Traveller Reskins: Small Craft

The various Small Crafts were never the intended focus for my Traveller Reskinning project; in fact, I originally considered doing the Ship's Boat, the Launch and a Fighter, and leave it at that. Well, one fighter turned into two designs, and when trying to figure the High Guard rules for the Small Crafts, the idea of a System Ferry slowly formed. It represents a type of craft that is used to transport passengers short distances in space, from Capital ships to Space Stations and other similar habitats - essentially a mobile airlock. It uses a 10 dTon hull, with minimal thrusters and has batteries instead of a reactor of any kind.

So with a 'bonus' ship, I thought I was ready to make a full PDF page. However, as I assembled the ships to the layout, I realized that there would be too much white space for my liking on the design. Something had to be done, and inspired by the Whartson Hall audio game recordings of Traveller at RPGMP3.com, I grabbed the Pinnace as a space filler.

And from there, things just went downhill. Somehow, I could not get the idea of the Modular Cutter out of my mind. It is not a glamorous ship, but the utility aspect of it started to haunt me, especially as there were no concrete examples of the various configurations in the rulebook. I wanted to see what an ATV compartment would look like, and that's when I knew I would get no peace of mind until I were done with the designs.

The rulebook mentions ATV, fuel and open modules, and I included the latter as the 'default' one; it is also quite simple to make one's own designs on that module. In addition to the already mentioned modules, I decided to include a basic Cargo Module, a Survey or Scout Module with living quarters for two, and a frontier Medical Facility, with an operating theater, sleeper pods and isolation wards.

In a way, the hardest one to make was the Fuel Module, due to it's simplicity. Just to make it more interesting, I had to add the service tunnel/crawlspace. Since it had Fuel Scoops, I also wanted to include fuel purifiers to the design, but as they were not mentioned in the rules I eventually left them out.

It also occurred to me that these modules could easily be used in creating a rudimentary planetary base or habitat. In that case, some sort of passenger module would be needed, and I was going to include one but just ran out of space. But Habitat Module, and some sort of connector modules might not be a bad idea...

Well, now I feel I have done everything I should with the Small Craft designs. Actually, the only one left out is the 95 dTon shuttle, and since that would eventually be just a enlarged version of the Pinnace, I think I'll give it a pass. Unless of course I get some horrible pangs of guilt for leaving things incomplete.

Oh, and as usual, the PDFs can be found from the Downloads (PDF) section.