Approved Starship Ultima-class bulk freighter

[Jessica Med-Beq]

An Ultima-class ship in mining configuration: non-mining configurations would not have bow doors

Image Source: Tony Cardona
Affiliation: Open Market
Manufacturer: Ringovinda StarYards
Model: Ultima-class bulk freighter
Modularity: Yes: one can change the weapons, as well as to devote more space to transporting passengers vs. cargo, and even mount a mining bow door
Production: Mass Produced
Material: Alusteel hull
Classification: bulk freighter
Length: 2000m
Height: 573m
Width: 943m
Armament:
Rating 4 (200 turbolaser equivalents)
4 Nekogal heavy turbolasers (48 standard turbolaser equivalents)
2 Bulkhunter heavy ion cannons (24 standard turbolaser equivalents)
3 Lusankya super-heavy turbolasers (in one triple turret; 90 standard turbolaser equivalents)
6 tractor beams, equivalent to one turbolaser each
8 Gatling rapid-fire turbolasers (in four double turrets; equivalent to 32 standard turbolasers)
20 Quad lasers
Defenses: 13
Hangar: 3 Squadrons (stock configuration means it is equipped TIE Reavers; a client may change the fighters equipped in it)
Manoeuvrability Rating: 17
Speed Rating: 17
Hyperdrive Class: 1
Special features:
- Tensor field generator
- Inertial compensator
- 60 Jessica landing gears
- 6 Marcia repulsorlift generators
- Watchtower collision avoidance system
- CHX 5.0 acoustic theater
- 4 Creveld-5 radial ion drives
Strengths:
- Can land on planets
- Strong hull
- High cargo capacity
Weaknesses:
- High maintenance requirements
- High cost of operation and purchase
- High crew requirements
- Lightly armed
- Concentrated
- Slow in realspace
Description:

Consumables: 3 months (regular passenger configuration) - 6 years (pure bulk freighter)
Cargo capacity: 50 million tons (pure bulk freighter)
Passenger capacity: 0 (pure bulk freighter)-100,000 (regular passenger operation)
Crew: 4,800

Based on plans stolen from Kuat Drive Yards for prison barges, the Ultima is the pinnacle in building starships capable of landing on planets. Larger than any known ship capable of landing on planets, it can do so thanks to a vast array of landing gears designed by the mastermind of the KDY theft operation. Rumors are that the landing gear designer had a personal grudge against Kuat Drive Yards for reasons that appear related to landing gears. Whereas the original ship could carry 100,000 prisoners, with very little cargo space, the Ultima promises to transport over a million standard "45-feet" high-cube containers for a grand total of 50 million tons or, alternatively, over half a million passengers as a lumbering starliner; however in the latter case the consumables will last only a week. As with all freighters built by Ringovinda StarYards, it is equipped with an inertial compensator and a tensor field generator to keep contents safe; without the repulsorlift generators, landing the behemoth would be impossible.

Such a large ship must be armed to minimize its reliance on escorts when operating in the roughest regions of the galaxy; unlike its baseline chassis, the Ultima features a Bulkhunter turret aft, as well as a few emplacements on the conning tower. The main battery is a single ventral turret containing three Lusankya super-heavy turbolaser tubes. In addition, it has a ventral hangar capable of housing 3 squadrons in ceiling racks, which also facilitates loading/unloading of the ship on the ground. But thanks to its modularity, virtually any possible mix of uses of a ship that big would be fair game, like a hospital ship, a prison ship, or a mining ship (requires taking the option of bow doors), or even a colony ship, especially with the addition of the CHX 5.0 acoustic theater, allowing its occupants unparalleled sound quality. Its sheer size requires a tier-4 corporation or a major faction contract to buy it; as a result the ship is classified as minor-production.

As a mining ship the ship can use its dorsal turbolasers at a reduced power rate (they have 7 power settings; settings 1-2 are suitable for mining) to shoot at asteroids and the tractor beam projectors, which are lined up along the bow doors, are collecting the ores for storage inside the bow doors.

Development Thread: Bedridden (the planning of the raid; 14 posts)
Vengeance served freezing cold [KDY/OS heist] (the raid itself, led the Design Triumvirate to Jabiim in its wake; 54 posts)
For 3000 Years, They Ignored Our Calls for Help | SSC Dominion of Jabiim (the aftermath of the raid; 23 posts, specifically #4, 12, 17, 23, 32, 39, 45, 52, 61, 67, 72, 77, 82, 91, 97, 103, 109, 115, 127, 132, 137, 142 and 147)

Total: 91 posts
Intent: To provide a bulk freighter capable of moving the massive loads required to sustain a galactic economy
Who Can Use This: Anyone
Primary Source: Imperial prison barge, Tormentor-class battlecruiser (of which it is an adaptation)

 

[Gir Quee]

RESEARCH REVIEW
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Star Wars Canon:
Pending initial review
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Starwars Chaos:
Pending initial review
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WITHOUT DEV THREADS
Pending initial review
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WITH DEV THREADS
Pending Initial review
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SUGGESTIONS
Pending Inital review

 

[Gir Quee]

There's not a lot of cargo/passenger ships in this size range (the two I can think of offhand are the Lucrehulk and the Field Secured Container Vessel), which puts us a bit in uncharted territory (at least for me).

