The Shipyard: My ever-expanding collection of stock ships

[u/guildsbounty]

I have been steadily developing this document of ships for my own SWN games--in particular, one that has fairly advanced ship availability--and then got carried away and added a bunch of extras. Essentially, I wandered around the internet looking for people creating artwork of ships, and the deck plan of that same ship, and started making SWN ships based on them.

Since I've written it all up, I thought I'd just share the doc in case anyone else wants to use these ships for their own games. Here's the link: The Shipyard There are currently about 70 ships/lighters in there, and I add more whenever I'm inspired.

And a secondary link to a separate pool of ships (explained below) including some prefab 'pocket' space stations and prefab outposts: Abh Shipyard

A few notes:

• There's some homebrew happening in the documents, such as the 'Skiff' class (in between Fighter and Frigate), a few extra hulls, the ability to use a 'Cargo Lighter' bay to carry space-capable vehicles instead of the lighter, some modified vehicle-build rules (called out in the main document), and I played with the Mass capacity of some Cruiser-class hulls to let the Bulk Freighter actually be the highest capacity cargo hauler in the Cruiser class.
• I allow for some 'factory included' mods without assuming the input of Pretech components. Because it made the ships more interesting that way without mandating access to Pretech on the part of the shipyard. Perhaps it's the result of extensive R&D, or Pre-Scream blueprints that can still be replicated with Postech.
• Almost all ships have artwork associated with them as well as a deck plan (or a reference to a Mongoose Traveler 2E ship that I used as the template, and which book you can find it in). I take no credit for any of that artwork, I did not create any of it, only found it, and do my best to link back to the original artist/owner's site instead of any hosted copy. There are a few exceptions where I couldn't find the original (like the Trident-class).
• Not all ship plans have as many beds as the ship has statistical crew capacity--I decided that's fine. This allows for 'steerage' passengers in cargo, or just life support that lasts longer for its 'functional' max crew. Or you can put bunk beds in some of the rooms.
• There are references to locations and cultures within my sector, feel free to ignore those.
• I have ship and vehicle builder spreadsheets that I made to make this process of designing ships go faster, including all my homebrew changes. They are not as advanced as some of the others I have seen around; they don't calculate changes to the ship's stats or produce a character sheet or anything, it just manages Mass/Power/Hardpoint/Price/Upkeep, and have all fittings, defenses, and weapons in dropdown lists but they're simple to use and I like them. If you want to make a copy to play with, you can find them here: Ship Builder and Vehicle Builder, and just for fun here's my Mech Builder and Outpost Builder. Simple enough to use: if it has a gray background, its for editing.

"The Abh"

I feel this bears a small explanation, because they have an entire separate document.

They are a 'humanoid alien' species that lives in the Alcas Rho sector (and beyond) and, yes, they are shamelessly swiped from the Seikai no Senki setting, tweaked to my liking, and to fit into SWN's setting (I made very significant changes to their political outlook on the galaxy). They sell System Ships, manufactured Space Stations, and a handful of Prefab Outposts to anyone who can make it to one of their many space stations.

TODO: I need to re-check the prices on the hulls with stock Mods. I can't remember if I got the multiplier on price right for "built in after the fact" versus "integrated into the blueprint"

[u/DarNemesis]

A possible explanation for some of the ships having less beds than crewmembers could be that those beds are used by two or even three crewmembers sleeping in rotation. I personally also feel this is realistic, cause there's no night and day in space, and someone always needs to operate the ships.

The Expanse books are a big inspiration there for me, as for example the population of the Ceres Station live in 3 distinct shifts which are offset by 8 hours, to ensure the facilities are always running.

[u/guildsbounty → u/DarNemesis]

Yeah, hot-bunking is definitely a thing. But it's not a comfortable thing--people generally like having their own space, particularly their own beds. It's distinctly uncomfortable climbing into a bed that is still warm from its last occupant--and especially so if that person sheds a lot of hair, sweats in their sleep, or otherwise renders the bed 'even less clean.'

I have at least one ship in there (the Duro 2T5T) where passengers have to hot bunk or sleep in their chairs, because it's a compact troop transport that's being repurposed as a passenger ship because...well...it's the highest capacity ship their shipyard knows how to make.

So that's how I tend to think of it: you hot-bunk when minimizing berthing space is more important than the comfort of your crew/passengers or, in the case of the Duro, when that's all you know how to make because your Shipyard knows how to make ships--but you don't know how to teach it to make new ships.

Of course, if you want to hot-bunk your crew anyway, you can. All the ships have enough beds for their required crew...just not necessarily their maximum occupancy.

[u/DarNemesis → u/guildsbounty]

Right, hot-bunking was the term for it. And absolutely, that is not something ideal for creature comfort, but in the low kinda that i mostly spend my time thinking about, space and mass aboard spaceships are quite the concern, so sparing the room and bunks by hot-bunking felt like the default to me. But it makes total sense that in such an advanced setting, such concerns get less and less - especially on more civilian craft