 April 5, 2014 - 5:43pm | I've been wondering what inspired the TSR staff to mention prison asteroids in the cannon (not sure where at the moment but I remember thinking an asteroid was not a good idea for a prison when I read it. Anyhow it seems that Space 1999 had an episode where an asteroid was drifting toward the moon and it turned out to be a prison for a powerful malovent creature that had been banished to the depth of space by his own civilization and Star Trek had Rura Pente which IIRC which was suppose to be an asteroid but it seemed to have plenty of gravity Might be interesting to allow a scout ship discover a dead civilization (nuclear war or some other apocalypse) and one episode in the scouting of that system is the discovery of a somewhat intact station on a moon, any internal atmosphere was vented and thus no oxidation has gone on so the PCs would be able to possibly power up a computer or find hard copy of the location of "something" in the asteroid belt. Asteroid is a prison for a highly dangerous criminal from the dead civilization, naturally the PCs release him and things get dicey. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 26, 2014 - 9:05am | A sort of Man/Vrusk/Dralasite/Yazirian In The Iron Mask type of thing perhaps...?  |
April 26, 2014 - 5:27pm | What if it was the real CEO of PanGal and not the replicant that sits in his office? After all Pan Gal bid for and won the contract for taking over the prison ship system and now provides the contract guards and crew for that and has the one special ship with only one prisoner.... I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 26, 2014 - 7:00pm | Ok here goes: The PCs are hired to break a prisoner out of the prison ship. They are told he is a scientist with proof that (said group) are wrongly holding him and must be returned to prevent (said group) from finishing the project which will result in huge benefits for them but cause hundreds, thousands, millions of being inconvienance or death. Of course once they get the prisoner out they find out he is really a Sathar and the contractor is a hypnotized agent. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
April 27, 2014 - 1:30am | So they get all the way into the ship and there's a Sathar sitting there...? |
April 27, 2014 - 1:59am | Here are a few doodles for a prison ship design: |
April 27, 2014 - 2:02am | Oops - both are a bit too large for the page format. Hopefully it's obvious, but the ships read from right to left (i.e. the front of the ships is on the right of the image). |
April 27, 2014 - 3:31am | Oops - both are a bit too large for the page format. Hopefully it's obvious, but the ships read from right to left (i.e. the front of the ships is on the right of the image). Fixed that for you. Did you do these? Will you be deveoping these pictures and further? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 27, 2014 - 5:10am | Yes, the doodles are by me. I will go back to the design, because drawing things out is steering me towards a modular ship. My thinking is that the main prison section sits on the spine of the ship and can be seperated from it when the need arises. |
April 27, 2014 - 6:06am | Yes, the doodles are by me. I will go back to the design, because drawing things out is steering me towards a modular ship. My thinking is that the main prison section sits on the spine of the ship and can be seperated from it when the need arises.
These sketches are great, i'd love to have them available for the magazine especially if they were a little bit more developed. By more developed I mean darker lines in the image and possibly some shading- either by hand or baking the image in Gimp. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 27, 2014 - 6:38am | I call them doodles as they are exactly that - rough pencil outlines of ideas. Nowhere near a developed drawing suitable as an illustration, mind you |
April 27, 2014 - 8:48am | Here's another quick doodle. The idea behind this is that the large prison 'module' is a structure that is carried and propelled within the the framework of the smaller ship, that has the command and engine structures (front and back). The drawing shows the two as seperate. The prison module can be tugged or manouevred out when required, and then slotted back into place once maintenance, etc stuff on the main ship is completed: |
April 30, 2014 - 9:11am | I'm going to have a try at designing the ship on paper. How many inmates do we think might be kept onboard? Does it need atomic or ion drives? I was thinking that it would be better 'armed' with a defensive capability rather than any offensive one. |
