Designing Plausible Spacecraft for RPGs: More work on IPVs

The USS Example II

         In order to help everyone get a feel of what I'm trying to accomplish with my Interplanetary Vehicle (IPV) design, and not just the long time followers of this blog, I made this list of vital statistics. I'm including the technical stuff as well; this being one of the places where such data is both expected and welcome.

Length: 240 meters on the longest axis.

Primary Mission: Space denial; to interdict the space around an asteroid base with Kessler-type Missiles in order to deny said base resupply.

Secondary Mission: Resource acquisition; force the surrender of asteroid bases though space denial and then occupy said bases.

Crew: 40 core crew, 10 Espatiers, 30 mission specialists, 75 maintenance robots, 80 combat robots.

Powerplant: Two 50 Gw He³-He³ fusion reactors

Primary Propulsion: Two Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) arrays.

Secondary Propulsion: Two Laser propulsion thrusters fed with Hydrogen or Oxygen from water electrolysis. Used only for emergency vector changes.

M2P2 Field on: as seen from the front

Radiators: 32 lithium droplet radiators

Propellant: Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen stored primarily as water.

Habitats: Two 25x25 meter cylindrical habitats on opposite sides of the IPV. Docking ports for up to 16 optional attachable Habitat Modules (mass removed from cargo capacity).

Dry Mass: 31,000 tons

Structure: 14,000 tons

Cargo Capacity (including habitats and all consumables): 16,000 tons

IPV under sail; spacecraft is traveling to the right.

Propellant Mass: 120,000 tons (stored as water)

Total Mass: 150,000 tons

Mass Ratio: ≈ 5

Specific Impulse: 400 s

Acceleration: 1 millegee (0.00981 m/s²)

Mass Flow*: 7.6 kg/s

Exhaust Velocity*: 4000 m/s

Thrust: 882,900 N

∆v: 116,171 m/s

Brachiostrome Duration Terra/Mars: ≈ 10 wks

*Data is for the M2P2 system

Fell free to comment!

Arificial Gravity and What Roller Coasters Can Teach Us About It

        One of the many problems with long-terms spaceflights is the lack of gravity. Your nose stuffs up more or less permanently, making any food not served with hot sauce taste like cardboard, nausea makes it impossible to eat for the first two or three days, and telling the male members of the crew to keep their dirty thoughts to themselves is pretty much unnecessary, given what the fluid redistribution does to “Le Reflex Gallant”. If that weren't enough, going to the space toilet takes about an hour and as Apollo 9 Lunar Module Pilot Russell Sweickart noted, “There ain't no graceful way”.

         If that were all it was, we probably wouldn't worry about it. However, these little symptoms are only the beginning. For example, because all of the body's fluid sensors are above the waist, Astronauts don't feel thirsty when they should and suffer chronic dehydration. They don't feel the need to urinate when they should either, making bladder rupture a embarrassingly real possibility. Lack of convection currents makes forced ventilation a must, as you could end up choking in a cloud of your own breath without it. The same principle makes dying of heatstroke for want of a breeze a possibility as well.

         The most dangerous effect of free-fall is that it causes muscles to atrophy and bones lose calcium. It is generally a truism in biology that organisms are lazy to a degree. If you don't use it, you lose it. In space, that means that bones, since they no longer need to support weight, start shedding calcium like a long-haired cat in July.

Keep going, it's saving your life!

        While it's true that vigorous exercise will help ameliorate this somewhat, Astronauts that serve the standard six-month tour of duty on the ISS lose on average 5% of their bone density. Not so bad right? It is when you consider where that calcium goes. Most of it is expelled via urination, which makes getting wicked kidney stones not only possible, but likely. As bad as kidney stones are on the ground, in space there is pretty much no way to pass them, as gravity will not move them along. While it hasn't happened yet, if we go without gravity for periods much longer than the current limits we will lose Astronaut to kidney failure. This means if we want to go to Mars, or even a Near Earth Asteroid, we are going to have to take gravity with us.

         We've been theorizing about artificial gravity in space since before we went there. Pictures of the old-school spin habitats hovering like giant bicycle tires in orbit have graced the pages of everything from children's books to Colliers magazine over the years. The problem with spin habitats is that they are, as currently imagined, going to be so maintenance intensive the dang things will probably spend more time out of order than doing anything useful.

        What's wrong with spin-habs, you ask? Oh, dear RocketFans, let's count the ways:

• If the entire spacecraft spins, it has to be wide enough to make it worthwhile, adding superfluous mass,
• If that wasn't enough, steering this spinning top is whack-o due to the gyroscopic effect, doing maintenance on the hull will cause vertigo in a corpse, and docking an axillary craft is impossible without stopping this monster.
• If only part of the rocket spins, you need a flywheel, which is aerospace engineer-ish for “big mass penalty”.
• If you have two spin-habs that counter spin to cancel out the gyroscopic effect, there is pretty much no known way to engineering science to make an air-tight seal that friction won't destroy in a matter of days. Come to think of it, this holds true for any spin-hab, counter spin pairs or no.
• If you use an air lock to travel between the spin segment and the rest of the spacecraft, you better leave a crew in the free-fall segment or hope you don't have any emergencies that require rapid response. Having a hab in the free-fall segment for the “on watch” crew just means nearly doubling the habitat space, which is yet another mass penalty.
• Radiation shielding an entire spin hab is – you guessed it – a major mass penalty. Not shielding the spin hab means that you better have plenty of warning when solar flares happen, due to the whole air-lock thing.

