A thread of 2 messages, 27 July 1989 to 27 July 1989, in the order they were sent.
A general question: Given ship stats, and a picture, as in the Rebellion
Sourcebook, where is a good place to start if I want to draw ship plans?
The specific project is the TJ-type Transport. How big is the silly thing?
I know how much it displaces in liquid hydrogen, but that means little to
me in terms of size... Am I missing something, or are there a number of
"correct" dimensions?
-Bob
[email removed]Generally, what I do is to first draw an interesting ship shape, with a front view, top view, and right side view. It is typically cobbled together from half a dozen to a dozen roughly geometric shapes; wedges, cones, hemi-spheres, cylinders, etc., with additional small ignorable garbage. I then guess at the rough dimensions that seem "right", from my rough drawing. Then I get out my mensuration formulae; i.e. volume of a cone is 1/3 times the area of the base times the height; volume of a sphere is 4/3 times pi times the radius squared, etc. With the aid of a good calculator, I determine what the actual volume of my drawing is in cubic meters, and divide by 13.5 to get tons. The ratio between my rough-guess volume and the specification volume is the cube of the ratio between my rough-guess dimensions and the accurate dimensions that would reflect the specifications. I adjust my overall dimensions accordingly. Next, I split the plan into decks, at 3m-intervals. Sometimes a ship is "split-level", to optimize volume for deck space. I then make slices through my drawings at the deck levels, and copy them to graph paper, at the correct scaling of 1.5m squares. I detail the interior with all the ship's components, then draw final, detailed plans of the exterior. Fortunately, the "rules" permit 10-20% slop in a plan, so everything generally comes out okay. Unfortunately, desgning ships in this manner requires a good understanding of basic algebra and geometry. James