Star Seeder Size.

[Raven Redstar]

I randomly rolled a habitable planet, and it came up with "Abandoned Colony." So in my search for a colony ship, I came across the Star-Seeder.

I'm trying to figure how tall the ship is; Wookieepedia has it at 280m in length, and it looks like it's relatively thick, so I'm guessing maybe somewhere around 10 decks in height, but there are quite a few folks here who are much more versed at guessing at size. I posted the Wookieepedia link, as it has the pertinent information from the WEG Sourcebooks.

Thanks in advance!

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Seeder-class_Colony_Ship
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RR
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[Raven Redstar]

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'm open to it. I took out my handy measuring tape and measured the length of the drawing at 9.5in long vs. 4.5in tall. So, figuring out percentage of length I decided it was about 47% of the length at its highest point, giving it a height of just over 130m, which I decided to round down to.

So, those expert starship engineers that we have on the forums. How many decks would that break down into? Roughly 2m per deck? Or would there be some other kind of calculation?
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RR
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[Mamatried]

In a ship that size I would go with one deck every 5-10 meters
On a smaller ship like the Ghost, I would give the decks a floor/roof thickness of up to 1 meter.
This to me seems reasonable as that leaves room for all the ship systems and ducts and such.

The Corvus is listed at 35m height I think, and it seems to have 3 decks with the hangar being one of them.

[CRMcNeill]

The D6 Space ship design system gave a standard deck height of 3 meters, which accounted for both the space itself and the ship systems below the decks and in the overheads.

EDIT: That works out to a ceiling height of 2.5 meters, with .5 meters left over for the ship’s systems, per D6 Space. However, some ships on the Star Wars Deckplan Alliance use a 2.3 meter internal ceiling height.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Raven Redstar]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I think I might split the difference between the two of these, since the ship is registered as a capital ship, which would give 32 decks, which still seems like quite a bit, but looking at the picture, it looks like the bottom 3/4 is taken up with the cargo bay(s).

I may have to adjust the stats of this a bit, at least as far as cargo capacity.

If you set it up like that, you give the ship 8, 4 meter decks for passengers and crew. And the rest of the ship is taken up with the vehicle compliment and cargo for establishing a colony.
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RR
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[garhkal]

[Raven Redstar]

[Zarn]

Wookieepedia has a better take on it, in my opinion.

"The Star Seeder was 250 meters long, could transport 800 people and had a cargo capacity of 3,000 cubic meters into which could be stored 7,500 metric tons. It was crewed by 169 people and had room for up to 800 passengers. For defense, the class was armed with 6 turbolaser batteries, a tractor beam projector and a deflector shield."

So, a crew much smaller than 550, but still 800 passengers. To have a viable colony of humans without genetic engineering, you'd need at a minimum 4169 individuals, which translates to roughly 5 or 6 Star Seeders per fleet at first glance.

However, if I were to establish a colony, I'd likely break apart most of my colony ships for materials, and I'd probably make sure that most of the crew would also be colonists. So with that in mind, figure 4 Star Seeders, drop the entirety of the cargo section on-planet (made to be taken apart and put together to fashion shelters, possibly a prefab clinc made out of sickbay, and so on), and use at least some of the drives on the ship as power sources. Possibly drop a few hyperdrives as well for power generation.

Keep a couple in orbit, probably docked together as a space station / orbital defense platform (and for Space Patrol duties, such as destroying incoming debris, meteors, and what have you), and keep a couple stripped-down Star Seeders as asteroid mining platforms for further raw materials.

What I'm getting at is that I'd say four or five Star Seeders originally would likely be enough for a viable initial colony - if they've used only one, then you'd either get severe inbreeding within 20 generations (using a computer program to maximise the genetic diversity of pairings, you could get away with less than 200 individuals if you return to the greater population within 20 generations), or you need genetic engineering (likely matched with cloning in the Star Wars universe) to keep the population healthy.

I'm starting to think of this abandoned colony as being similar to that particular village in Argentina, where blonde and blue-haired twins started being born after a visit by dr Mengele... well, not really, but the village of Candido Godoi has had a few wild rumours about it. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/world/americas/25brazil.html

[Mamatried]

[CRMcNeill]

One possibility for transport capacity is that the colonists themselves are placed in coldsleep capsules for the duration of the trip, since they wouldn't really be needed to crew the ship. Coldsleep has been hinted at in a few sources, and might help to explain the large crew for the Star Seeder (an enlarged medical staff to monitor and maintain the coldsleep capsules). Stasis is also a possibility (and differentiated from coldsleep by being a field that actually slows the passage of time) but is also very power intensive.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Mamatried]

This sounds likely.
In some book which title escapes me (canon book), this spy/bounty hunter is sent to a retirement home for bucketheads to find some artifact.
This place seemed like rooms full of "pods" slightly longer than a human, enough space for some personal gear, and to turn around, like a tube/pod into the wall.
At least this is the image I got from this, and this could make sense for many colony type ships

As for anything like a passenger liner I doubt this, and would lean to more cabin type living quarters with 1 to even 6-8 person cabins

[Raven Redstar]

It's possible that some of the additional cargo space could be taken up with cold-sleep passengers as well, at that point, they're more like cargo than like passengers though. And, then why freeze some and not others?

I suppose one could use converted passenger liner ships for the purposes of colonization as well.

The purpose for the Star Seeder might be a forward operating construction group, with the intention of having additional colonists follow after the initial construction and planting is done.

Or, perhaps with the size of the ship, you could just increase the number of passengers to something more reasonable for the necessary genetic diversity.

You guys have given me some stuff to think of.
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RR
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[Mamatried]

[Raven Redstar]

I decided to switch out ships and use the modular Loronar MOD-17 ship. Converting 50,000 tons to passenger accommodations for 5,000 passengers, essentially dedicated an entire deck to passengers. Also, from the Gamer Magazine deck plans, it can potentially have a hanger deck, which could be used for small shuttles and airspeeders.

Then have the lower decks for cargo, supplies, and construction equipment for building a new settlement.

Thanks for your input everyone!
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RR
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[Mamatried]