Classification: bulk freighter

Rating 8 (500 turbolaser equivalents)

Having a cargo ship this well armed is technically possible, but I do not think that people will consider it to be a civilian vessel with this many weapons.

From an OOC perspective, this is over twice as well armed as our dedicated carrier example, and this ship is only several hundred meters longer.

From an IC perspective, we do have an idea of what was considered the normal maximum amount of weapons carried by the largest civilian ships because of the Errant Venture, which was an Imperial Star Destroyer converted into something like a mobile smuggler base. We find out in The Bacta War that an civilian ship the size of an ISD would have the maximum civilian allowance of 10 heavy turbolaser batteries, 10 ion cannons, and 2 tractor beam projectors. Granted, the in-character New Republic and Galactic Empires of that time period no longer exist (or would their rules), but I think this example highlights how heavily armed this is for a civilian vessel.

Passenger capacity: 0 (pure bulk freighter)-600,000 (passenger configuration)

I don't know of any passenger vessels this size. A scaled up Acclamator would have around 42,500 people. The MC80a Evacuation Star Cruiser carries around 75,000 but this is only for very short journeys. I would wager that we're looking at this carrying rough ~100,000 passengers at most.

As an aside, I'd recommend expanding the areas about the different roles in can fill. For example, does it carry any specific gear as a mining ship (mining lasers, etc)?

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

[member="Gir Quee"] As an aside I had a 1500m-long bulk freighter with 2 squadrons and 170 turbolaser-equivalents approved with only 14 dev posts...

All I actually did was to say that 600k would be for short evacuation runs, and also that the Nekogal turbolasers' lowermost 2 of its 7 power modes could be used for mining, as well as the tractor beams.

Having a cargo ship this well armed is technically possible, but I do not think that people will consider it to be a civilian vessel with this many weapons.

From an OOC perspective, this is over twice as well armed as our dedicated carrier example, and this ship is only several hundred meters longer.

From an IC perspective, we do have an idea of what was considered the normal maximum amount of weapons carried by the largest civilian ships because of the Errant Venture, which was an Imperial Star Destroyer converted into something like a mobile smuggler base. We find out in The Bacta War that an civilian ship the size of an ISD would have the maximum civilian allowance of 10 heavy turbolaser batteries, 10 ion cannons, and 2 tractor beam projectors. Granted, the in-character New Republic and Galactic Empires of that time period no longer exist (or would their rules), but I think this example highlights how heavily armed this is for a civilian vessel.

The dedicated, 1700m-long carrier that can be built with 20 posts of development, while having 200 turbolasers' worth of allotment, has the benefit of 10 squadrons, whereas that one has 3; I accept something had to give in, that were the fighter squadrons. A 2000m-long carrier, built with the minimum 20 posts between 2 writers, with 10 squadrons would have ca. 250 turbolasers; 1 squadron could be traded in for ~80 turbolasers in a 2000m-long ship (assuming the Ship Reference Chart holds), and I traded away 7 squadrons. Getting to 500 turbolasers from there only requires trading away 3 squadrons. I assumed more dev posts than the 20-post minimum would have given one more cargo capacity than stock configuration. Now, I've made no improvement on defenses or on speed/maneuverability, so the remaining 71 dev posts are OOCly allocated to cargo capacity since the remaining 4 squadrons were exchanged, in all or in part, for the ability to land on a planet (and perhaps some cargo space if 4 sqns is too large a price to pay for landing gears and repulsorlift generators).

I couldn't add more weapons than that - beyond that amount, and 3 squadrons, it would be impossible to build a SD-sized freighter that could still be sold as a freighter ICly. Smaller freighters can have armament ratings of 8, and rating defenses of 13 no problem, although admittedly virtually all of those I saw with 8/13 ratings would be corvette or frigate-sized. Would it be helpful to have more dev posts or to reduce production (to, say, limited)?

Alternatively if you compare the Connestoga, which only had 23 dev posts, also carried 50 million tons of cargo. Low-grade shields, durasteel hull (it was built under 2.0 rules; under 3.0 rules its maneuverability, speed would be 18), no weapons, no hangar, no ability to land on planets.

