Designing the Small Craft of the Third Imperium

While we have spent the last three years bringing the Type S Scout/Courier, Type J Seeker, and the mighty Type A(L) Free Trader Beowulf into 28mm and a plethora of vessels as Starship Miniatures, we have thus far neglected the true backbone of the Third Imperium – Small Craft.

While the larger hero ships of the Traveller RPG universe most often steal the show, it is the craft under 100 tons that are the most ubiquitous vessels and keep the Empire running locally. Whether transporting passengers, crew, cargo or fuel, or acting as custom vessels or life boats, small craft service much larger vessels that cannot enter an atmosphere and for the smallest commercial endeavours.

For our 2023 Traveller campaign, we are tackling 3D printable small craft. The Kickstarter will go live in late September or early October (sign up here to be notified), and for the first time will feature a limited print run of our Launch.

Classic Problems

Whenever we make a new Traveller product, there are a multitude of things to consider. In fact, being somewhat faithful to the original designs is something we try to aspire towards and is incredibly time-consuming, often adding months to the design process.

However, with the Small Craft, we had to make some creative choices that long time Traveller fans will appreciate. We had to take into consideration the following factors:

• Our Traveller license from Far Future Enterprises covers Classic Traveller and Traveller5 materials; most other editions are either defunct (and un-licensable), or owned by Mongoose
• Traveller designs vary greatly from edition to edition in appearance and layout creating a wide variety of expectations with fans
• Most Traveller deck plans have many errors in them compared to the game rules
• Almost all Traveller deck plans do not work in a three-dimensional space
• We need to keep our production costs within budget
• The modular cutter is meant to dock in a 6-metre-wide berth
• Make small craft designs aesthetically pleasing

Issue #1: Incongruency

Every edition of Traveller has its own look and feel, and chief of all, its own deck plans and layouts. We learned early on, designing the Type S, that there are incredible challenges converting 2D deck plans into a 3D model that looks the part. Compromises always need to be made, so we started with those from the beginning.

Initially, we only conceived of creating the modular cutter. It has dozens of variants, is small enough to avoid the months-long print times for the 100 ton plus ships, and seemed useful enough for fans to print and use on the tabletop. However, after consulting with our Traveller gurus, it was pointed out that the small craft all had a similar shape.

Early Traveller has most small craft with a 4.5 metre interior diameter, with the exception of the Cutter with a 6 metre interior diameter, plus or minus a little, as of all craft in all editions of Traveller, this one is shown with the most inconsistency from edition to edition.

There are arguments of the exact volume of a dTon is equivalent to anywhere between 12.5 and 14.5 cubic metres, but the rules state that two squares are equivalent to one dTon. Looking at the deck plans above, it is immediately obvious that the deck plans are often off by a lot as far as tonnage was concerned. Which is a very frustrating issue for a designer like me who likes to be as accurate as possible. But what do you do when nothing matches up?

Picking the Diameter

The Modular Cutter was always designed to fit into the Mercenary Cruiser, and this creates problems – namely that because of the thin walls of Traveller Deck Plans, there is no reasonable way a cutter could actually be 6 metres in diameter on the inside and fit inside a housing with the same width.

This is even more problematic in 3D where parts need to be designed to a certain minimum thickness – we already had to invent a brand new clip to make the walls thinner. Add the deck plans vs. tonnage inconsistencies in and you have a serious headache, even with the relatively simple cylindrical form.

We tested a variety of options regarding hull diameter; what size did it have to be to fit standard cargo (ignoring the wasted space), exactly how much volume would a section have, and where should the floors be? Floors are a massive incongruency in all editions of Traveller, but especially GURPS Traveller, where there is simply not enough room for the interiors designed in the deck plans. Fortunately, we are only dealing with a single level with small craft, and older editions, so after some initial exploration of larger widths, we settled on 4.5 metre interior radius for both our modular cutter and our small craft:

• Small Craft were more numerous in design
• The Modular Cutter deck plans we had access to were wrong anyway, and the original art looked longer than presented, so we could simply stretch the Cutter to make it longer
• We need to reuse components to cut down on production time
• The 4.5 metre diameter can fit standard cargo with a recessed floor level
• A 4.5 metre diameter by 1.5 metre (three squares by 1 square) section just so happens to be almost exactly 29 cubic metres in volume – or 2 displacement tons! Each inch of ship at scale would be equivalent to 2 dTons, nice and easy, and above all, more accurate to the rules!

Design Process

Towards the Future

By keeping each design to a standard diameter, we can make ship parts relatively interchangeable. We imagine Cutters to be the equivalent of space big rigs, and other ships to be more like commercial airliners. You could swap out cab/cockpit designs, going for the semi-spherical Cutter cab, or the more stretched look of the Launch and Pinnace. We can even introduce more original designs, providing variety with engine sections and other content.

We are in full production at the moment, but the Launch is fully prototyped. Stay tuned for more updates as we progress and implement our new designs.