Firstly I apologise about the rudementary design of the page. It'll have to do until I get this project finished and I have time to dedicate a proper page of my website to Traveller.
For the time being this will serve for the first part - or literally half of my visual interpretation of Nick Bradbeer's award winning Rhino-Hunter Long Range Scout design for Traveller: The New Era.
The Rhino is a sort of Frankenstien ship consisting of an old, 50 ton, 'Rhino' Dropship customised to be grappled to a specially built, 50 ton, 'Hunter' Jump frame.
'Rhino' 50 dTon DropShip
First up are the deckplans for my visual interpretation of the modified 'Rhino' 50-dton dropship. Click on the relevant image to download the plans in 15mm and 28mm flavour.
The images are medium compression JPEGs retaining image quality but minimising memory size. They are designed to be printed at 150dpi which I find to be a reasonably crisp resolution without going overboard on the image size. Sadly the 28mm plans don't quite fit on to a single A3 sheet.
The 15mm plans, however fit quite nicely on a sheet of A4 in landscape format.
The tonal values are such that the images also work perfectly well in black and white for those not fortunate enough to have access to a colour printer.
One final note about scale. In each plan, I have assumed a scale of 15mm or 28mm = 2metres (or 6 feet - roughly human male size). I have made the larger plans 28mm instead of the customary 25mm because "25mm" figures can vary wildly from 25mm up to 32mm, so I settled on 28mm as an average compromise.
The Ship Areas
The Cockpits
The cockpits are, as I mentioned earlier, seperate identical systems. While each has a distinct role, pilot and co-pilot, each can also double up as a replacement for the other. They are accessed via sliding doors leading into a shoulder corridor. This shoulder corridor, itself leads on to the main, spinal corridor that provides access to the rest of the ship.
The Staterooms
The Small staterooms, of which there are three, consist of one single bunk, a desk, chair and workstation and a compact hygiene unit.
The workstation I designed to be a flat 2D screen. As fab and futuristic as holographic 3D displays are, I can't help feeling that a lot of information simply communicates a lot more efficiently on a flat screen. Maybe they have a 3D plugin option I don't know, but these monitors are essentially flatscreens. Whilst the monitors include touch-screen for direct input, there are also fully customiseable keyboards which are, essentially a second touchscreen monitor built in to the desk that can be configured in any way that the user wishes depending on the task at hand and their own, personal quirks.
The workstation is part of a ship-board network, tied into the main ship's computer and also functions as a shipboard or 'ship-to-shore' communications unit. Messages can also be recorded for sending via mail. The workstation can be configured as an entertainment unit too but that varies depending on wether the owner approves of that sort of thing.
The bunk is a standard bed with over and under storage lockers for clothing, equipment and presumably rations as there is nowhere for the crew to commune or prepare food whilst away from the mothership.
The hygiene unit is a cylindrical cubicle, little more than 2 metres tall. It functions as a shower for the stateroom's occupant but also has a fold-away toilet seat (as seen in Stateroom 03) and wash basin (as seen in Stateroom 01). Not very luxurious but it's better than nothing.
The Low Berths
The Low berths are vertical and each contains a locker for the occupant's personal effects. The Low Berth chamber also contains a hygiene unit for the Low occupants.
In the original Rhino, the third Stateroom and Low Berth chamber wouldn't have existed and the cargo area would have come forward to the airlocks.
The Airlocks
The Airlocks themselves are long chambers, the door of which is capable of connecting with most standard universal docking collars. The chambers contain Vacc-suit lockers and a bench for sitting during decompression/recompression.
The Fuel Scoops
Directly forward of the Airlocks and either side of staterooms 01 and 02 are the fuel scoops. These are designed to suck in hydrogen in the atmospheres of gas giants and feed directly into the fuel chambers. This unrefined fuel can be used at risk or it can be returned to the Hunter jump frame for purification and also use by the Hunter for Jump.
The Cargo Area
The cargo area has space for 196 kilolitres, has a full 3 metre head clearence and a loading ramp that extends rearwards of the ship and telescopes to reduce the angle of rest. In the original Rhino this ramp would have reached widthways from engine to engine. This has been reduced now to fit in the locking clamps for the Hunter grapples - indicated by the recesses between the ramp and the engines. The actual accessway is made narrower still by the stairs and catwalk leading up either side of the ramp, to the rear-facing airlock door that provides through-access to the Hunter jump frame when the two are docked. A narrow area down the centre of the cargo bay is usually kept clear and provides a route from the door to the habitable area of the vessel.
The Fuel
Fuel is stored either side of the ship in segmented and honeycombed tanks. The seperate sections of the tanks provide insurance against fuel loss if a cell should be ruptured. The honeycombed interior reduces 'slosh' when the ship is station-keeping in a gravity-less vaccuum.
