 January 29, 2009 - 12:21pm | Just a word of explanation: Moving around the Truane Express- the elevator at the bottom of decks 1-6 is accessible only to crew it tracks only through these 6 decks and ends at deck 6b where the captain's launch is docked- there is no direct access to deck 6a Life support without going up a deck and transferring to the upper elevator. The upper elevator tracks through decks 1-6a and continues through decks 7-16 on the left hand side of those decks. On Decks 9-16 the right hand elevator tracks down that side of the ship and continues through decks 17-19. Next to each elevator is a ladder well with a hatch at each deck, only crew can gain access to the ladder well unless abandon ship orders are given otherwise the individual hatches are manually operated once in the ladder well. Sometimes crew members get lazy and fail to close these hatches and just leave them open to quickly transverse several decks, especially if they are working in the ladder well. As depicted the TE has 1 deck of first class, 1 Deck of corporate class- the same as 1st class except conference rooms are provided for the use of corporate passengers, 2 decks of journey class, and 1 deck of cargo hold (cold storage class is up in sick bay though there is no reason that extra sleep modules couldn't be stored in the cargo hold with an attached parabattery). This may seem a bit light but I figured that it was easy enough to print up any number of extra accommodation or cargo decks to increase the ships size as needed. The Corporate & 1st class decks have 1 lifeboat each and the journey class decks have the life pods. I assumed that abandon ship protocols would be crew on the upper decks would use the captain's launch, engineers would use the workpods, and everyone else would use the lifeboats and pods- as the KH ship construction rules are written there isn't really enough provision for escaping a ship in the way of life pods or life boats so I tend to consider a life pod will hold 3 and a lifeboat will hold 20-30 as it would be silly to court a space based Titanic disaster though that could be the basis of an adventure as well. I included a legend explaining some of the common art objects included in these deck plans on deck one. Throughout the ship are provisions for emergency vacuum gear, O2 recharge stations, security cameras, SEU recharge station. These items were included as provisions for using the Truane Express on multiple adventures and they provide options for having life support being down and other such emergencies. Having used these deck plans for 2 adventures: 1 a murder mystery and the other a pirate boarding action; I found that having a scale print out for use with 28mm miniatures a pain for this many decks. Though I usually mounted 4 decks on a poster board I had to keep shuffling the maps as the party moved from deck to deck. Everyone loved the adventures and said that the deck plans added to it immeasurably but I did find it a bit of a pain to use a ship this big. It's nice to have a ship of this size detailed but I'm beginning to feel a smaller size ship is more appropriate for RPG games. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 January 29, 2009 - 1:37pm | Beautiful! What is the scale on those maps? Also do you have an exterior image of the ship? Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
January 29, 2009 - 6:31pm | @Terl Obar: I suppose I should take up the challenge of building a miniature scale model of this ship- I've sculpted other minis but never a ship mini. Sadly the Dundjini program only does interiors or at least my mastery of it only does interiors. If I had gotten past the learning curve with sketchup I guess I could have whipped up an exterior pretty quick- wish I had! As for scale I've used 1 square = 2m. I enlarged the maps at the Office Maximizer store while buying staples, so that the squares were 1 inch and used them with miniatures since there's quite a bit to print for this one I settled for a B/W printing and didn't laminate it like the others. I suppose that you could enlarge/reduce the size when printing and have the squares 1/4 inch to match the die-cut game counters- which would mean you could probably mount the decks on just a couple of poster boards and then this ship would be very playable despite the 19 decks (it really is a pain with miniatures but hey I love minis). I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
January 29, 2009 - 7:31pm | Yeah, my HS 20 freighter's biggest deck was only 40m in diameter and thta was still huge. I can't imaging trying to work on a HS 20 deck at a full 100m diameter. Maybe I'll play with your decks and see if I can't come up with silohette for the outline of the ship. Can you export those maps as individual images on a consistent scale, say 50 pixels to the meter or some such? That would be really cool as well. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
