Non-combat craft

I was playing around with some campaign ideas and
decided to come up with a few non-combat craft.

Ideas for campaign mechanics blatantly stolen from various web pages.
Industrial landing craft:
8 Mass non-ftl Merchant Hull, Q-ship Drive.
4+ Thrust, Streamlined
C Beam PCS

5 Mass cargo for a mining, refining, construction or fleet repair unit.

Cost:
18 + 8-16 + 3 = 29-37 points for the ship, 50-100 for
the specialized cargo.  (54 - 66 points for a 12 Mass
FTL version)

Industrial Landing Craft are attached to colonial expeditions to ensure the
new colony can quickly
become self-sufficient.  They are also useful to
quickly establish an advance logistical base for repairs, fuel, and munitions
resupply. Once they are unloaded they provided heavy cargo lift capacity to
the new colony or base.

Colony Tug: Mass 100 Merchant Hull 150
FTL (tug)           100  + 200
Thrust 2 200 Damage 25

Long Endurance Fighter Bay    32
(Or Long Endurance Multirole Attack 44) Superior Sensors 30 C Beam PCS C Beam
PCS
10 +1 Damage Control Party

20 Mass Cryostorage for 1000 people (and animals) 200

16 Mass Boat Bay 16 2 Mass 8 systems boats: Streamlined military hull C Beam
PCS Thrust 8 Damage 4 5 Mass of Cargo Additional Damage Control Party Cost 53
each (37 points for the civilian version)

4 Mass additional Cargo (14 Mass or 700 cargo units total)

Cost: 1050 or 1062 with better fighters

Long endurance fighters can be transfered to the new colony for system
defense, after all, they'd have three turns of combat ability after the
gravity well requirements. They are also useful for survey work.

Using the transporting troops rules on pg 15 of More Thrust I figured that
cryostorage would be ideal for a colony craft to transport people, plants and
animals to their new home. The ratio of cargo mass to colonists seems a bit
low unless a significant fraction of the cryostorage is for food animals and
the like.

A tug can be an extremely efficient modular cargo ship. If you replace most of
its internal structure
with boat bays and extra fuel you can do in-system
cargo loading really fast. Take a whole bunch of
small non-ftl cargo ships with cargos going to
particular places and offload those ships when they
get to that system.  The cargo-tug then picks up the
local non-ftl cargo ship and off they go.

Other non-military ship ideas:

Passenger liner:  Mass 50, Thrust 4, Level-1 shields,
PDAF, C PCS Perhaps passenger ships shouldn't have any offensive weaponry, but
shields for the safety of the passengers makes sense.

8 Mass Boat bay
4 Accommodations for 50 passengers  cost  4+
4 Cyrosleep beds for 200 passengers cost 40 4 200 Cargo Space units for extra
facilities for 1st class passengers and cargo

Asteroid Miner-Tug:
This ship breaks asteroids up and then tows them to
a mining/refining base.  They make have Armor to
protect them from the odd rock hit, but their main system is a set of forward
firing batteries used to break rocks apart.

The ship has a tug system, or tractor beams, or oversized engines in order to
get its heavy cargo home. These ships have some combat use, but their
batteries are fixed for efficient rock chopping, not
anti-ship use.  It is easy to track a rock and these
batteries are designed to be fired at point blank range. They can be
devastating if used to tug rocks for bombardment purposes.

Skimmer: This craft is a specially designed Gas Giant skimmer. Thrust 8,
streamlined, no systems, Special Cargo system for processing and compressing
gasses. It is used as an auxilary craft to quickly refuel major ships.

Close in Stellar Observer: Mass 100
Shield-3  Enhanced Sensors
Partially streamlined (round with huge radiator fin in CiSO's shadow. Used for
long term studies of stellar dynamics. Most of the mass is used to shield the
crew and scientists from stellar radiation. The ship could also be designed to
beam power collected by solar panels to a colony world in the system.

In the Age of Iridium universe it can serve as a customs station.

Some things to think about: There is a great deal of internal difference
between a ship designed to transport bulk grain, oil, ore or construction
materials and a ship designed to transport heavy machinery, or a container
ship. It would take some time to refit a ship to be most efficient for
carrying a particular cargo. At the very least some cargo space should be lost
when carrying cargo a ship isn't optimized for carrying. For one thing, there
is the consideration of whether the cargo hold is pressurized or not! And
there is the matter of setting up an automated loading and unloading system
that will speed turnaround.

Since some merchant ships are basically huge hollow holds with an engine, it
may be practical to define it as a tug that can carry all its cargo inside,
possibly by openning up like the Super Guppy, a real, if silly looking, plane
designed to carry aircraft parts and rocket parts.

So an ore carrier defined as a 50 Mass tug could carry 70 Mass of ore, if with
a low thrust...

More missions for space installations:

Ships designed for combat are designed to make it hard for enemy weapons to
get in. This can also make it difficult to rapidly get supplies on board or to
open up the hull to repair or replace internal systems.

So, a port facility should be able to rapidly load and unload cargo from a
wide variety of ship types. To some extent this can be done through the boat
bays. Some fleets design all their Capital ships with at least one boat bay to
speed cargo loading.

A port facility also needs heavy cranes, and the station keeping drives to
steady itself to use them, needed to properly open up a ship.

Ports need advanced medical facilities and quarantines for explorer vessels.
They also need communications gear, FTL communications if the campaign has it.
If the administration of a system or colony is done from space, the
bureaucracy could take up a significant amount of room.

Not to mention the zoos, theatres, gyms and other entertainment the ruling
class would demand. A space station could be a vacation spot of choice for a
particularly harsh colony world.

For really big orbital facilities, you might want to consider a beanstalk
system. Have the entire Geostationary orbit be occupied by a gigantic space
station with beanstalks for quick cargo shipping to the planet.

How much should a Beanstalk cost? A 6" FT elevator from ground to space.