April 30, 2014 - 1:35pm | It would only need ion engines for its mission but ion engines would require refueling at a depot or tanker ship which becomes a point of vulnerability. Atomic fuel is small and easily ferried to it by a shuttle so I think atomic emgines would become a requirement form the security stand point. On the other hand if a ship was attempting to intercept the prison ship then they might want that extra thrust the atomic drive imparts to make a run for it. Now that you have me thinking about the nuts and bolts of the situation I think a couple of armed shuttles are called for and the ship should have some battery weapon: laser battery saves on the need for reloads and it has a greater reach than rocket batteries. Might as well be a big ship to accomodate a shuttle bay and a big cell block so something at least a light cruiser Your sketches look like a frigate or a destroyer to me but if it was a frigate it would have greater vulnerabilities and thus make for a more plausible adventure set there whether a prison escape or a prison break from without. so for a frigate or destroyer sized prison: atomic drives, 40-60 or so prisoners and 20-30 crew and staff. EDIT: I'm kind of liking the idea of a troubleshooter team sent to investigate a prison ship that didn't report in. it can be written as a classic dungeon crawl much of the crew and "guests" are dead and something bad has happened like xeno-morphs from aliens or something suitable. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 30, 2014 - 2:46pm | I was thinking that the ship is in two parts - the main ship and the prison module. The module containing the inmates and warder facilities rests on the
spine between the bow and the stern, and can be moved away from the ship
when required. One level of the forward end of the ship is a shuttle bay - perhaps the last level of that part of the ship. The spine has elevators and an access tunnel running
along it. Maybe it needs more than one laser battery - too many blind spots otherwise. All in all, it would be a pretty big ship - more comparable to a quite large freighter; say a HS of 8 or so. For crew - maybe 40 warders (working in shifts, half on/half off) and perhaps 20 flight and engineering crew. That said, I wonder if some of the warden duties could be carried or assisted out by robots. The prison module has 8 levels, 4 of which are prison levels. Each prison level holds 12 inmates, and each inmate has their own cell. The centre level contains recreation, food and hygiene facilities for the prisoners. The other two levels (one at each end of the module) are quarters for the warders. The warders rotate out to the main part of the ship when it's not their shift. The tricky part is escape pods - 60 prisoners and not enough pods. |
April 30, 2014 - 7:09pm | Escape pods? Prisoners don't need no stinking escape pods. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 30, 2014 - 10:41pm |  The escape pods are built into each cell with a pull tab on the wall so that the prisoner may activate it from within the cell. That way the prisoners do not have to be let out of their cells in an emergency. The guards all have a common escape pod that they must dash to outside of the secure area where the prisoners cannot use them for escape. This is much more secure. A security firm on Outer Reach designed it.Oh, and each prisoner escape pod has an encoded transponder known only to the security firm so that no one but the security firm can find and pick up the prisoner pod thus preventing others from grabbing prisoner pods during an emergency evacuation. -iggy |
May 1, 2014 - 3:22am | The rules don't allow for so many pods, which is a problem. They would be needed for the inmates, for various reasons. Maybe they're programmed to eventually cluster together, for easier retrieval. Rather than a security firm having the codes, it would make more sense to me that they would be owned by the Star Law (I imagined that the SL also ran the ship). I'll draw up a few basic deck plans  |
May 1, 2014 - 7:34am | Oops - let me rework my numbers... The prison module is made up of 9 levels: 6 levels containing inmates (12 inmates per level), 3 on each side of a centre level for recreation, food and hygiene facilities for the prisoners. There's a level at either end of the module for the warders quarters and other facilities. However, with 20 warders on shift at a time, there's only 3 per level with 2 spare. I think this would mean that robots would be necessary in order to help with the surveillance and other workloads. Or I just add more warders, but more lifeforms means a need for more room. This means there is now a requirement for 72 escape pods... It's funny how trying to work out all of this and other details on graph paper actually changes the shape of the ship |
 May 1, 2014 - 8:14am | It's funny how trying to work out all of this and other details on graph paper actually changes the shape of the ship Yeah, it always help to actually draw out the plans. It makes you think of all the little things you forgot and also helps realize how it all fits together and how much space (and in what shape) things actually fit. As to the number of pods. I don't really think that's an issue. In my opinion, you can add a many as you want. You should be limited by the volume of the ship, not the hull size number. 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 |
