Sack class Mining Rig
| Sack class Mining Rig | |
|---|---|
| Type: UG Industrial Smallcraft | |
| Category | ACS |
| Size | 10 Tons |
| Hull Configuration | Close Structure Hull |
| Streamlining | Cluster Hull |
| Tech Level | TL–9 |
| Engineering | |
| Computer | Model/1 |
| Jump | J-0 |
| Maneuver | 1 G |
| Fuel Treatment | none |
| Armaments | |
| Hardpoints | 1 firmpoint |
| Offensive | laser drill |
| Accommodations | |
| Staterooms | 1 |
| Personnel | |
| Crew | 2 |
| High/Mid Passengers | 0 |
| Payload | |
| Cargo | 55 Tons |
| Fuel tank | 1 Tons |
| Construction | |
| Construction Time | 0.1 Months |
| Origin | Vilani Hegemony |
| Year Operational | -9200 |
| Price | |
| Cost | MCr2.265 |
| Statistics | |
| Quick Ship Profile | UG-1C10 |
| Universal Ship Profile | UG-91701C |
| Images | |
| Blueprint | Yes |
| Illustration | No |
| Source | |
| Also see | Bag class Mining Ship |
| Canon | Unpublished, fan design |
| Designer | Adrian Tymes |
| Design System | Mongoose 2nd |
| Reference | Fan: Adrian Tymes |
The Sack class Mining Rig is a civilian industrial smallcraft.
Description[edit]
The Sack class Mining Rig is a very basic smallcraft used for mining. The class is essentially unchanged since its origins in the Vilani Hegemony. "Sack" is the modern translation of its ancient name, which evoked the image of a medieval peasant carrying a sack of goods. It has a minimum of systems in order to minimize costs.
It can either operate from a mothership (or on an ore-rich planetoid or small moon that has been captured into the orbit of a world capable of processing the ore) or, for systems with no space-based infrastructure, haul ore all the way from a planetoid in a local belt. In the former role, it typically takes 2 days to fill its 55 ton cargo net full of ore, with the crew alternating 12 hour duty cycles, the mothership visiting to pick up ore (and sometimes rotate crew and refill the fuel tank), with the Sack producing an average of 770 tons of ore per 28 days, rivaling the production-per-miner rate of a good automated mine on a world with less up-front investment needed. In the latter role, travel times typically dominate any given "run", substantially slowing down production - but in these cases, there is often little to no planet-side industry to compete with.
It is rarely supposed to be crewed by the same crew for more than a week straight, especially given the complete lack of on-board artificial gravity, save on long back-and-forth runs where there is little to do while en route. It has 4 weeks' fuel supply, mainly as a backup in case things go wrong. Likewise, it typically carries 4 weeks' food and supplies for 2 people, a trivial allowance out of the commons.
The Bag class Mining Ship is a common example of mothership-based operations. Another, more modern and far more capital efficient example comes from the Estuary Cluster in Hanstone Sector. A truck - local parlance for a type of small cargo carrier, typically taking 1,000 ton modules ("trailers") - will escort 7 newly produced Sacks to a previously prospected planetoid. There the Sacks will spend cycles of 6 days mining, interspersed with 1 day of rest aboard the truck. During the 6 days of mining, the truck will take the previous week's results to the local world for sale, returning with supplies and an empty cargo module. After 26 weekly cycles (assuming all goes mostly well), the Sack operators are given their boats to seek their own fortunes. Local finance is notably unavailable, so the truck operator puts in about MCr15 (often in barter or favors to makeshift facilities, since the main shipyard in the area restricts work for independent operators) to get the Sacks manufactured, and expects to get at least MCr20 out (after overhead, a typical amount of accidents slowing work and requiring replacement components, et cetera). This is considered among the most capital intensive non-corporate-owned operations in the cluster; opinions are split as to whether this is a minor competitor to, or a supplier of, the local mining corporation.
Image Repository[edit]
Not available at this time.
General Description & Deck Plans[edit]
- Deck Plans for this vessel.
