CS Porad-Hevalrin

[Graham Kennedy]

A cargo hauler, the Porad-Helvarin is designed to carry up to 108 standard cargo containers across interstellar distances. The vessel is designed for long distance use, with a designed endurance of four months at the standard laden cruise speed of 22 kc. The ship carries a crew of eight, though it can be flown by a single person if necessary.

The ship has a three deck layout. The upper deck holds the command and control centre at the bow, with life support and various recycling systems in the middle. The upper aft deck is largely taken up by docking bays and support equipment for the four cargo pods.The bow section of the middle deck is occupied by crew quarters; each crewperson has a single room, luxurious for a vessel of this kind but considered necessary given the type's long endurance. Aft of the crew quarters is a lounge/recreation area, kitchen and food storage area, the main airlock, and engineering support gear of various kinds. The lower deck contains the major engineering systems; fuel tanks and the rift generator at the bow, with conversion reactors and a ZPEX unit aft. The power conversion tower is at the rear of the ship. The Helvarins are equipped with twelve single person escape pods which have a fifty light year range at 2.5 kc as well as an interplanetary journey on four small repellor engines. They are rated for a single midspace transition and a subsequent atmospheric entry and landing.

The cargo containers attach at the rear of the ship, stacked in tandem rows of 3x3 each. The ship can mount and unmount containers by itself. The number of containers involved means that their own anchor points lack sufficient strength to prevent flexing and buckling. They are therefore attached via "cage" units which hold them rigidly in place. The ship is capable of making planetary entries and landing, though it can only do this with no cargo attached (rumours persist that the manouver has beensuccessfully performed with a single row of nine containers, but no confirmed case exists.)

The ship has no weapons, no armament, and no shields.

The Helvarins are commonly sold both to Coalition customers and on the export market, and are a common sight throughout the Deep Range.

[Captain Seafort]

Another example of why I like this universe of yours - the background stuff. Do you consider this to be the equivalent of a container ship or an artic' (I assume the latter given the typical scale of the other vessels)?

Also, are those containers modern forty-footers, or slightly different?

[Graham Kennedy]

It's a step between the two, really.

I'm developing a range of container-based cargo ships. The Porad-Altina is essentially a "space truck" ship that hauls from one to ten cargo containers around. At the top end is the Maratona class, which can haul over 25 million of them around at once.

This ship falls inbetween, capable of carrying around a hundred containers.

The container is one I created; they measure 13x3x3 metres. That's not identical to modern containers but comparable to the larger ones in use.

The cargo ship run was sparked when I read somewhere that there are roughly 18 million cargo containers in the world at the moment. It occurred to me that virtually all science fiction depicts the future as using completely obsolete cargo handling methods; crates of all sorts of shapes and sizes, most of them small enough for one or two men to move around, are placed into a hold one at a time. There's still some place for that approach, and probably always will be, but the the large majority of the world's cargo goes by the container system because it's just more efficient. So why wouldn't the future do the same thing?

Interestingly one Maratona class could ship every cargo container on Earth, with seven or eight million slots to spare! Ships like that would travel between large hub ports only; ships like this would either take containers out to smaller worlds around the hub ports, or do longer range runs where the flexibility of not waiting for a major ship is important.

[Bryan Moore]

This reminds me of something we'd see in a B5 hangar. Quite nice.

[Graham Kennedy]

Thanks