Star Butler class Yacht
| Star Butler class Yacht | |
|---|---|
| Type: YK Expeditionary Yacht | |
| Category | ACS |
| Size | 300 Tons |
| Hull Configuration | Wedge Hull |
| Streamlining | Streamlined Hull |
| Tech Level | TL–12 |
| Engineering | |
| Computer | Model/4 |
| Jump | J-2 |
| Maneuver | 3 G |
| Fuel Treatment | scoops, purifier |
| Armaments | |
| Hardpoints | 3 |
| Offensive | 2 triple missile turrets, 1 triple pulse laser |
| Accommodations | |
| Staterooms | 5 |
| Personnel | |
| Crew | 1 |
| High/Mid Passengers | 9 |
| Payload | |
| Cargo | 52.2 Tons |
| Fuel tank | 61 Tons |
| Carried craft | 1 4t air/raft |
| Construction | |
| Construction Time | 5 Months |
| Origin | Rule of Man |
| Year Operational | -1823 |
| Price | |
| Cost | MCr150.761 |
| Statistics | |
| Quick Ship Profile | YK-CS32 |
| Universal Ship Profile | YK-C3823S-EM |
| Images | |
| Blueprint | Yes |
| Illustration | No |
| Source | |
| Also see | Yacht |
| Canon | Unpublished, fan design |
| Designer | Adrian Tymes |
| Era | Second Imperium |
| Reference | Fan: Adrian Tymes |
| Designed with Mongoose Traveller High Guard rules, but portable to other versions | |
The Star Butler class Yacht is a civilian yacht. Its small size and liner-like design sensibilities qualify it as a Charter Yacht.
Description[edit]
The Star Butler class Yacht is mostly known as a historical curiosity, due to its Second Imperium origins and the IISS having the still-working first Star Butler in its possession. It is one of the rare 300 ton starships that only requires a single crew.
Visually it is not that distinct: a 2-deck 300 ton Wedge Hull, tapering in front. It has (deliberately) the exact same outer appearance as a Solostar class Far Trader, and can be considered a q-ship variant thanks to hidden missile racks and a pop-up pulse laser triple turret. These are intended as defensive measures to secure the main cargo: a handful of probably rich high passengers.
All crew positions other than astrogator are either provided by software, or made unnecessary by self-service options or rendered optional. For example, the food-producing biospheres are located right next to galleys, allowing those on board to cook their own meals. Another case is the training zone to one side of the multifunction recreational space, that can configure itself as either a gym (with several configurations of equipment available for training different parts of the body in different ways) or a shooting range with holographic targets (never both at once, especially since it is only supposed to be used by one person at a time), with mode automatically managed though manually overridable. Perhaps a more significant example is power management: the power plant is not up to powering all the systems at once, so the software manages what systems are active at any one time (using the battery, nominally present to power jumps or provide several laser shots while fleeing hostiles, to smooth out in-flight power management even outside of combat). The ship's computer also provides a voice interface, accessible to the crew and all passengers, with an omnipresent butler-like persona that the class is named for, though when the computer's full bandwidth is needed for something (such as combat), the persona excuses itself and temporarily goes offline (the computer only interacting with the crew via the bridge's controls during these times).
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: 300 tons (standard). 4050 cubic meters. Streamlined Wedge Hull.
|
| 2. | Crew | Crew: 1 Astrogator. 1 virtual Pilot, 1 virtual Sensor Operator, and 3 virtual Gunners provided via software. |
| 3. | Performance | Acceleration: 3-G maneuver drive installed.
|
| 4. | Electronics | Model/4 ship computer. |
| 5. | Hardpoints | 3 hardpoints. |
| 6. | Armament | 6 missile racks on pop-up mounts. |
| 7. | Defenses | 1 pulse laser triple-mount turret on a pop-up mount (sometimes used for offense). |
| 8. | Craft | 1 Air/Raft. Rescue Balls for crew escape normally carried. |
| 9. | Fuel Treatment | It is typically equipped with a fuel purification plant and fuel scoops. |
| 10. | Cost | MCr150.761 (no architect's fees, those having long since been paid). MCr135.6849 in quantity. |
| 11. | Construction Time | 5 months standard, 3.5 in quantity. |
| 12. | Remarks | A yacht that only needs a single crew, allowing a person of means and some talent to entertain high passengers without hires. |
History & Background (Dossier)[edit]
Toward the end of the Rule of Man (not that those at the time knew it was going to collapse, though many suspected), there existed a somewhat hapless aristocrat. Many details have been lost, but it is known that he had been having particularly bad luck hiring crew for his yacht. His response was to design one that needed no crew save the owner - who, in his thinking, would of course be educated and thus be able to serve as an astrogator. He needed assistance realizing his dream, and got sponsorship from local trade companies so long as he also designed a Trader Vessel variant they could manufacture, resulting in the Solostar class Far Trader. Being at the leading edge of automation for the time, it is estimated than less than 100 Star Butlers were made prior to the Long Night.