Basic Ship Characteristics[edit]
Following the Imperial Navy and IISS Universal Ship Profile and data, additional information is presented in the format shown here. [1]
| Basic Ship Characteristics [2] | ||
|---|---|---|
| No. | Category | Remarks |
| 1. | Tonnage / Hull | Tonnage: 10 tons (standard). 135 cubic meters. Close Structure Cluster Hull.
|
| 2. | Crew | Crew: 2 Pilots for typical operation (in alternating shifts), though only 1 needed otherwise. |
| 3. | Performance | Acceleration: 1-G maneuver drive installed.
|
| 4. | Electronics | Model/1 ship computer. |
| 5. | Hardpoints | No hardpoints, 1 firmpoint. |
| 6. | Armament | One laser drill. |
| 7. | Defenses | None. |
| 8. | Craft | None (aside from itself). Vacc suits required for EVA (extra-vehicle activity). Rescue Balls for crew escape normally carried. |
| 9. | Fuel Treatment | It is not typically equipped with a fuel purification plant or fuel scoops. |
| 10. | Cost | MCr2.265 (no architect's fees, those having long since been paid). MCr2.0385 in quantity. |
| 11. | Construction Time | 3 days standard, 2 in quantity. |
| 12. | Remarks | A basic mining smallcraft. |
History & Background[edit]
The full origin story is lost to time. It is recorded that the first instances of this class were introduced a few decades after the Vilani discovered jump drive (which puts it at roughly -9200), both to aid "barbarian" neighbors that had yet to achieve spaceflight and to help their own colonies bootstrap local industry. A few museums on some older Vilani worlds, including Vland itself, have Sacks that evidence suggests are over ten thousand years old. Some of these are in working order (aside from the drives and laser drills being disabled) and set up as many a young sophont's first time aboard a spacecraft, often with signs and interactive tour features of a higher technology level than the Sack itself. For such worlds that have experienced dire times, their historical value has generally exceeded any practical utility: if there was actual need of a Sack, their low cost means that it can be practical - if no other alternatives exist - to put one together even without a starport (also known as having a Class X Starport) so long as a technology level 9 or better industrial base still exists on the world. There is at least one documented case from the Long Night where a world's industrial capacity crash was so severe that, by the time anyone thought of using the museum's Sack to restart local industry, deferred maintenance on the long-deactivated maneuver drive meant that it would need parts that were no longer available.
There were doubtless other contemporary designs, but this one - and ones functionally identical - survived for being particularly cheap. Two-and-a-fraction megacredits is much easier to finance than two or four dozen megacredits. If put to constant, around-the-clock use mining common ore (let alone uncommon ore, or more lucrative goods), it is not unheard of for a newly built Sack to pay for itself in under three months. More common is for a pair of spacers to obtain one with a mining contract, making there-and-back runs to inconveniently remote planetoids with at least 2,400 tons of known ore; at two runs per month (typical given travel times between a typical planetoid and world pair), their contract is worked off and the Sack is theirs in two years (three years if work slows much below an average of two runs per month, for instance due to significantly longer travel times). Even the presence of a second crew is only because scaling down to a true single sophont capacity does not result in it being measurably cheaper still, and the cycle of one crew sleeping while the other mines allows for constant production while on site. Larger craft can be more efficient - hauling more ore at once, maybe hosting a second laser drill or other equipment to improve ore collection - but they are not as cheap.
Being old also means they are common. Even far from a major polity, a mere Class B Starport, sometimes a Class C Starport, at a world that is barely technology level 9 is entirely capable of manufacturing Sacks normally (or lesser starports with some difficulty, as noted above, a solution generally reserved for extreme circumstances). Many who are familiar with the class, even pilot them for a living, never learn the name "Sack", only referring to them as "mining rigs".
It also helps that they are among the smallest spaceworthy laser drill platforms in the stars, meaning that several can be deployed from a mining mothership with the intent to quickly extract everything useful from a prospected planetoid then move to another. Losing the stateroom and commons could result in a smaller craft, but these - along with the fuel tanks providing 4 weeks' endurance - are seen as a useful safety measure: even after thousands of years of spacer experience, things in space sometimes just go wrong, and space is a hostile environment.
Class Naming Practice/s & Peculiarities[edit]
Ship Interior Details: The three-dimensional layout can be slightly confusing to crews used to Slab Hull decks. The Sack's greater use of vertical space is generally attributed to the design having originated before artificial gravity became common on ships (though what historical record there is on this point disputes that, claiming instead that it was just another cost-saving measure). The cockpit-commons-stateroom core is straightforward, as are the power plants and fuel tanks to either side of the core. Slightly nonintuitive are the cargo net controllers and maneuver drives arranged, respectively, above and below the power plant/fuel areas, giving the craft an overall H shape when viewed from the front.
