Simerge spacegame

Light, atmosphere capable, short distance space vehicle. Mainly used to transfer cargo from ground to orbital relay stations. It is equipped with a Xava type hybrid engine (hypersonic ramjet + antimater-mater compound MPD thruster). Due to it's small size it can fit only a compact sized power plant. Combined with high performance cells it brings up the necessary 30GW power to leave the gravity well.

Characteristics of Skylark:

Manufacturer: Corinth Dynamics
Vehicle type: Ground-To-Space jet
Wing span: 49,8 m
Length: 44,35 m
Height: 12,5 m
maximum acceleration (in vacuum): ?
Basic weight: 735 t
Cargo Weight + Fuel: max 600 t
Conventional Engine: 2x Xava AMH-1F each 12.7MW to 35.2GW
FTL Engine: n/a in standard versions
Powerplant: Nanom 7C-525 compact 5GW to 25GW (standard equipment)
Cells: Tesla UP-20A high performance cells at 20GW
Shields: Only thermal




Design Proposition: Alesto
Model author: Jonathan "deus siddis" Kelly

Updates:

I noticed a small issue.
The cargo hatch can make a problem with docking. Usually the cargo area should be hermetically locked when docked to the station. Simplest would be to assign an extra airlock for cargo?
Also there are other solutions. One which is compatible to your current design would be minicontainers inside the ship. Then a station would have something like a crane picking out the containers from the vessel. But for the second case it would be better if the hatch wings are sliding somehow inside instead swinging outwards.

Luckily, this can be done easily. A single hatch door can slide backwards inside the hull, just above the reactor.

Good. Then we can go for the sliding door variant.

There is an important I forgot. We need to design a docking interface used by the stations. These should be compatible with Skylark and desirable with all coming freighter types we will have.

I've taken a look how the interior could be planned. For me it seems that there is not enough room for crew area. Possibly we could move the reactor behind the cargo area. What would you think?

The Skylark, being an aerospace craft, has a specific curved geometry around it's cargo hatch. So to create an interface that hermetically seals to it, plus other freighter designs, something special will be needed. What should work best is for the Skylark to extend a level, square docking interface of its own to meet the station's.

As for the station's interface, it would need to be designed around all of the small or specialized freighters that don't use large exterior containers. The challenge here is only the Skylark has been modeled, so we don't know exactly how the interfaces of the other freighters will look yet.



I already did this actually.

There really isn't enough space for it in the middle section. Further, I think we should go back to your original idea that the reactor is not directly accessible by the crew. The technician can manage it from the cockpit with a remote interface, but for him to go to the reactor room he'd have to travel through the cargo bay, which would be so packed full of cargo there would be no room for him to pass through.

One alternative. The other one could be to model openings on the top of the transporter. When docking to a stations, heels are attaching from the station's dock interface to them.



You're right. We will need to be a little careful here. Possibly it's the right time to think about standards on dock interfaces.



Maybe wo could have something like a maintenance corridor below the cargo bay (possibly also connecting to each minicontainer inside the bay) and ending by the reactor area.

Yes, you could have "slots" the dock interface goes into. That would get around the curvature issue as well.



It could be. On the other hand, it can be difficult to design things without building them fully in 3D. There's a lot of precision dimensional issues that don't become apparent until you've done that.

How best to proceed with this could have a lot to do with how many different container classes and ship classes you ultimately want to have in Simerge?



There's no room under or anywhere around the cargo bay, I'm afraid. Space is tight on this craft.

Okay. Then we can abandon the option to have direct access to the reactor and only make it accessible from outside as a new option. Leaving the ship is of course always possible.


What do you think then, if we leave the docking interface question aside and make something like a dummy interface which we can easily replace in the future after we have enough ship class types?