitive). They have ships that are essentially the pods on thier own as little fighters.
I know that it was done to save budget, but would it not follow that they are powered by the same tech? Where is thier green ball?
The way I've always thought about it, the green ball is basically the reactor, providing masses of power to pass to the engines themselves, which are mounted in the three pods. The smaller fighters have a smaller engine and thus a smaller reactor, which fits nicely into the fighter's main hull.
The craft was clearly visible from the ground at night (I would say probably about the same brightness as Venus in real-life) at 1000 spacials from the surface. At this distance, it was geostationary on Earth-sized planets, so it is fair to assume that 1000 spacials is the same as Earth's geostationary orbit. Based on this, I'd say the Liberator would have to be about a hundred times the size of the existing International Space Station, for the brightness to work out.
Another way to figure the size is in relation to the prison ship in Space Fall. The Liberator is clearly ten-to-fifteen times the size. The prison ship had a crew of about seven or eight and had two rooms for the prisoners, each of which could take about thirty active people. The Cobra III could probably have provided comparable facilities for about fifteen. This makes the Liberator somewhere between twenty to thirty times the size of a Cobra III.
Given that a Cobra Mk. III takes a maximum of two in a cramped flight deck, whereas the Liberator can take seven crew and probably twenty-one passengers comfortably on its flight deck, this might not be unreasonable. The Cobra Mk. III can carry one escape pod for its own use and can carry only a few more in cargo without the cargo extender. The Liberator had several cargo bays, one of which was shown as about ten times the size of the capsule it brought in, which was about twice the size of an escape pod. It had at least two, I'm guessing three, such cargo bays. This ignores the multitude of strongrooms, storage rooms, labs and other areas that could be used to keep things. This would also suggest that the twenty-to-thirty region is about right.
Now, the weaponry is something worth considering. It had essentially three military beam lasers pointing forwards, with the ability to fire rockets in other directions or bombs onto a planet. This would be interesting to simulate in the game. Under the BBC Elite system, lasers had strength. The type was derived from the strength value. A laser of strength 16 was a pulse laser, and a laser of strength 128 was a military beam. This means the Liberator would have a front weapon strength of 384 in BBC Elite terms.
Shields are also important. The Liberator took twenty hits, when ambushed by cloaked Federation vessels, and was damaged but was still flyable. (Unlike when it tried to hold off five hundred alien vessels attacking through the hole in the minefield at Star One. But it still held on for close to an hour, based on the ETAs Servalan was given.) It's hard to judge the power of the Federation's weaponry, let alone that of the aliens from Andromeda, but it seems reasonable to say it would be about that of a military beam laser, except that it could only fire as a pulse weapon. Each of the seven Liberator energy banks could absorb the impact of two plasma bolts (Duel), which means it can take twenty-one such hits, which seems about right. It could recharge moderately rapidly in flight, but not when stationary, so it presumably had giant fuel scoops on each of the three pods.
