New Spaceframes from Lower Decks and More

Hi all,

my group is soon starting season 3 of our series and they are getting a new ship. Since we have no official spaceframes from Lower Decks and since someone inquired recently about it, I made a quick write-up. Its not much but it includes the following spaceframes:

  • Emmett Till class
  • California class
  • Cheyenne class
  • Osler class
  • Parliament class
  • Yeager class (background ship from DS9 that I like somehow)
  • Prometheus class (this is a spaceframe reverse engineered from the USS Prometheus in the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)

I have also modified some talents and added a new one for the Cali.

Hope you enjoy.

Summary

Edit 1: Changed Parliament-class scale to 5. It’s kind of in the middle between 4 and 5, but I’ve seen diagrams where it is as large as the Luna. Also added High-Power Tractor Beam talent which suites the episode well.

Edit 2: Added Osler-class
Edit 3: Added Cheyenne-class
Edit 4: Added Emmett Till-class

6 Likes

Added Osler and Cheyenne classes.

Nice stuff. I like the “Supply Ship” Talent, which could work well for cargo transports too. And I think your Nebula-esque treatment for the three California-class variants works better than what I’d come up with.

Nice work but the Talent supply ship can really be abused.
I would add some kind of limitation like "On each adventure you have a 3 momentum pool, that can be spend of stuff "

Thanks for the feedback. How can this be abused? I realize that this can bring the Momentum cost of several items to 0, but I figure most of the equipment is not that critical anyway since it excludes weapons and stuff with Threat cost.

Each of your players and support character, NPC on team side will have all opportunity 1 items like chrono watch, medikits, signal amplifier on them just in case

I figured the players will still be reasonable when equipping their characters, but I see your point. But the carrying capacity still applies: Characters can only carry up to two items (plus their standard equipment) and a suit.

Also, if you have enough time to prepare for a mission, you don’t pay the Opportunity costs anyway.

I always presume that my players will not be reasonable and I assumed that an antigrav backpack is also an opportunity 1 item

Nothing is keeping them from taking an anti-grav unit at no cost right now. Opportunity cost only applies if you are short on time. Or imagine if the player says that the character always has an anti-grav unit in their quarters. At some point I reserve the right as a GM to veto any equipment which comes clearly from the player and not the player character.

On time sensitive missions, and most missions are, opportunity cost must be paid. In this case, the talent as written, can be abused. At the start of a mission, the opportunity pool is empty or low at best, choosing stuff is critical

Added the Emmett Till (from DS9 “season 8”).

I’m liking what I’m seeing here, but your document could use some editing. You mention the Osler out of the blue for no reason at the end of the first paragraph in the Parliament write-up, for example.

All in all, this fanbook looks very nice. Well done, Shran.

EDIT: You did notice that the Emmett Till and Curiosity-class look very similar; I just saw you post about that elsewhere. I agree: some official info about whether those two are related in-universe would be nice.

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Thank you for the feedback. You are right, that last sentence in the Parliament-class makes no sense. I guess some copy and paste error when I shifted the ships around.

I use Emmett Till-class in the book since there is nothing more to go on. I thought about naming it the Curiosity-class, but decided against it for now.

Yeah, I suspected that was a copy-and-paste error or something similar. I’ve seen lots of similar stuff in my editing work. If you want, I can read through your document and give you my edits via docfile. I’d PM you my email addy if I can find that option on this forum…

And before I forget, there’s something tangentially related (WARNING: SHAMELESS PLUG INCOMING!): I’ve recently come across some canon information about starship size comparisons from Wixiban and Eaglemoss. Eaglemoss has been publishing the Official Starship Collection magazine for the better part of a decade with canon stats. As of October 2020, they posted a few jpegs of most of the canon ships that ever appeared in Star Trek. (Stuff from Picard and Lower Decks aren’t included because Eaglemoss hasn’t gotten to them yet. The Picard ships are going to be released as miniatures later this month if I recall correctly. I don’t know if the Lower Decks ships will be made anytime soon, but it’s possible Eaglemoss hasn’t announced them yet.)

These are the in-scale pictures that Eaglemoss made: Federation; Alien; and Small/Massive. I took it upon myself to examine all these ships one by one and determine their in-universe Scale as evidenced simply by length and size/mass/volume. I’m still learning the STA rules, so I left out any other in-game factors that might or might not influence a starship’s Scale. I judged all this just by size alone using the Scale 4 TOS Constitution and a few other published starships’ Scales as the rough basis of comparison. I’ve been working with Mephit James of Continuing Mission to get all my Scale work published in one of their upcoming articles. The article will also have links to the Eaglemoss pictures I linked here, as well as all my notes concerning which ships have which Scales and why. Yeah, there are a few times where I disagreed with Modiphius where I thought they got a few ships’ Scales worng, but they likely didn’t have this Eaglemoss data and I present my explanations for my conclusions in my notes.

Anyway, I told you all that to tell you this: The Yaegar class is actually Scale 5 by my calculations, not Scale 4. It’s actually almost 60 meters longer than a conventional Intrepid class and, with the addition of its scaled-up Maquis raider secondary hull, significantly more massive than an Intrepid as well, enough to be comparable with many other ships I rated as Scale 5.

It’s stuff like that I can include in my edits if you like.

With a bit of luck, Mephit James and I will get the article posted soon. If all goes well, Continuing Mission should post my article within a week’s time.

Shran, if you want me to edit your Unofficial Spaceframe Companion document, just give me your permission and e-mail address via PM. (EDIT: Does this forum even have a Private Message system? I don’t wanna ask for your email in public… :scream: )

Well, that was a long-winded post, wasn’t it?

This is actually great feedback! If you want to read through my document, please go ahead! Feel free to make edits or annotate anything that’s wrong or you don’t agree with.

Scale is somewhat of a mixture of ship dimensions, volume and crew complement. I had the Yeager at scale 4 mostly because it is kind of like an Intrepid. If you compare its secondary hull to the Intrepid’s, I think the interior is smaller and the ship either has the same amount of crew or even less than that. That’s why I arrived at scale 4. But I’d love to read your article on this once it is out.

Don’t know if you can PM, I think not. For now, I’ve made a file request in my Dropbox where you can upload your edits: Dropbox - Submit files

Thanks for your collaboration!

Already started work on this. I’ll keep you posted.

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Just finished editing the Osler. Apologies that this is taking longer than expected; I had to help Mephit James with the Eaglemoss article over the last few days. That one should be out at Continuing Mission in a few days. Shran, my first edits of your document should be ready tomorrow or the next day (unless something unforeseen happens).

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Very cool! Don’t worry about the time, I’m just glad you are so involved at all.

No sweat, pal. What I’ve found so far hasn’t been all that egregious: most of the corrections were simple grammar errors, a run-on sentence or two, one or two sentences I had to reword for clarity and that’s about it. The only major changes (and by “major,” I mean things that could be construed as “overriding” your text) I’ve made were inserting the-entirely-optional change of the Emmet Till class to the Curiosity class (and my edits are color-coded to reflect that the Curiosity class edits are indeed optional) and changing the Scale of the Yeager class from 4 to 5 (see my previous post with the Eaglemoss links).

On the Eaglemoss article front, I sent my first draft edits of the article to Mephit James a couple of days ago. With luck, I’ll get his second drafts later today and have enough time to send those edits to him tonight. Hopefully, the article will be ready at Continuing Mission in a few days at most.

Ok, back to work for me.

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Just one question, what software did you uses for the document look?