www.ditl.org

The Maratona and her sister ships are typical large Coalition cargo vessels. Several thousand of these ships are in service, most of them plying the routes into the Deep Range. They are modular cargo ships, designed specifically to carry large numbers of standardised cargo containers. Each container measures 13 x 3 x 3 metres; fully loaded, the Maratona can carry 26,261,400 of them.

The ships are 8,375 metres in length - over 3 kilometres longer than a Kororra class battleship - and follow typical civilian practice of having the midspace drive shunts, power, and fuel systems in the bow whilst the bulk of the vessel is in the rear. This puts the center of mass far aft of the engines, making the design inherently stable and simplifying the flight control systems considerably.

The Maratona has limited sensors, no armament, no shields, and no armour. Her systems are designed for a high degree of automation and a high degree of reliability under long term use; as a result the ship has a small crew, typically twenty eight people though if needed she can be handled by sixteen.

The Maratona has no capability to load or unload cargo containers from her own resources, and is dependent entirely on suitable equipped port facilities in that respect.

The Maratona's speed is somewhat dependent on her cargo load. The containers she is designed for are rated for up to 30,000 kg each, but more typically average 15,000 kg. With a typical load of about 390 million tons the ships cruise at 28 kc, which is quite fast for a cargo vessel. At full load this drops to 24 kc. The ships have an endurance of 40 days at their cruise speed, giving them a range of around 3,000 light years.

God only 28 people on a ship that long. I imagin they'd get lonely.

The Maratona in her unloaded state.

I may be looking at this wrong - the containers are accessible top and bottom, while the lighter red stripe down the sides connects the bow to the drive, right?

... OK, never mind.

In flight, the containers are not accessible at all from the ship.

The second pic shows the hull; the red stripe is part of the ship proper (just has a red paint job). The containers attach above and below that section. The containers are sealed, airtight boxes; there is no way into any of them during flight.

Yeah, I was writing that as you put up the second pic. I didn't mean accesible from the ship; I meant accesible to tneders/tugs/whatever your universe uses.

How are they secured?

They lock to one another at the corners.

The inspirations for this class : http://www.costaricapages.com/panama/bl ... ited-1.jpg http://www.garon.ch/nouveau/cargo%20shi ... ncisco.jpg http://www.simplystainless.com/graphics ... erShip.jpg

Cool. I was just thinking of asking about things like freighters in your universe.

Rochey wrote:Cool. I was just thinking of asking about things like freighters in your universe.

Graham's a witch!

Mikey wrote:Graham's a witch!

Did he turn you into a newt?

... I got better.

A witch?! BURN HIM!!!!

Um, on second thoughts... maybe not...

Yes, it's a small crew. The crew doesn't do a whole lot on a typical day. You have three shifts each with a pilot, engineer, navigator, power systems specialist, couple of others. If the ship breaks down it sits and calls for help rather than the crew trying to repair it.

Probably not a terrible idea, since someone will have a bit of capital invested in it, and will be motivated to send a repair effort ASAP.

How bad of a problem is piracy in the areas in which these would operate?

Not very. Taking a ship like this down would be fairly pointless, because it would be very difficult and exceptionally time consuming to offload it without a major port equipped with specially designed equipment. I suppose it's conceivable that you might hijack this whole thing and then prise one or two containers loose and run off with them, but it seems a bit of a poor way to go about piracy.

These ships would usually travel well trafficked routes between major cargo hubs. Not the kind of thing that pirates would prey on. The major hubs send them on to smaller destinations in smaller ships, sometimes much smaller; those are the kind that pirates hit.

Fair enough.