A >small< ship, but still no stars to steer her by

[classicdrogn]

Finished the pod frame finally, also added (green) deuterium slush tanks and (purple) antihydrogen ice cryo-pods, which calculating from their size and a bit off for internal volume/equipment hold 5.5 metric tons of the stuff EACH. That's a total of 160 tons of antimatter, not even counting the smaller supplies under the shuttle bay floor and in the rollbar for fueling small craft and torpedoes. Yikes!

edit: Wait a minute, no, I forgot to divide the dimensions of the AM pods by half due to working at 1:2 scale in Blender. That's one eighth the volume, or "only" 20 tons of goddamn antimatter in the back of my boat. Aiyiyi...

Consider any question about why bother with saucer separation ability answered; if your ship is crashing you do NOT want that much concentrated hate coming down in the same area, preferably not on the same planet at all, better still you drop it on the far side of a large moon or set the computer to have it try to ram your enemies as a distraction while the saucer flies away.



I also added a small impulse engine back on either side of the engineering hull, to provide emergency power and more efficient sublight propulsion with the saucer separated since I guess there are some situations where flying the two around might be useful which don't involve engineering becoming a big cloud of uncontrolled, hard gamma-spewing annihilation reactions. There's a couple of little staircases visible in the nacelle gallery corridor area; the forward one leads to the sloped transverse corridor that cuts the deuce tanks in half, while the other leads to the a-mat farm and engineering impulse drive. Next on the list to model are the capacitor banks to let the torp launcher volley fire and m/am tanks in the rollbar, then the autoloader system in the pod and maybe a transporter pad as previously mentioned, then I must risk the distraction of messing around on another session of searching for reference material on the internet to verify the size of the docking rings rather than the "that looks about right" 2.5m of the current placeholder objects.