<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>

This page may require a bit of an explanation:

the shuttle number
Pay attention to the shuttle numbers on page 12 and 14. Because of a silly little prank DSS 682 is logged as having left Endis but never having arrived anywhere else. Nevertheless it is now in a hangar on RSC 3. Meanwhile DSS 589 has never left anywhere yet is logged as having arrived on RSC 3. Now imagine you being the underpaid desk clerk somewhere on a godforsaken planet having to figure out what really happened in this administrative mess, keeping in mind that it would take a six week roundtrip time to send and receive an answer from RSC 3.

Rail 'er when I'm done
There are four different ways in which ships frequently dock in this universe:

1. airlock: the old fashioned way, small shuttle docks at airlock of big ship. Crew and cargo can enter the big ship through an airlock. Pretty much every ship has one, though most ships that have have other docking methods only use this one as a fallback.

2. The gate: Shuttle enters a sluice of the big ship (the gate). Sluice gets pressurized and then the shuttle moves on to the spaceship hangar. In some smaller ships the hangar and the gate are the same room, limiting the amount of shuttles that can dock to a single one. This system can be found on nearly every large people-carrier, and in a number of military ships.

3. The rail: shuttles are stacked vertically on a rail in an unpressurized part of the ship. Crew must either use flexible docking tubes or spacesuits to enter/exit the shuttles. This is the default configuration in nearly every warship. Two to sixteen such rails in a single hangar bay make it by far the fastest way to send out an entire squadron.

4. Cargo dock: A super-sized version of an airlock near the cargo bays of the ships. Used to quickly load and unload large quantities of cargo while in space.

The pilot
One down, two to go.