300dTon Catfish class cargo liner





This sprang from a discussion a few years back on CotI as to what would make an ideal player ship. I forget the minute details now but the general concensus was a 300 ton ship capable of carrying a mixture of cargo and passengers. I set about working up the designs for a ship that fit the description. This is the result so far. It was actually going to be a Firefly ship for a while and probably still could be.
I wanted for a while to design a ship that had the bridge in a different place than the 'nose'. I ideally wanted to do a sort of conning tower style bridge mounted on top. I also wanted to do the engines as external pieces with replaceable fuel tanks protruding from the engines rather than built into the hull of the ship. With this in mind I started scribbling some ideas based on this concept drawing:



I have no idea who that image is by or where I got it from. If you know, or if it is yours then please get in touch and I will either credit or remove it.

These are my initial scribblings. The first problem I came across was that the fuel pods protruded downwards too far to make landing gears credible. It'd also force the obligatory loading ramp out the back to be at too steep an angle. I rather quickly settled on the idea of a Tyderium style swing-wing so that the wings fold away when landed. This makes sense if only for conserving space.



Here you can see the decks as I've layed them out thus far. The two lowest ones are cargo. Where the upper level overlaps the lower level would be open so that that area would have a ceiling height of 5 metres. The third deck up is the passenger quarters including staterooms, a recreational area and autochef etc etc. The next deck is the crew quarters and common area and the detached piece on top is the bridge.





Following are two shots of the ship landed with 'people' for scale. The basic shapes are mostly modelled. There's no fine detail yet and the bridge is still a placeholder blob.