Micha wrote:Nice work, but I also subscribe to the TC being a standard volume, rather than weight. From Wikipedia:
wikipedia wrote:The ton is a unit of measure. It has a long history and has acquired a number of meanings and uses over the years. It is used principally as a unit of weight, and as a unit of volume. It can also be used as a measure of energy, for truck classification, or as a colloquial term.
It is derived from the tun, the term applied to a barrel of the largest size. This could contain a volume between 210 and 256 gallons (800 to 1000 L), which could weigh around 2,000 pounds (900 kg) and occupy some 60 cubic feet (1700 L) of space.[1]
I'd make the engineering section in the Adder much bigger though, at the cost of living space.
There'd also need to be a regular airlock. The scoop would also need some sort of direct connection to the cargo bay, and in my personal interpretation of the Ooniverse, would need to be contained within the hull, perhaps only extended during scoop operation.
It'd be interesting to try and make an Oolite with more realistic distances and scales, but which is still playable and fun, although I believe many have tried and failed.
More great points. The TC is, i think, something that has evolved through decades and centuries of space travel into something that can be reliably carried on most ships without taking up too much space. Basing it on something like a truck's trailer is, I think, unfeasible due to inertia and mass displacement. It's also something that needs to be easily stored and moved around in a space station's docking bay, which could be kinda cramped (canonical evidence for this could come from the Amiga Elite's docking sequence, where several ships are relatively close together in the docking bay.
Although the idea of a bigger engineering section is workable, I get the feeling from the current trends in design that most things are getting smaller by the day. Petrol burning engines can be fitted to 1:12 scale model aircraft, so it makes sense that spacecraft drive systems in Elite would have gone through similar processes in the 700 or so years of space travel that have been going on by the time of Oolite/Elite. I would postulate that the engineering bay is probably about right in terms of size, given that it has to handle the hyperdrive, the torus drive and the recycling/reclamation systems. The computer systems are contained in the astrogation console and the cooling systems are vented through the exhaust at the back of the ship.
The external details of the cargo scooping systems are definitely retractable, which is another of the justification for the size needing to be to the smaller scale. In the case of the Adder the cargo scoop will be central to the ventral forward panel and will route directly to the bay as located on the port side of the cockpit. The other thing I considered during the design is getting the canisters out of the ship when in a docking bay, and it too indicates a smaller size. Removing a 10m tall canister from a ship would need 10m clearance on at least one side. It would also mean needing at least a 2.5 metre diameter door to allow one canister to be extracted at a time (bigger if more were to be moved).
I agree about the airlock. The Adder design has the airlock system combined into the cargo bay, but there is also one in the roof. One thing I didn't think about, actually, was landing gear (other than them being part of the "equipment level").
