OOC: Free Merchant

OK, here is my idea for the design of our Free Merchant:


The design goals are as follows:
- We have to have a Drive-2 upgrade. It is required to be able to travel in this part of space. A Drive-1 is just not sufficient.
- We have to have fuel scoops as there is no guarantee for some place we can just buy fuel from.
- We need an effective weapon and the base Sandcaster or little Laser just isn't enough. The perfect choice is the Plasma Gun, but that is just too expensive and would ironically make use more vulnerable, not less. The Fractal Impact Charge is a decent compromise. It's main weakness is the need for ammo, but it comes with 8 shots, which isn't bad. If we need more ammo, that cuts into the cargo space.
- The Ship's Locker is required. If we want to get an Armory later, that is also a viable option.
- The Cold Sleep Pods are required, so are included.
- Extended Stores would be cool, but it would take up two spaces to get, and I thought the cargo space was more important. Besides, we can likely improvise Extended Stores with cargo if we absolutely need to.
- With the above we get six spaces of cargo, or a total of 120 tons of capacity. That should be pretty good for what we will be wanting to do.
- Finally, it just barely keeps the final cost to just barely under Cr1M, which is also pretty useful. (In fact, that's the primary reason the Armory isn't included.)

Anyway, that's what I came up with. It's also good for six people. If we want the option for more, we'll need to think about how to make a slightly custom hull to accommodate that.

Looks good, Don't know if you were working off of the example on page 107, but they make math errors and you don't :)

Side note/Question to the group: In SWN, Cold Sleep pods are not required. In that game system people stay awake and work as normal during a jump and there are no Synths. I don't have an issue if this doesn't end up changing the cost, but from a Setting perspective, I would think that the Cold Sleep pods would be 'built-in' with any ship purchase. Removing them would be an option to lower cost but would limit the ship to in-system only or Synth only.

Also, from a dozen sets of dice rolls, 4 shots from the Fractal Impact Charge generates 50% to 120% of the damage needed to destroy the Example Corvette.

I only have 2 thoughts:
- remove Fuel Scoops and Fuel Bunker, get Eternal Reactor. It decreases the total cost by 50k. And our operating cost by
It does take 2 components and some specific maintenance, but we will have that with our engineers.
Of course we could redesign the ship to include the plans, but that would cost 50k more, but wouldnt require constant maintenance.
-IF we are in a place we expect to need more than the 120 tons of storage we can get Cargo Efficiency Bays for 25k to bring our cargo space to 200 tons.
If we expect to be trying to grab more than 120 tons of cargo, or at least carrying more than 120 tons because maybe we're holding it for more than one stop, it could greatly increase our profit.
The integrated, no mantinace required, modification would cost 250k.

I am very for the Eternal Reactor. I think we assess the Cargo Efficiency Bays closer to geting the ship.

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I personally agree, but I can see how that may not be, depending on setting feel and what assumptions out GM makes
If we're assuming averages, it will take about 6 charges to take out a Corvette. So as long as that's the biggest thing we have to deal with we're ok....
As long as we don't die by that point.
Not dying is the hard part, and I imagine anyone able to outfit a Corvette with weaponry that is in enough of an aggressive mindset we have to fight them ... Well they'll have better weaponry than a Fractal Impact Charge.

Where's the Eternal reactor from ?

PG#108-109 Modifying and Tuning Starships

Ok, so that stuff should be in a Table - just a gripe to the author.

Pretech Energy Cores sounds like something from the SWN setting history. I'm not sure that an equivalent exists in our Sandbox Sci-fi setting. If they do, it sounds like something you'd have to find or salvage. If they were an 'off the shelf' component, everybody's ship would have one. I mean they'll pay for themselves in fuel cost eventually for any size ship.

There's enough reflavoring that I don't think that's the important part of the description, since there's enough other requirements. It's the monetary cost, the maintinance cost, and the components, that make it uncommon. Most ships don't have any modifications.

Together with the Synth and associated costs, they are effectively a "rebalance" of hyperspace travel for our game, as you correctly pointed out. SWN makes traveling slightly easier and cheaper.

We can consider that they are built-in (but with increased costs) and that someone could remove them and so would save that money, or that they are not built-in, like we are doing, but are required.

In the end, I would like to retain that increased mass and credits requirements. There are In game reasons as well. As such, all things considered, the math works out and we don't need to update all hulls. =)

We are using the Elders for that. Replace "Pretech" for Elders (or consider the 'pre' part as meaning millennia old) and you will translate it for our game =)
The components are the hard part for ship modding. In our setting, they are millennia old or were somehow reverse engineered from the Elders.

I didn't consider mods because I was trying to stick with a configuration using standard equipment. And since we absolutely require the Fuel Scoops, and the Fuel Bunker gives us breathing room, I felt I had to include them. (Though if we needed the space, we could burn the bunkers and just rely on the Fuel Scoops. The main thing the Fuel Scoops does is allow us to cross open space in two jumps.) If we can swing the Eternal Reactor, I am on board with it. If we can swing the built-in Eternal Reactor, I am *all* on board with it! Plus, the cost of the built-in version is exceptionally reasonable for the gain and I would much prefer that approach. However, we have to have the Elder tech parts, which we don't have. (Yet.)