I don't know of any passenger vessels this size. A scaled up Acclamator would have around 42,500 people. The MC80a Evacuation Star Cruiser carries around 75,000 but this is only for very short journeys. I would wager that we're looking at this carrying rough ~100,000 passengers at most.

Linear scaling assumes that the other two dimensions are the same. As for the 600k passengers, you have to remember that scaling ships' cargo holds or cabins up is a matter of volume more than length. This ship has 17 times the volume and from there 17 times as many passengers as the Acclamator, in which case 250k in normal operations would be the absolute uppermost limit. 600k, in evacuation configuration, carries the risk of running through the consumables in a week.

Plus the Wook page of the 1200m-long MC80a Evacuation Star Cruiser is contradictory: on the one hand 75k and, on the other hand 200k. Which canon number is correct I don't know.

 

[Gir Quee]

The dedicated, 1700m-long carrier that can be built with 20 posts of development, while having 200 turbolasers' worth of allotment, has the benefit of 10 squadrons, whereas that one has 3; I accept something had to give in, that were the fighter squadrons....

This isn't an issue of if you technically could build a ship with most of these stats. You undoubtedly can, and you have the development behind it. I have no issue with stamping the base concept of this ship, including its armament.

What I am saying is that this probably won't count as a "civilian ship" for things like a company's corporate fleet in OOC terms. Instead, it would probably count as a military vessel because it is well-armed.

In IC terms, you may remember that the GA rebuilding of Coruscant thread had the GA supreme commander block the presence of heavily armed ships and troops in the area. A ship like the Ultima probably would not be welcome at such events because it is so heavily armed.

If you are okay with that, that's cool. But I felt that it was something that I should bring to your attention just to ensure that there wasn't any confusion in the future when this submission is used.

Linear scaling assumes that the other two dimensions are the same. As for the 600k passengers, you have to remember that scaling ships' cargo holds or cabins up is a matter of volume more than length. This ship has 17 times the volume and from there 17 times as many passengers as the Acclamator, in which case 250k in normal operations would be the absolute uppermost limit. 600k, in evacuation configuration, carries the risk of running through the consumables in a week. Plus the Wook page of the 1200m-long MC80a Evacuation Star Cruiser is contradictory: on the one hand 75k and, on the other hand 200k. Which canon number is correct I don't know.

You're absolutely right that volume isn't scaled linearly, but exponentially. For simplicity's sake though, it's far easier to calculate things linearly, since many times we don't have all of the dimensions available to us. In order to minimize the exponential difference, I try to find and stick to vessels that are as close to the target ship as possible. There aren't many large passenger ships in the Star Wars universe, however, at this size, which is why I mentioned that we are "getting into unknown territory" in my previous post.

I'm not sure where Wookiee is getting the 200,000 number, as I do have the Dark Empire Sourcebook with the stats (which is the only source of stats for this vessel according to Wookieepedia. It states "Passengers: 75,000 (safely; this number can be doubled if absolutely necessary, but is extremely risky)". My guess is that the 200,000 is referencing the emergency doubling of passenger occupancy in this vessel. Note that this is considered to be "extremely risky".

But the MC80a evacuation cruiser is an interesting case in Star Wars engineering, especially since MC80s were originally designed as passenger lines. However, the evacuation cruisers show the upper limits of what is possible for passenger count. This ship is so specifically engineered for max passenger occupancy for short periods of time that they literally modified or removed anything that they didn't need to move people. The most interesting change is that hyperdrive system was modified to trade range for more life support systems. They also completely removed the weapons and shielding to get more space. Now when we say 75,000, keep in mind that this ship is cramming in people to take them for short jumps that last several light years, and that's it.

In comparison, the Ultima seems to be more long-term in its carrying capacity, which generally means that it needs more consumables, and consequently more space dedicated to each person the longer they are on the ship. It also would seem to be more than a standing room only sort of ship. I'm guessing that if you're keeping people on board for long journeys, they're probably going to want their own personal space and cabins. On top of this, it has reasonable defenses, a heavy armament, and starfighters. All of these things take up space.

My main point, however, was not to debate exact statistics, but find a rough ballpark figure for what a reasonable passenger count would be. Even assuming that volume is not a linear function, if I massed two MC80 evacuation cruisers together to account for that, we're talking about 150,000 passengers, which is a quarter of the initial passenger rate. And like I said, that's 150,000 with some extreme limitations.

If you want to go slightly higher than 100,000, I can go with that, but that is where the passenger count will roughly be.

 

[Jessica Med-Beq]

With 200 turbolaser equivalents rather than the original 500, and also the passenger capacity being 100,000, that would be much more reasonable...

[member="Gir Quee"]

 

[Gir Quee]

Awesome. Pending Admin Approval. Thanks! [member="Spencer Varanin"]

 

[Allyson Locke]

Approved.