        There are probably more reasons that spin-habs are a pain to use, but I think we've seen enough.

        So there you have it, RocketFans; we have to have spin gravity in order to survive a trip to the planets, but they are so ornery that actually building one is going to be next to impossible. Whatever can we do?

        Obviously, I have a suggestion; there are pictures further down the post that are a dead give-away.

        First of all, I've generally thought that putting the motive force at the hub of a spin-hab would put a lot of stress on the spokes from torque (I think; engineer I'm not). It made more sense to me to put the spin hab in a centrifuge, which could be as small as a stationary ring around the hab and them have wheels on the hab add the spin like a car constantly driving uphill. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a design that had a prayer of not being a tangle of supports that make the mass penalty of a flywheel seem like a sweet dream. Still, the idea has stuck for awhile, and ended up getting used in the Iceteroid Outposts article in OpenD6 Magazine. Basically the Conestogas are connected and drive up the walls on opposite ends of a circular vault inside an asteroid. That worked pretty well, but didn't help for spacecraft.

Look kids, it's Physics!

        Finally it hit me: Roller Coasters! Specifically, inverted roller coasters. You know the ones; they have tubular tracks and the cars have wheels mounted both above and below the track that allow the coaster to travel in pretty much any direction the track leads, regardless of gravity. The inverted coasters are my inspiration because when they loop the loop, they are on the outside of the track, hanging from their wheels.

         That's all it took. I opened up GIMP and started kit-bashing with the map elements and plans from all of my other stuff and whipped up possible design for an IPV that has spin gravity via modules traveling on tracks.

The USS Example

         This IPV is not large enough for my tastes, but it demonstrates all of the design principles I've mentioned in the past. It has two of everything, lots of room for propellant, two fusion reactors and associated thrusters, and big, beautiful radiators that turn what looks like a dumb bell made of Tinker Toys into a fairly cool looking spacecraft. Or maybe that's just me.

Thank goodness for sprites!

        The important parts for this discussion are the spin tracks and modules. As you can see to the left, there are airlock nodes mounted on drive trains that have two sets of wheels gripping the tubular track. You can have as many or as few of these modules as you like; as long as there is an equal amount on the other track rolling in the opposite direction at the same speed. This versatility will allow IPVs to interchange modules in short time, both increasing flexibility and making maintenance easier.

         The maintenance advantage is that each module node has its own motors and power supply independent of the others. If one konks out, it can be pushed or pulled by the others on the track like a rail car while the techs repair the motors inside the module and in gravity. This turns a good chunk of the maintenance nightmare into something manageable. Even better, preventive maintenance can be done as often as you like and no one need put on their fancy clothes.

         This design is safer too. You may notice that the interior surfaces of the hab modules are flat; there is actually an Astrobot standing on the “top” of the module on the left. The robot arms in the previous graphic allow access to the habs, the consumables cargo pods on the central truss, and the avionics gear in the hub, all without risking the trapeze act while the modules are spinning. If there is a need to crawl along the “underside”, or outer surfaces of the modules, handrails are provided. Have fun with that.

         My favorite part about this design is the outside surface airlock on the module nodes. In the examples above, you can see that I have an inflatable greenhouse on one side and a Paladin Spaceplane docked on the other. Both the greenhouse and the Paladin are in full gravity - even more gravity than the modules because they are further away from the center of rotation. This set up allows the crews and passengers of small craft being ferried across the black deserts of space to enjoy the benefits of gravity without having to increase the number of habitat modules permanently attached to the IPV. Indeed, an IPV could become a veritable super carrier just by adding more airlock nodes. If it were me, I'd have double the number of airlock nodes anyway and use them to ferry passengers (for a fee) to the other module it's in between. This system also makes it much harder for shady types to get unauthorized access to the control module, which will have the command crew's quarters located on the same node.

         But what I like about this spin-gravity hanger space (no pun intended) is the possibilities it gives me as a role-playing game designer.   I need my future Players to be able to do something during that ten-week trip to Mars, or I'll end up having to Handwave shorter travel times out of desperation and hang my head in shame. With the roller coaster design, Characters in my game can explore the IPV, interact with its crew, the crew of other rockets, explore the other rockets, all while traveling to Mars or the asteroids in their personal, short-range spacecraft. This is why rockets like the Heinlein spacecraft have airlocks in their noses, so they can become part of the spin-hab itself.

          Anyway, the roller coaster design may solve a lot of problems, but seems to make some issues worse. Traveling to the non-spinning sections of the IPV, for example, is now impossible. These modules are completely isolated and cannot even use an Airlock to access the hub because the rails are in the way. While it may seem to be not unnecessary to travel to the other parts of the ship, trying to pilot a spacecraft from a control room that is in constant motion would be difficult, to say the least. This isolation also seems to make the problem of radiation shielding worse as well.