The Efficient Cargo Bay ability would be cool, but secondary to the Eternal Reactor. The main concern on the built-in Efficient Cargo Bay is that, unlike the Eternal Reactor, it is prohibitively expensive. The other thing is that I don't think we've really challenged 120 tons for speculative cargo yet. Freight, yes. Speculative cargo, no. So, honestly, 120 tons might be sufficient, at least to get started. The main exception is if we make replenishment trips to the new colony as our standard route, then getting more cargo space might be worthwhile in order to be able to do both.

Also, htech provided an alternative sleep chamber that still takes money and space, but takes no power. However, it is more limited than the standard Cold Sleep Pods. I thought the advantages that the standard Cold Sleep Pods provide make them worth getting.

Finally, for the numbers, I put this all in a spreadsheet. I also put in the component power and mass as negative numbers to make the sum easier in the spreadsheet. :-)

@htech,

One minor question. By-the-book, the Free Merchant has a crew range of 1 - 6. However, the lowly Shuttle has a crew range of 1 - 10. Can we just say that the Free Merchant really has a crew range of 1 - 10? (I am not asking for the Shuttle to change. I am only asking to increase the Free Merchants max crew from 6 to 10.)

The reason for this request is that we have five PCs. Assuming all five want to keep adventuring, and we have Erin and Maya as NPCs that want to join in, then having a limit of 10 instead of 6 will give us a little more room to breathe. (And I am absolutely all for both Erin and Maya joining in!)

Moving here because it seems the appropriate spot.
Well. It depends if we're going to have to buy Synths anyway, or we can get them from our captain or not. If she's going to give or sell them to us there's no way sh's going to get the shiptender mount. But we will have to get some at some point either way.
If she is keeping her Synths we will have to buy some. If she is selling them (maybe to us) would it make financial sense for her to invest money into a shiptender mount anyway? I can't see her ever deacuding to spend the CV money to save us money for Synths.
If we buy it we still have to buy the Synths after
I don't see the math adding up.

Actually, that's exactly how we justify it: She buys a Shiptender Mount to carry the ship through the Spike when we get the ship, then we buy the synths from her when the CV is disassembled. This reduces her full investment in the Mount to the difference to what we have to pay for the synths.

She won't need the synths once the CV is disassembled. They will have no value for most people outside a ship. So, she'll need to either give or sell them to us, or to someone. Why not set it up so that we have to buy them from her? Especially since having the Mount will make a lot of logistical issues much easier for her to manage. The nice thing is that getting the Mount makes her life easier during the trip AND makes sure we have to buy the synths from her at the end of the trip. AND makes sure we stay with the CV for the whole trip. That's looking like a pretty solid win for her, to be honest.

It sounds like a loss for her. Why would she invest ANY money when she doesn't have to. Why would she have to offset any cost. The mount is more than all the Synths, the new synths, and she has no reason to buy it except it helps us, not the CV.
I could see her asking US to pay the difference in the cost of the Synths and the mount though.

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Edit: I know I just said all that but... Why don't we just .. ASK the NPC. ... No reason to speculate when an answer is easy.

That's reasonable based on the meta-game of our needs, but I will postpone that decision. We will decide that when we need to, probably in Altaria, as it changes the game balance. The usual solution to have a crew of 10 in the Free Trader is by fitting an Extended Life Support in it.

(You can remind me of this post when we get there. Maybe you can buy a Free trader with this fitting for free, to minimize balance changes in the ship design...)

I think we should decide on our list of next expenses/fittings for the ship. This is my thoughts:
1. Eternal Reactor. We could drop the Fuel Scoops and Fuel Bunker and have these instead. Save space and energy.
2. The Efficient Cargo Bay seems to be the next most attainable change. Though 3 is higher in my priority list, but way more costly
3. Weapons Weapons. On the note of saving space and energy as above, I think we could use better weapons.Flack Emmiter Battery or Plasma Beam would make me feel better than a Fractal Impact Charge.
A Specialized Mounting modification would also be great to fit a couple but... Somewhat costly (50k for base mod, 250k for integrated mod, no parts required though )
4. Misc. Armory, and better armor/defenses (Foxer Drones or Grav Eddy Displacer?)

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Though.... I hope we can salvage from this coming combat so maybe we'll see. It could be a good opportunity.

Again, I was:
1) Trying to keep it below Cr. 1M.
2) Not including any modifications by default.

And, again, I have always said the Plasma Beam is the best weapon for our purposes, but the weapon costs more than the base cost of the ship. That means we become more of a target because now people are gonna want our weapon and will be willing to hunt us down and kill us for just that specific part. That goes the same if we have too many modifications. Put that many expensive parts into the ship and people are going to hunt us down and kill us just to get those parts. It becomes worth the effort for them to do that. I think having the most valuable part of the ship being the cargo gives us a slightly better chance to live in the end.

We'd still have to go on a quest to find 6 Elder components just to be able to build an Eternal Reactor.

Luckily we're going to end up on a planet with untapped ancient Eldar sites.

I found some cool ship blueprints we might be able to use later

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Really nice! We can surely use them in the future. Thanks!