spacecraft

I would like to thank Mike Van Atta, the author of this section of the Military/Corporate Vehicle Catalogue. Had it not been for him helping me out and taking some of the strain off, this article would still be nothing more than a giant stack of images forever gathering dust on my hard drive. So thanks Mike.

Mikes notes on construction rules:
No official construction rules for exists space vehicles in CP2020, and I were not able to get any unofficial ones. I’ve tried adapting construction rules from other systems, but CP2020 is not easy to fit there. Thus, it may take more time and effort than it’s worth to...
The below stats are just top of my head guesstimations – use it or loose it.

Note on cargo: I find original NO / DS idea of limiting cargo with volume rather stupid. You don’t worry how big it is, once you’re planning orbital transport. If there’s no landing on an atmosphere-posessing body (Earth, Mars, Venus, etc) you don’t have to worry about aerodynamics, so you van strap it outside and in any direction you like. What you have to worry, however, is cargo weight. So what if it’s small enough to fit into your cargo hold, if it’s very heavy as well? A heavy cargo will affect your ship’s maneuverability, acceleration and deceleration. If your ship weights twice the usual (including the cargo) it’ll need twice as much time to reach the same speed, given the engine output is the same as usual. That means You’ll have to work the engine twice as long, thus burn twice as much fuel (these are rough esitmations). If you want to accelerate in the same time as usual, you’ll have to double engine output, probably doubling fuel usage as well – plus, the engine might be not able to withstand such task...

Note on engines: Scramjet engine is a combination of an almost ordinary jet turbine and rocket engine. The trick is that scramjet uses air as oxidizer as long as there’s enough of it. When reaching upper levels of atmosphere, air becomes scarce, and the craft switches to more conventional rocket engine (using the oxidizer carried). This way, you can save a healthy amount of fuel. However, this is possible only on Earth (well, it COULD work on Mars as well, but there was no attempt to build a martian scramjet yet, so we aren’t sure), so it’s impractical to use it on vehicles that are to do anything else than just climb into Earth orbit and then come back. Under scramjet drive, you need only 2 burns to start from Earth (instead of 4 under rocket drive).