Of course, I wouldn't have brought it up if I hadn't figured out a decent work-around. Just like real railroads, our IPV's rails can have sidetracks and switching stations. It's a little more complicated than tracks on flat ground but if a section of the tubular rail can be made out of flexible segments with expandable areas in between, it would work. I made a handy .gif animation showing the process below:

 
         With a sidetrack, the Modules can leave the spin track when they need to, without the other modules having to slow down. It may be necessary take a damaged node off the spin track for overhaul; the IPV can simply detach the modules, connect them to the node that pushed the damaged unit off track, and put the modules back under gravity, all in a couple hours or so. In combat or an emergency like loss of sensors, the Command module can side track out of spin, stop, and then take as many bearings off the stars with a coelostat that the Emergency Pilot wants. They can also send robots and possibly live crew via suits to any areas of the hull that are stationary.

         But the best part is that in the even of a radiation event, attack, or other calamity, all of the modules can sidetrack and hide. You'll notice our USS Example has a ring of silvery cylinders to located medially to the big orange balls (those are Hydrogen tanks, BTW). These tubes contain the bulk of the ships volatile propellant stored as nice safe water. Because there isn't any solid that hydrogen can't seep through given enough time (it is, after all, the lightest of all elements), the long-range IPVs electrolyze the water when more LH2 is needed and the oxygen is either burned for rocket power or breathed by the crew, take your pick.

Head for the cellar, Maw!  Twister's comin'!

         Anyway, all those water tanks are racked on a ring wide enough that the habitat modules can slide into the space they create, giving the humans and plants within a nice 10-15 meter wall of water between them and radiation. This means that not only is there no additional mass penalty for radiation shielding, there is no need to cramp up the crew in a tiny storm cellar either. The only luxury the crew need do without during a long radiation storm is gravity; they can sleep in their own bunks and eat at their own tables.

          During combat (if it's that kind of IPV), The modules are still protected. I imagine that all of the modules with the exception of FCR-1 will be under cover; FCR-2 will be in a place where it can pop out immediately and take over if FCR-1 is mission-killed. The most logical set up I could come up with is the one above; the Modules go in opposite directions so that the loss to one side of the spacecraft does not mean the loss of all hands. It may be possible to create another sidetrack that allows modules to travel from one spin rail to the other; that way, if one ring is damaged, the full crew can use the other ring while damaged one is repaired. Repair would involved replacing the damaged section from either spares or fabricated sections. We can do that now, as the rails on roller coasters today are prefabbed in sections and assembled on site.

***

          Anyway, this is a really long post, so I'm gonna go do something else now. Comments are always welcome. See you tomorrow, RocketFans!

Crew As Mission Control II

          This topic has generated so much feedback, from comments, forum posts, to a new section on Atomic Rockets, that I feel it deserves more discussion.  Besides, it's fun.

           First off, allow me to apologize; I may not have been as clear as I should have as to how the Mission Control model would work in practice.  Also, I know many RocketFans out there are curious as to how this model can be applied to smaller spacecraft, such as the kind PCs in a role-playing game would actually crew.  Lastly, I wanted to address how this model may work out in command-and-control craft, such as the Heinlein rocket, during space combat. 

          To begin, let's look at the crew of our friend, the Missile Craft.  Just to recap, the Missile craft is an interplanetary vehicle (IPV) that has enough delta-v to travel one AU or thereabouts and still be able to stop at their destination.  They usually travel on year-long patrol routes, carry a crew of about 80, and can be considered a Flotilla-level asset for those who vote Navy and a a Group-level asset for those who prefer Air Force.  All this means as far as out crew model is concerned is that there will always an MCOM billet on a Missile Craft.

          As mentioned in our first post on this topic, There are five departments in Mission Control: Command, COMAST, Engineering, Life-Support, and Payload.  Each department has three staff positions.  Since there are two full Mission Control teams assigned to an IPV, for redundancy and safety, this gives us six staffers per department.  Each member of the Mission Control team will be qualified to stand watch for their entire department under normal operations, which means that the normal crew per watch is five.  This is similar to the way that flight control for the ISS is handled at NASA; only eight staffers are on duty during low priority times.  

         This gives a Watch bill of six four-hour shifts.  Each member of the Command Department functions as Flight Director for their Watch, though only the two Flight Commanders are referred to as "Flight".  The INCO is the de facto Executive/1st Officer of an IPV, and the Chief is the de facto 2nd Officer.  The Witch bill is staggared as well, with Flight 1 directing the first Watch and Flight 2 directing the 4th.

         After their 4 hour Watch is up (or before, I'm not picky) each crew member has an additional four to eight hours of work to do in their specialty.  This can mean a lot of things, but with the technology available, it will mostly be supervising a lot of robots and performing spot inspections.  The most important part of a crew member's job - indeed, the entire reason for having an organic crew at all - is to spot potential problems before they happen.  Space is an uncaring mistress, many problems are lethal and impossible to fix by the time they actually occur.  The two Flights have the task of not only handling the details of their respective commands but also being on the planning staff of the MCOM, along with the Flight Commanders of any auxiliary craft and the commanders of the Espatier attachments.