January 29, 2009 - 8:00pm | Yeah, my HS 20 freighter's biggest deck was only 40m in diameter and thta was still huge. I can't imaging trying to work on a HS 20 deck at a full 100m diameter. Maybe I'll play with your decks and see if I can't come up with silohette for the outline of the ship. Can you export those maps as individual images on a consistent scale, say 50 pixels to the meter or some such? That would be really cool as well. all the original images exported to jpg files, I just openned one and its 1600 x 2000 but I could shrink it to any number you'd prefer. I create the PDFs because the office place only prints from PDF though the really competent girl will convert files for you its better to go with everything RickyTick lest she's not there and well...stuff happens. I'm not sure what you mean by 50pix to the meter. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
January 29, 2009 - 10:24pm | I don't mind them big. I prefer to have them at the higher resolution. It'd be really cool if you could export them as SVG format but unless Dundjini is a vector graphics program that may not be possible. Then they could be scaled to any size and retain their beautiful resolution. By 50pix per meter what I was meaning was if your grid is 2m per square, then in the image the lines would be 100 pixels apart. Then you print them at 100dpi on the printer and you have one meter on the map the same size as the 1/2" counters. Print them at 200 dpi and you get each square the size of the counters. You can scale it regardless of what the resolution is, so it's no big deal. This scale makes the maps pretty big though. My ship maps are done at 50 pixels to the meter and the big 40m diameter deck image is 2450x2450 (there is a little padding around the edges). I need to get those linked in over here. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
January 30, 2009 - 6:03am | I just checked the program and I can export as JPEG,PNG, or Raw BMP there is also an option to export it as a HTML page I've been exporting everything as JPEG. Unless some of the art elements have become corrupted then re-exporting all the files that make up the 19 decks should only take an hour or so. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
January 30, 2009 - 6:43am | That's what I expected. Saving as PNG would probably create larger files (or maybe not, depending on the color schemes) but would preserve 100% of the detail as it is a "lossless" compression algoithm. JPG (a "lossy" compression algorithm) blurs things a bit but can achieve higher compression. The blurring isn't noticable for pictures but sometimes in line drawings or other images that have lots of sharp edges you start to see the bluring as smearing or loss of fine detail. It especially becomes noticable if the JPG is opened, edited and saved several times as each time it is saved, more blurring can occur. They look good. I wouldn't change anything unless you notice problems. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
January 30, 2009 - 9:31am | @ Terl : thanks for explaining that I'll certainly switch over now for futer projects. Jedion I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 February 18, 2009 - 4:55am | Yeah, my HS 20 freighter's biggest deck was only 40m in diameter and thta was still huge. I can't imaging trying to work on a HS 20 deck at a full 100m diameter. Tell me about it...I have hand-drawn deckplans of a HS:20 freighter that is 100m across at the hold and that took some serious graph paper! Four pages taped together/foled at the "seams" for those wider portions. I had begun a battleship deck plan using 5 meter squares but ditched it as I didn't care for the lack of detail possible on such a scale. I can write and draw pretty small but stuffing 3-4 command chairs into a single square was getting old, and the alternative of having cavernous chambers to spread such items out was not appealing either. Lately I've been using 1.5 meter squares...I found it to be a happy alternative between the huge 1m maps and the more compressed 2m maps. Can't imagine doing a HS:20 deckplan with that scale though...that's at least 67 squares across! I think the light cruiser I'm about to start on will be about the largest ship for that scale. |
 February 18, 2009 - 8:10am | Eureka !!! That is why UPF/Sathar ships are long and narrow. To fit on 8x11 graph paper.  |
February 18, 2009 - 7:50pm | LOL, yeah up to single digit hull sizes anyways. I'm starting on a light cruiser now, 50m diameter...at 1.5m squares that's 34 squares across not counting the drives that extend outwards beyond the hull. Without the drives, that'll just fit on 8x11 graph paper assuming you don't have the three hole prepunched variety! Suffice it to say this is about as large of a ship as I can create with my 1.5m scale. |
