Does a Light Fighter fit inside the cargo hold of a Free Trader Type A?

Question

Could a light fighter (Mongoose Traveller core rulebook, p. 136) fit into the cargo zone of a Free Trader Type A (p. 117)?

If yes, how much cargo space will it use — its tonnage of 10 tons? Or more, as it's not a crate and doesn't neatly fit with other cargo?

I can't find any rules for small craft inside ships, but they are supposed to be designed to fit into larger ships. The main concern is that, if you look at the deck plans, it seems that the fighter will use a good amount of space, so a 10 ton small craft could end up using (let's say) 20 tons of effective cargo.

I appreciate RAW as well as DM / player experience.

Answer 1

For a reference, the Space Shuttle Orbiter, an atmospheric entry capable real-life spacecraft that weighs ~68 tons empty or ~110 tons loaded would need a hangar so big that it would store more than 3500 tons of cargo* if used as a warehouse. That's a ratio of 1:35.

This is assuming that your hangar is a plain box. If you customize your hangar to fit your atmospheric craft's geometry, I believe you could get significant savings, but it's still something like 1:20.

If you also optimize your craft and add features like folding wings and control surfaces (like on naval fighter jets on aircraft carriers) I believe it is possible to store and field 1 ton of spacecraft in the space needed for 10 tons of cargo. ie. 1:10

A real life cylindirical spacecraft like the Apollo command+service module is much more effective in that sense. It weighs ~12 tons and approximately fits in a cargo hold that could fit 36 tons if needed, for a ratio of 1:3. Keep in mind that it is a very frugal spacecraft with just 6 cubic meters of interior space for three astronauts.

By the way, 1:3 is also the ratio for a typical car.

The International Space Station is more like a distributed spacecraft, made up of connected modules, and in its assembled and deployed state, the same calculation gives a number more like 1:78

If I would make a ruling on this, based on hull configurations in the Traveller SRD, I'd go for 1:4 for standard, 1:16 for streamlined and 1:80 for distributed. If the daughter ship has provision for stowing or folding ptrousions like wings, radiators and solar arrays, I'd make the numbers 1:3, 1:8 and 1:20 respectively.

Update

Zeiss Ikon mentioned the Traveller Classic rule about cargo space, standardised for liquid Hydrogen. If that is the weight/space ratio they had in mind (~75kg/m³), then my assumptions become something like this (rounded for simplicity):
2:3 for standard (1:1 stowed)
1:6 for streamlined (1:3 folded)
1:30 for distributed (2:15 stowed+folded)

_{* Assuming a 200kg/m³ average density as most cargo companies do today}

Answer 2

In my Traveller Round I houseruled that it works, because I couldn't find matching rules either.

We have ruled that if you want to be able to use it, it takes up 2x its tonnage in floor spaces.

If you cram it full / stack stuff on top of it then only 1x, with the argumentation that the ship is not in crates and not rectangular itself. It doesn't use its space up efficiently, so it uses more then cargo of the same tonnage.

RAW:

I found in my German Traveller book the ship "Korsar" which is designed to hold other spacecraft (for pludering). The rules there state that the Korsar can open its freight doors to allow landing of 100ton spacecraft.

The Korsar has 160tons of cargo capacity.

So, for ships optimized for the task, 1:1.6 seems to be the conversion ratio.

Answer 3

As others have noted, a 'ship's vehicle' takes up only its own tonnage, with no addition for docking bays etc. This may be a game simplification but it is likely to be a deliberate design decision: the floating sort of ship, whether mediaeval or modern, has a cargo capacity expressed in tons rather than cubic feet precisely because the weight is much more important than the space taken up*. So if a fighter weighs 10 tons, the ship can haul 10 tons less of other cargo; the bottleneck is mass, not space.

*There are two exceptions: if you are carrying something notably lightweight like polystyrene (not applicable here) or if the weight is sufficiently concentrated to be in danger of going through the deck (in which case the cargo itself takes up less space than average, by definition, but the necessary spacers and strengthening beams may cause problems). The DM would need to make a successful Engineering roll to be certain whether this last applies, but bear in mind that 'normal cargo' may include bulk steel or other metals; it seems unlikely that a hollow machine, where the designer has minimised weight to improve performance, would be heavier than that.