          Under combat conditions, both Flight Control Rooms are fully crewed.  The FCR used by the MCOM is the primary control room; the second FCR , home of the Deputy MCOM and Flight 2, is on standby to assume control immediately in case of loss of FCR-1. "Loss" can mean anything from communications breakdown to explosive decompression.  In order to keep both Mission Control teams honed and in fighting trim, they will routinely conduct wargames against one another in real-time via virtual reality and telepresence.  MCOMs and Flights will also conduct surprise inspections, drills and other nasty tricks to avoid the lethal complacency that can cripple a crew on the long, monotonous orbits between worlds.  One such trick will be an "Honor FCR" competition; the most efficient, alert, and combat effective  FCR team will have the honor of hosting the MCOM for whatever period of time there is between competitions.  I imagine they get first dibs on liberty and fresh provisions as well.  Whatever it takes to keep them motivated.

          This has become a pretty lengthy post already;  therefore I hereby decree that I will address the there two topics I mentioned, small spacecraft control and C-and-C spacecraft, in their own posts.  Don't worry, RocketFans, I will be posting on this topic daily until Wednesday at least.

           One last note:  I am soliciting comments and suggestions on the Character Sheet until Friday; the PDF will go live over the weekend.  I've already gotten some awsome suggestions and made a few changes, so please, if you have any thoughts at all on the subject, share them.

            See you tomorrow, RocketFans!

        

Designing Spacecraft for RPGs: Crew as Mission Control?

          As promised, I'm actually writing one another installment in one of our on-going series here at Blue Max Studios.  It was tough deciding whether or not to put this one in Designing Plausible Spacecraft or as one of our articles on the Missile Craft, but I think this applies to spacecraft in general, and not necessarily just IPVs.  We'll see.

          The topic of today's post was inspired, like many other ideas, by Rick Robinson's blog Rocketpunk Manifesto.  In this particular post of Rick's, he suggests that a plausible spacecraft of tomorrow will be staffed by a crew that functions more like the present-day Mission Control than the daring rocketeers of yesteryear's fiction.  I immediately liked this idea, since the Black Desert setting has computers and AI that can perform most of the functions of modern-day astronauts faster, more accurately, and above all else cheaper (in both terms of cost and consumables) than organic spacers could.

          The first thing we need to do is find out exactly what the people at Mission Control today do; what positions need to be filled?  I did some digging on Ye Olde Internet and found this website, which outlines NASA's current line-up in, as they call it, The Trench.  NASA's Mission Control is full of nifty acronyms, but the tasks performed by the various controllers will be for the most part as valid in the twenty-third century as they are today.  I've done some fiddling with the crew positions I've already come up with for Black Desert and those used by Mission Control, and have come up with the following list of possible crew positions that an IPV or space station would have in a future where navigation, piloting and many other traditional occupations are all automated.

           Let's take a look:

        There are four senior flight directors at the top of the food-chain in our BD Mission Control.  They are:

• Mission Commander (MCOM):  This is the overall director of the entire operation, whether it's directing a combat task force or leading a convoy into the Asteroid Belt.  This is the Big Boss; the equivalent of a General (Air Force Commander) or an Admiral (Task Force Commander).
• Flight Commander (Flight): This is the directer of the spacecraft itself; the one directly in charge of supervising all aspects of the ship's preparedness and it's ability to perform the mission MCOM outlines.  This is the traditional Captain or, in Air Force parlance, the Group Commander (for an IPV) or, of course, a Captain of a Naval Vessel.  All spacecraft have a Flight Commander.  That being said, only the IPV Commander is "Flight" the Flight Commander of any subordinate spacecraft are called "Commander", "FCOM" or "Skip", depending on that organization's traditions.
• Integrated Communications Officer (INCO): This is the supervisor that is in charge of all exterior and interior communications.  This person is the bridge between all of the spacecraft's different computers and personnel and the two senior commanders.  In addition, this director handles the inevitable administration details and discipline among the other departments. This is the equivalent of an XO position and is occasionally referred to as such.
• Flight Engineer (Chief):  This supervisor, as the title suggests, is in charge of all the engineering systems of a spacecraft.  On an IPV or in a space station, there will be separate directors for the fusion reactor, maintenance, electrical, and all that jazz.  On a smaller rocket, this individual will be do it all.

         On large spacecraft, there will be four departments under the Command department that perform additional tasks:  COMAST, Engineering, Life-Support, and Payload.  We'll look at each in turn.

         COMAST:  This is an abbreviation of Communication and Astrogation.

• Guidance Procedures Officer (GPO):  This officer monitors the navigation of the spacecraft.  Basically, they constantly check the guidance control software in order to make sure its working properly and not glitched or fooled by electronic warfare.  Often simply called "Guidance".
• Guidance, Navigation and Control Systems Engineer (GNC): This directer is responsible for all of the hardware involved in their title.  This includes flight computers, radar, lidar and flir sensors, the spacecrafts RCS, and all of the connections between these elements.  They mostly direct robots and perform spot inpections.
• Spacecraft Communications (SCOM): Still called CAPCOM in the US, this officer is the direct communicator between a spacecraft and their axillary elements.  For IPVs, this means any spacecraft attached to the craft or docking/undocking.

           The next department is Engineering.  The need for this department should be obvious.

