This Space for Rent

A bigger survey ship for the guys

Darth Tiffany had her own survey ship, so the bears wanted to have another one for their guys. After a week or so of construction (and the demolition of most of the other spaceships in the house) they got one.

Front view Rear view
Side view.  Beautiful, isn't it?

The only special lego piece on this ship was a canopy piece from the Slave 1®™© lego model; the rest of the pieces of this ship were parts dragged out of the big pile of lego pieces. The ship has a curved front attached to a two-story cruciform body, and, unlike the first survey ship, has a minimum of external thingies that can be burned off when the ship has to do a Battlestar Galactica to get into or get out of trouble.

Navigator's station Pilot's seat

The bridge is a little bit more complicated than the one in the earlier survey ship was. This one is split into two levels; the top story is for a pilot to fly the ship in the vicinity of a planet, with a small engineering console behind the pilot's seat.

Computer & Communications room

The downstairs part of the bridge is where the communications and stellar navigation computers are. When the machine is in space, there's not much point to having someone at the helm because people don't react fast enough to the potholes that might pop up at .4c. Darth Tiffany and Harriet Potter are thus driving the ship in the only way they can; they're sitting by the computer playing Civilization II and waiting for the collision alarm to go off.

The lower level of the bridge does still has a big front window, but not for any real reasons. The excuse for the big front window is so that if the stellar navigation computer crashes, they can drag out sextants and other implements of mass destruction and chart their course by hand. In reality, it makes a lovely light show when the ship is doing small-fraction-of-c manuvering in some previously unexplored solar system.

The guys have private cabins just aft of the bridge.

The co-captains have cabins just back of the bridge, and there is a small washroom there so that they don't have to climb down the ladder to the lower deck when they have to commune with nature.

When you get down to the lower deck below the captains's quarters, there's the kitchen/dining/common room. This is a very small ship, after all, and space is at a premium.

The kitchen/dining/meeting room

I see that someone has prepared a pizza so that Darth Tiffany and Harriet Potter can have a little snack before continuing with the tour.

Crew quarters, bathroom, and toilet. Darth Tiffany and Harriet Potter try out the crew accomodations

The main entrance to the ship is immediately aft of the dining/meeting room (it should be an airlock, but I don't have the pieces to put both doors in. You can pretend it's an airlock, or you can assume that nobody leaves the ship unless there's an atmosphere), and immediately aft of that is the main bathroom and bunkrooms. There are quarters for six people here, in two bunks and two semi-private cubicles.

Harriet Potter takes a nap in the engine room crew quarters

The engine room crew has the good (or bad) fortune to have a pair of beds in a small room above the engine room. There is a sizable loft in front of that room where supplies can be piled up for long journeys (or booty can be stored for the return from a long journey.)

The engine room, aft view. The engine room, aft view.

The engine room has a big magic engine for sublight travel, and a pair of warp generators (also magic) driving the two warp grids. The ship can jump into warp with one, but two of them gives a little bit of redundancy.

The front door.

The main entrance to the ship. The boarding ladder simply folds up against the door, and can be manually raised and lowered.

The shuttle boat. Harriet Potter prepares to climb up into the shuttle.

Last, but not least, is the little shuttle boat that can be used to go off and sniff around the surface of small asteroids and other objects that might be too fragile to survive an unexpected bump into the survey ship. The shuttle is not intended for operation on a planet -- it's got the streamlining and thermal resistance of a shoebox -- but it's useful for operations everywhere else. There's a small airlock between the shuttle and the survey ship; a hatch in the lower deck roof which mates with a docking adaptor on the bottom of the shuttle. The gravity generator in that part of the ship can be turned off to allow people to move heavy and awkward items into and out of the shuttle, and it can be used as a clumsy airlock if the main door of the ship ever jams.

--orc