Famously, the original one survived, having been passed from owner to owner during Twilight. The final owner of that era, seeing interstellar travel drying up as worlds died back, set up a trust to preserve his ship and inspire future generations until such time as interstellar voyages resumed. The exact text of his trust wound up, more than a thousand years later, being fulfilled by the IISS once they recontacted the world where it had been left; the custodians (by then resembling a monastic order) dutifully fulfilled their ancient contract and handed the ship over (and would have disbanded on the spot, their official duty finally complete, had the IISS not convinced them to continue inspiring and educating their world's future generations). The ship is still around as of 1105, serving as a well-preserved museum ship, its value as a functioning relic of the Second Imperium far exceeding its value as a working starship. As such, it spends most of its time at its new home port, Reference.
Many knockoffs have since been made to the reverse engineered blueprints (updated with Fusion Plus and other minor improvements), the plans freely available to those who know where to look. That said, the market for a small, single-crew yacht has never been very large.
Class Naming Practice/s & Peculiarities[edit]
Ship Interior Details: Most of the ship is split into two decks, the forward section combining to a single deck.
The rear of the ship combines both decks into a substantial cargo bay (mostly intended for passenger cargo and ship stores, though there is usually a little room for freight or speculative cargo) lined by the maneuver drive, jump drive, power plant, and other engineering machinery, with cargo crane machinery along the top. At the rear is a large (6 meter by 6 meter) cargo hatch.
Amidships there are two proper decks. The lower deck is mostly occupied by four luxury staterooms, with secondary biospheres (and attached mini-galleys) as well as a pair of wash/dry/press/fold laundry facilities in the corridors, which end in the ship's airlocks. The upper deck features a multi-use recreational space (with areas for physical training, mechanical tinkering, reading, and gaming), the medical bay, the captain's quarters, the primary lounge and galley, and a dock for the air/raft (which can only enter or exit via the roof, rather than horizontally as with most such docks; allegedly, this was intended to keep drunk pilots from taking off). Access between decks is had by a grav lift toward the rear of this area, and a staircase that spirals to provide an ergonomically acceptably low slope, with a platform at the midpoint between decks.
This platform leads to an iris valve that opens onto a space under the popup weapon mounts, beyond which is another iris valve leading to the bridge. According to recovered notes, it was intended that even drunk passengers would have a hard time mistakenly going through this space not knowing they were headed to the one area of the ship where seriousness was essential. Modern users are more inclined to view the double iris valve as a security measure to buy slightly more time against boarders.
As with the Solostar class Far Trader, the repair drones can enter the main hull via the airlocks. Unlike with the Solostar, these drones come standard with service programming, presenting themselves as extensions of the ship's computer's butler persona, able to float up the stairs and even open unlocked doors or iris hatches to reach crew and passengers. Transporting an injured person to the medical bay is standard practice. Undoing minor "improvements" that "helpful" passengers sometimes contribute is also standard, if less common. They can even provide a physical representation of an opponent in the gaming space, by default programmed to let the passengers win though the difficulty can be adjusted. (There is a tale from the Second Imperium of someone who rode a Star Butler to a tournament. The person started out having never played the game in question, but intensively trained against the ship's AI, ratcheting up the difficulty over time. While the person did not win the tournament, they managed to reach the final rounds and thereby provide cover for their true objective.) These drones usually do most of the work to refit a stateroom to a passenger's tastes. They also do almost all the maintenance, relying on the sole crew to make sure sufficient spare parts are stocked (the ship's computer providing a list of parts needed as part of a "To Do Checklist" whenever the ship lands).
As with many yacht classes, individual ships (both during the Second Imperium and after the class's revival in the Third Imperium) are commissioned and named by a variety of users with no common naming theme.
Selected Variant Types & Classes[edit]
3 Representative Expeditionary-Yacht (YK) 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.