The net controllers unfold triple-segmented articulated arms with gecko-toe-like tips (not originally named "gecko", but similar principles were known) to grab bits of ore that the laser drill blasts loose, depositing them into an expandable, flexible container (the sack for which the class is named) between the controllers. The tips are readily switchable: on to grab, off to let go. When empty, this container lies flat against the hull. When full, it is more than 5 times as large as the entire rest of the ship and would block sensors if not for tiny camera nodes distributed around the surface. Thanks to this increased displacement, a Sack gets slightly better sensor resolution with a full container than when it is empty, though the practical effect is usually negligible. When transferring ore to a mothership or other destination, these same tongues reverse the process (if the destination does not have its own machinery to do so): take bits of ore from the container and gently toss or place them into the cargo airlock or other opening. Learning to control these arms is notoriously one of the steepest learning curve elements for a new Sack pilot; fortunately, runs provide plenty of practice. Standard ore collection rates assume an experienced pilot (at least one or two runs will usually suffice) who can operate the drill and one arm simultaneously, with the second arm as backup or in case many ore bits are blasted loose at once (often handled with a double-arm sweep of the expanding volume before any ore can get too far away, transferring one arm's load to the other, then using the freed arm to pick off and discard any rock that got picked up before depositing the ore by gently thrusting the arm's tip into the container, switching the tip to let go while the ore is underway, waiting a moment, then retracting the arm, closing the container, and contracting the container as tight as it will go to zero out the ore bits' momentum relative to the Sack).
The maneuver drives provide gravity while at thrust. Between that and their location, a Sack technically qualifies as a tailsitter design, albeit a rare single-deck tailsitter. Fine maneuvering (such as during mining, takeoff, cargo transfer, and landing, when the Sack typically vectors thrust so the bridge is forward) takes some concentration, but long-distance travel is a "set it and forget it" deal - though the maneuver software sometimes drifts a bit during long journeys, so checking every few hours is recommended, and mid-course turnover must be performed manually. Fortunately, the software comes with basic timers to remind the crew.
The entrance and exit is through the rear of the stateroom - not a true airlock, though if it has to be used that way, standard practice is to put away any loose items, then one crew (assuming two are present) to shelter in the cockpit while the other (after donning a vacc suit) quickly opens the rear hatch, steps through, and closes it. This is so rarely done that many Sacks have no logs of it, even those with thousands of years of logs.
Other than that, the stateroom is fairly minimalist, with a bunk bed to one side and a fresher to the other. The open space is often used for exercise; some Sacks carry exercise equipment here but that is not standard to the design as built. Paranoid crews store a vacc suit here, for the stateroom-airlock scenario mentioned above. The commons to fore includes a minimal galley, cleaning station, supply storage and waste disposal. Fore of that is the cockpit featuring the ship computer, the laser drill machinery, and finally the lone control station. All of this space is designed to work in 0G or 1G; for instance, the beds have fasteners to prevent a sleeping body from drifting away (readily removable once the sophont wakes up), and there are handholds on most internal surfaces (other than the floor, to avoid tripping hazards). The "engineering spaces" - the power plants, net controllers, and maneuver drives - are accessed through narrow doors on either side of the commons. While door openings are rarely formally logged, on many older Sacks, it appears that all internal doors and hatches may have been left open for at least a thousand years.
While there is not a complete absence of automation, many conveniences that modern crews take for granted are simply absent on a Sack. Then again, there is not nearly as much to do as there typically is on larger ships, especially when travelling long distances: while there is no true autopilot, pointing the Sack in a certain direction and checking every so often for course deviations is a simple matter. Many Sacks that have been in the same hands for a while install better automation as their first upgrade; it is not uncommon for older Sacks to have upgraded computers running virtual crew software, sometimes even flying without crew on board.
Class Naming Practice/s: As with many civilian smallcraft that have been produced for a long time, there is no set pattern to Sack names. Many do not have names, just registration numbers.
Selected Variant Types & Classes[edit]
2 Representative Industrial Smallcraft (UG) Classes[edit]
References[edit]
| This article has metadata. |
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This ship was designed using Mongoose 2nd ship design rules.
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- Author: Adrian Tymes
- ↑ Timothy B. Brown. Fighting Ships (Game Designers Workshop, 1981), 10.
- ↑ Timothy B. Brown. Fighting Ships (Game Designers Workshop, 1981), 10.