• Propulsion Engineer (Prop): This dude's in charge of gas.  On most military craft, they monitor the water tanks, electrolyzers, LOX and LH2 tanks, all the connecting hoses, the cryogenics and all that stuff.  They also keep track of how much Delta-V the spacecraft has left.
• Booster Engineer (Booster): This is the officer that monitors the spacecraft's L-Drive and Plasma Sails.  They also make sure that the radiators are in working order and the laser generators can provide combat power if needed.
• Fusion Reactor and Electrical Engineer (FREE): Despite the acronym, this operator is anything but.  They monitor the fusion plant, the helium 3 supplies, radiation levels and all of the electrical sub-systems and lighting on the spacecraft.  Again, this is a job for robots with the FREE performing spot-checks.

            The Payload department is not only concerned with cargo, though that is a big part of their job.  These operators also oversee a spacecraft's fighting ability.

• Payload Officer (PLO/Payload): This is really the weapons officer, but they are called "PLO" for the same reasons the chief communicator is still "CAPCOM" long after the use of capsules.  If a spacecraft is armed, this is the person who directs the weapons systems.  
• Payload Deployment and Retrieval Officer (PDRS):  This person actually monitors the loading and unloading of cargo.  Robots do all the work.  This  "Cargo Master" also makes sure that the cargo is balanced so the rocket doesn't fall off it's tail.
• Maintenance, Mechanical Arms, and Crew Systems Officer (MMACS): "Max" is another holdover name; the term now denotes the officer that oversees the maintenance of all of the spacecraft's robots, robotic arms, and associated systems.

         Last but certainly not least, we have the Life-Support department.  If they don't work, you don't live.

• Environmental Consumables Manager (ECM): The ECM makes sure that there is enough food, water, atmosphere and heat to keep the crew alive.  Anything to do with food storage, air-srubbers, water faucets and air vents falls under their supervision.
• Closed-Ecology Life-Support Systems (CLESS): If a spacecraft or station has a closed-loop system, there will be a CLESS to oversee it.  Hydroponics, algae tanks, urine recycling, and making sure all that nature does not get out of hand is their chief responsibility.  A ship with a CLESS and a good officer to monitor it can feed and support it's crew for years without resupply.  
• Flight Surgeon (Doc): Obviously, this is the spacecraft's medical officer.  They inspect for cleanliness, diseases and radiation.  In the event of injury, they are expected to deal with anything from eczema to explosive decompression.

          If you're keeping count, that's 16 staff positions for a fully crewed Mission Control.  If we want to keep the same number of crew for our Missile Craft that we had already,  we add four more people; an extra Engineer, LSO, PLO and an Emergency Pilot, for when the Avionics are fried by a laser or EW.  Of course, we will double this amount, in the spirit of redundancy.

          Computers being what they are, you will only need the full crew on duty during combat or other intensive situations, so under standard conditions, we'll have only one crew member per department on duty at a time.  This gives us a watch bill with six four-hour shifts.  One of the command staff will be in charge of each watch, with the exception of the MCOM and their deputy.  Flights one and two will get either 1st and 2nd watch, or more likely 1st and 4th, with each mission control team taking half a day.  After their four hours in Mission Control, the crew will take an additional four hours doing maintenance and inspections in their areas of responsibility.

         That's all I got on this topic right now, RocketFans.  Comments are always welcome.

More on the Missile Craft, and some Q&A

          I got an email today from long-time fan Trey Palmer, AKA "Pilgrim" that asked a lot of very good questions.  Rather than fill up the comments section with my lengthy response, I decided to use today's post.  Besides, I didn't have a good topic to blog about today...

         Here is the comment, reprinted for your convenience:

         "I can see the medical types reporting to the LSO, but I'm not sure the LSO would be a medical type. From my (admittedly limited) understanding, life support is a mix of biology and engineering to keep the larger system alive and inhabitable. The doctors and any support team would be invaluable in helping diagnose life support problems and fix the crew from their impacts, but I think the training would be in different directions.

         

         "Occupying colonies - yes, I get that the espatier unit woud have a large number of force multipliers in the form of robots in the cargo hold, plus new ones fabbed up on site, plus whatever they could suborn and be useful in occupying the site. However, you're going to need human judgement behind those bots and surveillance feeds and with no to minimal light speed lag. The ideal goal is to keep the locals from wanting to sabotage your efforts to rebuild their colony into a FOB for whatever power. So, I think the human touch would be very useful.

           "Now some questions - you've provided an illustration of the general purpose 'bot. But what are some of the broad types in the BD setting? Bush bots? Human imitators? 

           

           "What is medical treatment like in the BD? Is tissue engineering common for replacing organs and limbs? Or is it cybernetics all the way? Or some mix? I'll bet telemedicine is taken to a level that would boggle us. Doctors and nurses making house calls through teleoperated robots, or being on call at a hospital 200 miles away while staying in your living room are two that immediately come to mind.

           "The medical question brought up some demographic questions for me. IIRC, the three major PC types are human, AI and nu ape. So, what are their typical ages? Lifespans? Causes of death?"