May 1, 2014 - 9:11am | I was tongue in cheek about the prisoners having personal escape pods that they control. That is why I made them from a contractor from Outer Reach. I was teasing that the Malther built in an escape method for his goons. Now I do like the idea of the prisoner escape pods clustering together. -iggy |
May 1, 2014 - 9:50am | I was tongue in cheek about the prisoners having personal escape pods that they control. That is why I made them from a contractor from Outer Reach. I was teasing that the Malther built in an escape method for his goons. Now I do like the idea of the prisoner escape pods clustering together. escape pods for the prisoners are a bad idea and a risk. Since the whole cell block is removable it is the "life boat". the ship jettisons it and it has some thrusters to change its orientation or halt spin and there exactly 2 burst of chemical fuel that impart 1ADF of thrust (one to accel and one to decel) option for 1/2 or 1/4 ADF burn as well. my dungeon crawl of a derelick prison ship idea would then be in two parts; PCs find and investigate the main ship section and then begin tracking down the cell block which has coasted away at a speed of 1. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 1, 2014 - 10:06am | escape pods for the prisoners are a bad idea and a risk. Since the whole cell block is removable it is the "life boat". the ship jettisons it and it has some thrusters to change its orientation or halt spin and there exactly 2 burst of chemical fuel that impart 1ADF of thrust (one to accel and one to decel) option for 1/2 or 1/4 ADF burn as well. I was thinking that it only has very basic thrust, and has to be towed. The thrust is controlled remotely from the deck of the main ship. After all, seperation should only occur during maintenance, and maintenance would be done somewhere that has tugs. There would need to be escape pods for the prisoners in the event that part of the prison module is damaged enough to warrant a mass evacuation. The other sections would have their own pods, and the bow section would have a shuttle bay which could include lifeboats and maybe a shuttle or two that actually belongs to the ship. I was also thinking of having an access airlock on that level for something up to HS 3, just in case it's needed. |
May 1, 2014 - 11:34am | I think you're thinking in terms of a passenger liner. We're talking about prisoners they dont want to see the light of day thus escape pods are contra indicated as it removes prisoners form tight control into loose control and thus any prison break involving outside help will almost always be based on causing an accident the triggers escape protocols. I'd rather see the whole cell block act as a life boat much like the booms of klingon ships could separate in Star Fleet Battles or like the saucer section of the Enterprise D separating as a life boat. Adding some limited thrust to it is just about thinking what desingers might want for this as potential safety features I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 1, 2014 - 12:13pm | No, I'm not thinking of it as a liner at all - you're barking up the wrong tree there, sorry I'm assuming that Star Law do place some value on the inmates. Otherwise they could simply have them executed - or would have made sure that they were 'terminated with extreme prejudice' when they were tracked down. Criminals of such calibre could prove useful somewhere along the line. The ship(s) are a secure place where they're kept both to keep them seperate from society and also as a potential source of information, etc. Therefore, escape pods are protecting Star Law's investment. Like I mentioned before, if the pods are designed to cluster together, perhaps having gone a certain distance, there is less chance of individuals being lost or escaping. The pods can simply be collected en masse when the situation allows. They're the safety feature If it was all simply a case of having somewhere for the inmates to rot until they die, there are far cheaper means of doing so than building a ship, or small fleet or ships, to intern them. |
May 2, 2014 - 3:04pm | I think your right about this being for high value prisoners. They should have individual life pods. What if said pods were their own cells or the bunk in their cell. The training would be for the prisoners to get into their life pod when their cell door seals. The cell has a few hours of air for the stubborn or hurt to get into the life pod. Then the life pod acts as a freeze field. No any outside beings trying to spring an inmate needs to get into the cell block, then into the cell, then deactivate the secure freeze field. Also the high value inmate is protected by two layers of ship plus their life pod. -iggy |
May 11, 2014 - 1:57pm | Here's a drawing of how I envision the ship. The central squarish area is the block containing the prison levels. The tower just aft of the bow contains the laser battery - having it that tall give a better firing arc. There's also another aft on the underside: |
May 17, 2014 - 9:40am | A slightly updated version: |
May 17, 2014 - 3:30pm | Looking good. 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 |
