Oolite Bulletins

If customizers took a bog-standard Cobra 3 and removed the 4 missile pylons AND 2 side laser mounts...and enlarged the cargo bay/s to encompass all that freed-up space/mass...

How big of a cargo bay would be acceptable/believable for this modified Cobra 3?
I call it the Cobra 3 Trader Edition.

My feeling is if the cargo bay is rebuilt from scratch to maximize the space, it would be at least 50 tons capacity. Even 60 might not be out of the question. The game does think Cobra 3's mass is roughly the same as a Boa 2, which has a much higher cargo capacity!

...But I'm asking others what they think, based on other standard and OXP ship sizes.

Thargoid wrote:

Depends a little on whether the cargo bay expansion is allowed or not. A standard Cobbie with one can haul 45t without any loss of pylons or weaponry.

So my personal feeling would be a trader edition should have a higher max cargo count (say 75t) but then without the side weaponry or the cargo bay extension options.

As to the loss of pylons, again it depends if you see them as internal or external to the ship body. If they're external, then losing them to gain cargo space is a little odd.

Seconded, at least about side weapon mounts and cargo bay.

The standard Cobra 3 has a 20T hold, and can have a 15T expansion. Assuming that a cargo expansion uses up spare 'empty' space within the ship the normal maximum capacity is 35T.
Assuming also that missiles and lasers are mounted internally, are very roughly equal in size to a standard 1T cargo container, removal of these would free-up a further 6T worth of space, and also assuming that an efficient re-organisation of this space would yield a little more room, I think a total of 45T would be reasonable. Certainly no more than 50T.
Relating the Cobra to a Boa Class Cruiser is not workable due to the very different shapes of the two ships. The Cobby is wide and flat where the Boa is more box-like. And mass is not an indicator of capacity, which is a function of volume.
A large pancake will have a similar mass to an egg, but the egg has a much higher volume/capacity.

You've obviously never had the misfortune to try one of my pancakes then

You could lose the rear gun too (or the front one, depending on your style, the showroom will sell you either).

ooh-ooh wrote:

You've obviously never had the misfortune to try one of my pancakes then

Thargoid wrote:

Depends a little on whether the cargo bay expansion is allowed or not. A standard Cobbie with one can haul 45t without any loss of pylons or weaponry.

Typo? As far as I know, Oolite standard Cobra 3's can haul 35T after adding a Large Cargo Bay (extension). The LCB extension would NOT be allowed on this new Cobra variant, because the whole cargo bay is specially rebuilt by the design to maximize storage space already. If anything, think of the LCB extension as being already built-into the modified design.

ooh-ooh wrote:

You could lose the rear gun too (or the front one, depending on your style, the showroom will sell you either).

I want to keep the front and rear laser mounts, as this design will need to fight while running away...and it's good to have+use a second laser while the first cools down.

Smivs wrote:

Assuming also that missiles and lasers are mounted internally, are very roughly equal in size to a standard 1T cargo container, removal of these would free-up a further 6T worth of space, and also assuming that an efficient re-organisation of this space would yield a little more room, I think a total of 45T would be reasonable. Certainly no more than 50T.

I figure missiles are longer than cargo containers, and at least equal to 2T worth of space considering the complexity and volume of the missile pylon itself -- which must be larger than the missile. The laser mounting I'd think would also be significantly larger than the laser attached to it to make laser replacement easy...and would probably be about as long as a missile. Lasers are "fluffed"/described as actually stacks of lasers as a bank which fire quickly/individually so no 1 part overheats badly. Worse, the side lasers might be in the MIDDLE of the "wing" -- dividing whatever free space is in that part of the wing in half, with tiny amounts of free space in front and behind as well as even smaller spaces above and below.

Assuming the original cargo space was an "afterthought", added after most other ship fittings, and was a continuous space in the "belly" or occupied 2 spaces (1 portion in each "wing" of the ship) -- then it was either unable to use the space cut off by other ship fittings, such as missile pylons and side lasers might have more free space near the wing tips. There probably wouldn't be much space there, but enough to round up to the nearest 5T or 10T final amount.

Since the rest of the ship's fitting would be left in place for compatibility with the parent design, there would have to be multiple cargo areas to fully utilize most of the larger areas of internal volume. Ship performance would be almost completely unchanged, because the removed fittings were probably high-density, high-mass. The side lasers probably have a cooling array around them. The missiles especially pack as much explosives, fuel, and thrusters they can into their internal space! I figure this modification would be relatively expensive, making the total base ship price ~200k -- differing from the original Cobra 3 by roughly the cost of adding military shield boosters. There wouldn't be any need for the missile target memory add-on, but as that was not a built-in item it wouldn't lower the modified ship's cost any.

Very pitiful example of the "wing" cross section:
C=Cargo, E=Engine/other equipment

Another consideration is that the Cobra was originally designed as an "all around" sort of ship, so far as I understand it. Logically, since it was intended to be capable of some fighting, some of it's internal space is dedicated to more bracing and supports so it can survive a bit more of a hit than a ship of similar size where cargo hauling was the priority. The Cobra MKIII's hull plates might be a bit thicker/heavier than a cargo ship, it might have more backup systems for critical functions.

Have there ever been any efforts to work up diagrams of the interior of the ships in the game? Deck plans, maybe?

Ganelon wrote:

Have there ever been any efforts to work up diagrams of the interior of the ships in the game? Deck plans, maybe?

I don't think so. One problem is nobody knows the size of anything

There are deck plans or interior layouts from previous versions of Elite. Some fan-created stuff. And wasn't there a game version as well with at least a rough picture of the inside of the ship?

There have been musings about this as well here on the boards in the past. So I think, provided you can find the relevant threads, there will be some pictures posted already.

However, the problem is again the screwed-up-ness of sizes in Oolite. While you can make efforts to reconcile at least ship and station sizes, and come up with theories for planet sizes and distances, the one thing that doesn't fit to scale with anything in the Ooniverse is the size of a human.

The ships are vastly too big for their crews (and the planets are at the same time vastly too small for their inhabitants). So it's better not to think too closely about how the pilot would fit into the interior design of a Cobra III.

(As a side note: the Dark Wheel Cobra has a nice easter egg: even the "cockpit window" is a subentity and can get shot off. If you manage to do so—which is not trivial; I've only managed once or twice—you can see the pilot behind it. He sits in it like it was a small fighter, and makes up a considerable portion of the ship's total height of 30 meters, so he must be at least 5 meters tall, probably more. It just doesn't make sense.)

Here is a model that sounds similar to what you are trying to do [wiki]Venom[/wiki]

For interior diagrams and layouts etc, Rabidvixen did a lot of work on this in her Long Haul Outpost project, I've pm'd her I know she still visits the BB occasionally.