          Whew!  Where to begin... First off, combining life support maintenance with direct medical intervention in the job of LSO is, admittedly, a matter of convenience.  I justify it as an analog of how old Destroyer Escorts had corpsman as the ship's chief medical officer (or Pharmacist's Mate, in those days) and maybe one actual doctor per squadron.  Of course, the IPV is itself a squadron-level (or rather, wing-level in Air Force parlance) asset, so it should have at least one dedicated medical doctor.  We'll make that two, doubling up as usual, giving us a nice round eighty for our Missile Craft's compliment.

          As for the warm-body to robot ratio of Espatiers, I am deliberately making it as low as possible to save Life-support.  Robots are easy; just rack 'em up Episode I style and do maintenance checks, assisted by the IPV's Payload Load Officers.  This gives us a full Espatier battalion, three companies, between 220 and 440 robots they can deploy at one time, and expect the command staff of 20 humans to maintain total tactical control.  This is a ratio of  1:10 to 1:20, which sounds high, but is really not when you consider the ratio of officers to enlisted in real life.  Of course, robots are not as intelligent as the enlisted marines of the present day, so there may be some conflict.  Robots do have the virture of staying on-task, not requiring sleep (just one hour to charge), and of course, they use no life-support and can be stationed in vacuum for extended periods.  You take the good with the bad either way.

           As for the question about the different types of robots available in The Black Desert we will be releasing a Core Book free-source excerpt that covers the robot rules in April.  As always, there will be fluff to give everyone a feel of how robots work.

           Medical treatment is a huge topic that I haven't fully fleshed out (ahem) just yet.  Replacement organs can be grown much more effectively than they are now, and it is possible to clone an individual.  The process used to download people's memories into a QOOR processor can be used in reverse, but its something of a crap shoot as to how much the clone is like the original.  

           One thing that BD has that I'm excited about is nano-biotics. These replace antibiotics with nanotech; the benefit being that bacteria cannot build up an immunity.  There will also be nano-virals, that do the same for viruses.  While these two wonder drugs would seem to cover the bases as far as disease goes, the fact that bacteria and viruses are at least twice as virulent in space makes it a little less effective.  In game terms, we really don't have to worry about infections in game terms.  It's a work in progress.

           All of this adds up, however; Humans live about 150-200 years without trying very hard, and they do not cosmetically or physiologically age much until they're into their hundreds.  The social ramification of this are significant, not the least of which being that scientific advancement has slowed to a crawl.  The old fuddy-duddies that will not accept any theory that is not the traditional one (the major brake on scientific advancement for...ever) simple will not die; they live twice as long as they used to.  This is why BD tech is not very much more advanced than what we could be seeing in the next thirty years or so; that generation of scientist are still alive.

           AI, and by extention Transhumans, don't have life-spans; their consciousness is not biological.  Theoretically, they could a dozen millennia or more before the carbon micro-tubules in their processors break down.  Transhumans, who don't care if they are an original or a recording, can last forever.

          NuApes don't have it so good; they live shorter lives than mainline apes did before they went extinct.  NuApes are not an actual species;  they are cloned apes that are surgically altered and have proto-QOOR processors implanted where their enormous jaw muscles used to be.  As a consequence, NuApes have to eat essentially baby-food, as they barely have the strength to hold their massive jaws shut, much less chew.  This leads to digestive problems, poor nutrition, and other chronic health issues that make them die young.  Being so close to human, they could live longer, but their creators aren't concerned with longevity for disposable troops and laborers.  Free NuApes will be strongly motivated to extend their life-spans, modify their jaws, and other things like that.

          

Space Combat in the Black Desert: Crew Requirements of the Missile Craft

           While the primary in-game use of the Missile Craft design is actually going to be its civilian equivalent, I have already stated that most logical way to get a feel for the civilian IPVs is to design the military one.  Today's post will deal with how many people we can expect to see on one of these spacecraft, and what they will be doing.

           If you'll recall, the most important design consideration in a spacecraft is it's mission.  Since we're in "in-game" logic mode, this means the Missile Craft's military mission.  I gave a brief description of this in a previous post, but to expand on that, the mission of a Missile Craft IPV is to travel at high speed on extended patrols (about a year) around the Black Desert.  If called upon, the Missile Craft can travel to an asteroid node, attack it, and secure it as a base for their nation's military.  This can be done through interdiction; by filling the sky with debris from your missiles, or by threat.  Once the orbital space of an asteroid is secure, the outpost itself will be occupied and the asteroid's resources put to use.  The question is: how many eating, breathing and excreting people will this take? 

           The nature of realistic space travel is one of absolute minimalism: No space agency will design accommodations for two crew members when one will serve.  As a game designer, I would like to have as many potential NPCs for Players to interact with as possible, but as a Hard SF designer, I understand that I have to keep that number at a minimum in order maintain a plausible setting.   

           So, what's the minimum, anyway?  In reality, it's actually pretty minimal.  No matter where you stand on the "Future Space Force = Air Force or Navy" debate, the fact remains that the crew requirements on a spacecraft will be similar to that on aircraft.  For example, no matter how many people travel on a plane, be it the Air Force's most long-range command and control craft, or a 727 commuter, the number of crew needed to actually fly the plane is about 3 or 4.  I have sort of extended this in BD to five core crew positions: Flight Commander, Pilot, Flight Engineer, Life Support Officer and  Payload Officer.  Payload Officer is the current euphemism for a military officer that is assigned to civilian spaceflight in order to launch classified satillites and such; in The Black Desert, this antiquated term is used for a rocket's chief cargo handler, robotic operator, and weapons officer. 

