Traveller Reskins: 10 dTon Fighter

Count the 20 squares!

After the Scouts and Trader, I encountered a designer's block with the Far Trader design, and decided to try something smaller and simpler for a change. That proved to be a bad decision, as the Small Crafts are very vaguely defined in the Traveller main rulebook, and the plans still manage to contain all kind of contradictions. Of course, it could be asked that is there even a point in trying to come up with a top-down floorplan for a single-seat spacecraft such as the fighter, but that is another kettle of fish altogether.

Since there is an online version of Traveller SRD that includes the High Guard supplement, my next step was to go there and try to figure out whether the apparent contradictions could be solved using that resource. Instead, things just got muddier, and I realized that although I could use High Guard to craft the kind of ships I wanted, they would eventually end up resembling nothing like the ships in the main rulebook, stat-wise. For example, a 10 dTon ship with a power plant big enough to power a single laser could have a Thrust of 12, whereas in the main rulebook the Thrust of a fighter is only 6. But my plan was not to redesign the ships from the ground-up, just to provide upgraded visuals. So after some headscratching, I went back to the original designs, and decided just to approximate them, making sure that the things like Cargo space would match the tonnage given in the rulebook, and just roughly eyeball the rest.

In the end, I came up with two designs I liked, and with a different function to boot. The Aerospace Fighter is quite close in design to the the in the rulebook, and performs much the same role, having a streamlined hull and thus the ability to perform both planetary and system-wide missions. The Interceptor, on the other hand is a pure starfighter, with a distributed hull and not having even landing gear. What it does have, however, is an airlock, so that it can dock with other spacecraft easily, and of course the airlock can be used as an extra transport space.