The HEPlaR Thrusters
Directly aft of the fuel tanks are the two HEPlaR thrusters. Nick quoted a volume of 18.1kl for the HEPlaR but I wanted two thrusters so I divided it up into two cylinders of roughly 9.05kl. Simplistic and, yes, the engines do seem a little small, but Traveller drives always have seemed rather small to me!!
The Powerplant
The ship's powerplant and fuel (reactors have their own fuel supply in TNE apparently) are built in to the hull above the cargo bay. The ship's computer core and life support systems are also stored there. There's no habitable area so I didn't feel compelled to draw plans for them. The Reactor was originally going to have an access crawlway but there was no way to get access to it other than from a ladder in the cargo bay and that just wouldn't work.
The Sensors
Sensors are positioned in the nose and wings of the craft. There's actually a much larger area of volume given over to sensors than needs be but that was just a happy quirk of the designs.
The Armaments
Armaments on the Rhino are in the form of a chin-mounted fusion gun and underslung ordnance pylons. For the Fusion gun, I built the barrel and it's swivel socket and subtracted that volume from the whole. The rest I made into a mound on the underside of the ship. I preferred the way this looked, to simply making a huge, hemispherical dome with a cylinder sticking out of it. The turret was originally mounted dorsally until Nick pointed out that it was intended for ground assault situations so it made more sense to be chin-mounted. A simple click-drag and his wish was my command!
The weapons pylons are capable of carying 18,000kg of ordnance (though not through Jump). Nick has given me a list of possible configurations and the dimensions for the ordnance types. I may model those in too at a later date.
The Landing Gears
Finally, Landing gears are retractable skids mounted centrally in the forward section of the ship (just behind the gun) and in either wing root - on the lower wings. They provide just enough clearence to load ordnance when landed. This was a juggle to get enough clearence without making the loading ramp angle too steep. I may include a render of this soon to illustrate.
'Hunter' 50 dTon Jump-Frame
Hunter Jump-Frame with sensor dish deployed and grapples extended.
Hunter Jump-Frame with sensor array stowed and grapples retracted in docked position.
Hunter Jump-Frame rear.
Some design notes, or '...What the hell is that!!!?'
I initially decided to do a two-part ship when I saw the Jedi Starfighter with it's detacheable Hyperspace engines in 'Attack of the Clones'. I loved the idea of a jump engine with a detacheable, streamlined lander and set about trying to design one using Classic Traveller. I quickly realised that each section would need seperate fuel, drives, powerplants etc etc and it got a bit confusing. I made some enquiries on JTAS and was pointed to Nick's site. I'd been there before but not really noticed the Rhino-Hunter. His designs are for 'Traveller: The New Era' which I'm not familiar with, but I contacted Nick through the Traveller Deckplans Yahoo Group and got him to make me a list of volumes for the seperate elements of the design. With this I was able to knock together a rudimentary volume block model and build a rough hull around it like so:
The block model is essentially a series of cubes. The habitable areas are 3 metres in height , and sized horizontally until the volume (calculated using MAX's handy measuring utility) was correct. In my designs (especially for purely utilitarian craft like the Rhino) I allow a headroom of between two and two-and-a-half metres. I then make up the rest by dividing half above and half below the deck for pipes, cables, machinery etc... This also gives me half a metre either way that I can eat into for curved hulls etc. So, as you can see in the block model, some of the volume cubes extend beyond the surface of the hull but not to the extent that it's worth bothering about - and believe me, it took some shuffling to get it that far.
As for the hull, I toyed with a number of ideas for the shape. The basic, overall shape was allready in my head before I'd even looked at Nick's design. I allready had an idea of how I wanted the ship to look, but there were the details to take care of. For example, I originally had wings that swept back but this, Nick pointed out, increased the length of the ship which is a no-no for storage on motherships such as carriers. I toyed with folding them over but that was too much like the ALIENS dropship which has been done to death. I liked the idea of them folding under but that was firstly too similar to the 'folding over' idea and also it made things messy when folding away for landing. It just didn't seem practical. Nick had allready suggested folding forward which I originally balked at but then came back to it. I scribbled a few shapes and then added another pair of wings. I liked it! It stayed.
The next thing that irked me was the cockpit. I liked the idea of a huge, high-visiblity, bubble-cockpit. Nick suggested that for a dropship likely to land in a 'hostile' environment this wasn't really practical. I swallowed my artistic pride and admitted that he had a point. I scribbled and I scribbled but even with the smaller cockpit it had these two great, ugly shoulders which just didn't work. And then it hit me: Two cockpits! It solved my 'ugly shoulders' problem and it also meant that I could have a secondary cockpit with redundant backup controls should one be destroyed. Design bliss!
Once the shape was finalised and the block-model adjusted accordingly, I set about building the model that I wanted to use, not only to get a highly accurate silhouette for the floorplans but also to render some illustrations and animations with. At the time of writing this overview, those have yet to be done.
The Rhinocerous Samurai character, 'Gennosuki' or 'Gen' appears in the Usagi Yojimbo comic book and is copyright Stan Sakai. Find out more at UsagiYojimbo.com