           In the spirit of redundancy,  there will be two of these core crews on duty at all times.  In order to preserve the chain of command, there will also be a Mission Commander and a Deputy MCOM, raising the minimum to twelve.  Since IPVs have spin gravity, and connecting spin segments to the rest of the craft is a maintenance nightmare, I am going on the assumption that there will be a total of four core crews; two on watch at a time in a 24 on/24 off type of rotation.  The on watch crews will be in the free-fall sections of the craft, while the other crews will be in the spin habs.  These crews will still be on duty for a portion of the day, working on keeping the ship habitable and all systems in working order.   This type of watch bill will raise our minimum crew to twenty-two.

          Missile Craft, like all IPVs, have to have auxiliary spacecraft in order to move cargo and personnel from the ship to a planet's or asteroid's surface.  The minimum number of rockets needed for this will be two.  That being said, we could simply assign the off-watch crews to man these rockets if needed.  If we do that, however, any casualties suffered on the Missile Craft could not be replaced with fresh personnel, so I believe that the inclusion of additional crew will be considered a necessary expense.  Two more crews will raise our total to thirty-two.

          I've also stated that Missile Craft carry espatiers.  Assuming a company-level unit assigned, which should be enough to secure a medium-sized asteroid outpost, we will need a minimum of six more warm bodies as passengers.  Why so few?  In The Black Desert, robots are always used instead of people if possible.  So an espatier company will have one Major as Company Commander, a Captain as their deputy, a pair of Lieutenants as Platoon Commanders, and a pair of Sergeants as their deputies.  The rank-and-file soldiers in the company will all be combat robots that are coordinated and, if necessary, directly teleoperated, by the few human espatiers aboard.

          Six espatiers will raise the totals to thirty-eight.

          So, will there be anyone else aboard?  No one else is needed to run the Missile Craft or help it complete it's primary mission, so logic suggests no.  However, the Missile Craft does have a secondary mission; once an asteroid has been successfully secured, it must them be occupied and turned into a productive forward base.  This will require additional personnel.  I have no idea how many, really, but I kinda came up with a ballpark of forty or so, thus doubling the compliment of the Missile Craft for a grand total of seventy-eight.

          This is a lot of people; Rick Robinson would be vexed with me.  That being said, the primary restraints on high crew counts on a spacecraft have to do with the cost of supplying said ship for a mission.  The Black Desert solves many of these problems with the L-Drive; cost per kilogram of supplies lifted to orbit is not very high compared to now.  In addition, a year-long deployment is past the break-even point of 145 days where the inclusion of greenhouses and algae tanks is more cost effective that transporting additional cargo.  These two factors put together make such a high number of crew possible; and the nature of high military budgets in the face of less than cost effective solutions make the possible just this side of plausible.  I hope.

           Of course, plausible from a military perspective is different from a civilian one; will such a high compliment of organics be viable for the Missile Craft's privately owned and operated analogs?  I would think so; since passenger transport is a paying proposition, the cost of supplying so many people would be subsumed in the cost of their tickets.  This is no chump change, though; we're talking some serious price tags on express tickets to Mars.  Just how much is an economic issue, however, and will be covered in another post.

            Any comments on this topic, of course, are welcome.

        

Designing Spacecraft for RPGs: Why the Missile Craft?

          This is a question I've been asked before.  It makes sense; after all, unless one is planning to run a military campaign, what do you need a huge, Interplanetary Missile Craft for, anyway?  The answer to that has to do with the compromises necessary in a Hard SF setting, and the ways to make those compromises fun in a role-playing game.

          First off, there is one rule to Hard SF that has caused more heartache and headaches to the authors of such fiction than any other.  Nevertheless, this rule is set in the stone of physics and therefore must be followed.  We'll add it to the list:

           11. "There is simply no stealth in space.  Period."

         I'm terribly sorry, but it's true.  This point has been argued ad nauseum an many different forums and venues to no avail.  If you think you've found a work around, please check it here before you mention it.  Please.

           Notice, however, that this only refers to pure detection; basically, you will been seen coming.  You're heat signature and acceleration will probably also give away your rocket's type, size and other information.  There is nothing one can do about this.  In Hard SF, as I've mentioned before, the solution to problems like these is not to ignore them, but to work with them and around them.  That's what future military planners will have to do, right?

           The only plausible work-around I've found in my research is in one of Rick Robinson's post on Rocketpunk Manifesto, which basically states that while "everyone can see everything" in space, you may not understand what you are seeing.  This point was used to good effect in the design of our Heinlein rocket.  The Union of the Americas (otherwise known as "Brazil and everyone else"), solved the stealth in space issues by making their civilian and military craft as close to identical as possible.  That way, you may see a bunch of ships, but you don't know whether those unknown rockets are a convoy hauling food and medical supplies, or an attack wing hauling missiles and laser drones until it's too late to maneuver.  This puts IFF tech into the fore, but that's for another post.

