oo nice, reminds of the prisoner transport ship that crashes onto the planet in the movie Pitch Black with the diesle guy

Yeah, I liked that ship - though it had ridiculous amounts of break-away and aerobraking crashlanding infrastructure. Neat on camera, but as a commercial vessel? Hilarious. Then again, the warship that Anakin and Obiwan crash landed in Episode III was ridiculous on steroids. Neither ship was anything like streamlined for any kind of atmospheric flight to begin with - they just put all that aerobreaking in just in case the antigrav that all Star Wars ships have fails apparently.

Interestingly, I've considered such air-braking structure in my own designs not so much as a means for airbraking, but as a means to move mass further from the center of gravity in order to help slow and control unintended spins, much as a figure skater can change the speed of her spins by extending or drawing in her limbs. It could also be used to move thrusters further from the center of gravity to increase their effect. Not that anyone was thinking of that in Star Wars, but it is a plausible use of such things.

I can see that, actually. And post scarcity of certain things - fusion/antimatter for energy, advanced materials tech for lighter/stronger hulls, armature manipulation via forcefields or gravity manipulation - such things can become elegant, on otherwise huge and/or chunky starship designs. Of course the breakway parts, aerobrakes, etc. was really for the audience, ie. rule of cool - and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that either :>

Yeah. Though I think one of the main reason's I'm completely smitten with Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is that there is absolutely nothing in any of the design or mechanicals that doesn't make absolute sense from an engineering perspective. I often find that true to life mechanical things can be much cooler simple because it connects with a viewer's real life experiences in a more visceral way. The detail obsessed me gets a major high every time I watch the ship launch fighters simply because the system as it is designed would likely work as well in real life as it does on screen.

Very awesome, Seriayne. So, how did the players get involved with this vessel model...they're going into further freight business, or preying on others' freight business?

Well, from their perspective, the little weasels already bought the Suez (fuel tender) variant of the class to keep their little trade-link station running. One of their NPC friends commissioned the prototype above, and now, with the discovery of nearly 2 million cold-sleeping members of their species (from a pre-game era time travelling Minsk) they need to come up with a way of smuggling thousands of Minsk through human space to some world they haven't yet decided on ... or even discovered yet.

Buying and running several of this class would provide some cover while they set up the infrastructure needed to wake up intelligent, but naive about the universe young minsk. By the time they've got a candidate world with enough shelter and self sustaining food (automated farms, pigs, alien fisheries if the fish provide the right nutrients for terrestrial life, etc.), they can repurpose the freighters to haul the coldsleep pods directly to the target world. Or to 'halfway' worlds for educational processing.

That's going to make for quite a few transport runs. If all else fails, they can just start automated construction of colonies in a system with suitable raw materials and a main-sequence star. Cheaper than staking a claim on something terraformable...

Perhaps in a few dozen generations when the tech available catches up to what the Ancients used, but at the moment the level of automation and infrastructure of even the high tech capital worlds is still nascent and, - well ... they're kinda in the backwaters. Technology is catching up to the core worlds, passing it in some small areas, but the population and industrial base is still fairly minimal - a world with 10 million + is a veritable industrial powerhouse in their neck of the woods, and most have populations of only a few tens of thousands.

Nice modular design.

I'd be interested in a interior floor plan design for this.

Oooh, very nice! I like that design :)

Verry SWEET!!

Nice and simple, looks pretty modular as well as not too large

You know, I'm curious: Many of your ships are clearly designed to never ever enter the atmosphere, yet they have nosecones and air intakes. Is it just an aesthetic choice, or are they actually capable of atmospheric flight? Or are those the intakes to magnetic ramscoops, and the nose is just to reduce friction against interstellar particles at high speed?

Most of Traveller's later continuum ships are essentially reactionless thrusters with contragrav capabilities, so can generally come down or go up as slow as they wish (Think - clunky old Millenium Falcon, with all those jillions of widgets and nurnies all over the hull - at what we consider normal rocket escape velocity or re-entry speeds, the ship'd be torn apart), then accelerate to turnover or jump distance once beyond the friction of the atmosphere.

The intakes are usually for either gas giant skimming (wilderness refueling of hydrocarbons) or, more rarely, for pulling water in during a surface water landing - refineries crack the H20 into hydrogen for the fusion plant and fuel for the jump drive.

Very often Traveller ship designs follow more the Rule of Cool (see TV Tropes), though some are gear-headed by grognards either back to old-school dials and levers of ~1930's through 1950's Space Opera serial spacecraft, or interpolated into something familiar, but more in line with near future speculative fiction (There was a big push in the 90's before Game Designer's Workshop - the original makers of Traveller - went out of business to change the ship design system to incorporate Ronald Reagan's SDI research ... which didn't really capture the soul of vast, alien filled, galaxy spanning space opera more than 3000 years in our future).

I try to stick to a blend of Star Warsy aesthetic, with a lot of nods to classic Traveller ship design aesthetics (1970's through late 1980's).

I must say I admire the aesthetic, and I find no flaw in your logic. However, when you say that this is the "Star Wars" aesthetic, I'm forced to disagree. Star Wars ships were always characterized by a large amount of greebles, battle scarring, and a lived-in feel... What you seem to be modeling is closer to Star Wars prequel ships, also known as Star Trek :P