            The another thing we must take into account when designing any craft in a Hard SF setting is travel time.  To add yet another rule to our list:

            12. "All spacecraft travel at the speed of plot."

            In most mainstream sci-fi, this means that Hyper-Jumping-Warp-Drives or some other species of magical FTL will move the ship and it's characters in the time the space of a scene change or, at most, in between episodes so they can rendezvous with the planet of the week.  In Hard SF, it means that the plot takes into account travel times measuring weeks and months.  This is why most Hard SF novels deal a lot with the interpersonal relationships of the crews of such craft.  Some of these are great, some are a turn-off for me, but all take into account the large fraction of "down-time" between planets.
            
            In SF games, this is often either ignored, glossed over, or fixed with magical FTL.  Traditionally, ships in most RPG settings are seen as mere transportation, and are not an adventure location per se. In a Hard SF game, we need to change that.  So in The Black Desert, I'm trying to make Interplanetary craft larger, more cosmopolitan, and above all, more interesting.  They are not just ways to get to the adventure, but an adventure location in their own right.

            So, back to the original question, why Missile Craft?  Because in The Black Desert, civilian craft are identical to military craft, and because of the long travel times, they must be large enough and exciting enough to function as adventure locations.  By designing the Missile Craft, I am also designing locations for PCs to have adventures.

             The rest of our articles on the Missile Craft will be handled either this series, the Space Combat in The Black Desert series or our series on Economics, as all of these factors are interrelated.  In order to make it easier to follow the thread, I'll tag each post, so that one link will bring them all up.

            Tomorrow, I'll be making some announcements about upcoming projects, and then we'll get back to this topic Thursday, hopefully.  See you tomorrow, RocketFans!

Space Combat in the Black Desert VI: Developing the Missile Craft

          Thanks to the recent exposure, I seem to have a good number of new visitors to the site!  Welcome, thanks for coming, and feel free to comment and stuff.

          I've been asked on a couple of forums about developing some of the combat spacecraft that will appear in The Black Desert, mainly by folks who are looking for something to add to other systems.  Fair enough; it's not like the BD Core Book is out or anything.  However, one of the interesting things about developing Hard SF spacecraft is that the designs absolutely cannot be done in a vacuum (no pun intended).   What I mean by that kinda goes into the nature of aerospace design, the back story of the setting and the constraints of the setting's technology.

          Case in point:  The Black Desert itself.  The term "Black Desert" in the game itself refers to the area of space between Terra and Mars where several asteroid colonies have been established in a pair of cycling orbits between the two planets.  These Aldrin Cyclers have six "nodes" apiece, spaced evenly around the orbits.  Each node has anywhere from four to a dozen asteroids clustered within a quarter-million miles of one another.  These asteroids range in size from massive hollowed-out vaults containing small O'Neil cylinders to tiny balls of ice containing the 23rd century equivalent of a gas station (download the first issue of D6 Magazine for an article about these). 

         Since we're talking about Hard SF here, distance and delta-v are the controlling factors as to how long it takes to travel from point A to B.  It takes single node on the cyclers thirty months to make a round trip between the Terra and Mars.  Since there are six nodes per orbit, that means the planets are visited by a new node every five months.  The nodes will have lots of mineral goodies to trade in exchange for food, luxuries etc, and these visiting asteroids have become an important part of Terra's and Mars' economies.  And where there is wealth and people exploiting it, there is a military presence as well.

         This is were are our Space Forces come into play.  Terran forces need to be able to respond to hot spots and conflicts faster than once every two and a half years, so they have to have something that can travel these ridiculously long distances in a reasonable amount of time.  They also have to get their personnel to their destination in one piece, with adequate air and food, and somehow prevent them from cooking in the harsh stellar radiation. 

        Enter the IPV;  a type of spacecraft that can make a one-way trip to Mars in about ten weeks, has plasma sails that can ride the solar winds without using propellant and, as a bonus, protect the crew from that very same radiation.  This type of craft is The Black Desert's answer to the distance, time and radiation problems combined.  I'm fairly proud of it.  In the article I've linked to above, I've outlined two broad types of IPVs, the Missile craft and the Strategic Craft.  In the last post in this series, I outlined what you can do with a Strategic Craft; namely the Hard SF version of an old-fashioned dogfight between carriers and Attack Wings.  The Missile Craft was described as smaller, more common (i.e. cheaper) and having a mission that more equates to blockading ports and laying siege to a fort. 

         This is the ship that we will be developing for you gamers out there.
        
         Now in order to do that, we will have to take into account lots of science-y stuff, like the above mentioned distance and delta-v factors, as well as tactical issues such as deployment, response time, and mission readiness, and the all-important political factors of what one can do with these resources and their effectiveness in the ever-changing face of warfare.

          Obviously, this is going to take more than one post.  So stay tuned for more posts on the subject between now and May, when this Missile Craft will be available for sale!  With deck plans and stuff!

          Also, I am working on the next entry in the Ships of the Galaxy series, which will be on sale Monday.  Stupid 28 day February...

           Anyway, see you all tomorrow, RocketFans!