A bunch of 10-ton ships

All this messing with smallcraft left me wondering how cheap you can make a ship in Traveller. Turns out about Cr 160,000, if you want to drive a rocket and solar powered planetoid rubble-pile from a cockpit. But that's the extreme. You can do quite a bit with 10-ton ships, and so here are a gaggle created for The Beyond, but suitable for just about anywhere.

Ingiisi Yards 10-ton vessels

The Ostmark Venture Disaster of 935, with 177 passengers and six crew dying as life support failed on the stricken liner prompted the Nakris Confederation to mandate lifeboats capable of evacuating all passengers and crew from any Nakris-registered liner above 400-tons. This change in regulation prompted a rush to create lifeboats capable of being retrofitted into existing ships and changes to designs of Nakris-built ships to accommodate the new regulation. One of the first yards to complete a new design was Ingiisi Yards, previously mostly a producer of generic utility boats and launches. Recognizing that space was a premium and that many ships had only 3 meter high cargo bays and doors, Ingiisi developed a 10-ton vessel with a 3 meter high, 4.5 meter wide cross-section. Only 14 meters long, this small vessel, which Ingiisi called a "life pod" could fit aboard nearly any ship's cargo bay.

Ingiisi produced two life pod models. The first model was the Safety-class life pod, an automated vessel stuffed with seven emergency low berths to hold 28 passengers in cold sleep. It had a sophisticated autopilot and solar panel backups for unlimited endurance, but no accommodation for a crew or manual control. The forward low berth was designated as "crew", but that only meant it would cycle first upon landing or in an emergency. The crew could do little but designate or abort a landing and operate the radio. The vessel did not even have a fresher nor more than 60-person days of rations, and its life support would soon fail if all 28 passengers remained awake for more than a few days.

The second model was the Leader-class life pod. This vessel had a standard smallcraft bridge, two emergency low berths for eight passengers, and a single low berth for a crewmember. In theory, the ship could hold twelve persons: eight passengers, two on the bridge, one in the cabin and one in the crew berth. Cheaper than the Safety-class, the Leader life pod was popular with freighters that carried few passengers. The Leader life pod gained some notoriety as part of a lawsuit by the Gromwell Line, who insisted that the regulation, which called for lifeboat low berth accommodations for "all passengers and crew", did not mean "all crew". Gromwell won the suit in a narrow decision, but that did not endear it to its crews.

Ingiisi's manufacturing lines surged for a decade when the regulation first came into force and then suffered a severe slump caused by overcapacity. To drum up demand, Ingiisi developed a number of variants based on the life pod hull. The first of these models was one of the cheapest vessels available, the Taxi-class passenger ferry. Equipped with 24 cramped seats and a single fresher. and with the pilot confined to a small forward cockpit, the Taxi class was designed for short haul journeys of no more than a few hours, suitable for orbital and near intra-moon travel. At less than MCr 1.5, Ingiisi sold enough Taxis to keep its yard production lines at full capacity. An obvious variant of the Taxi was the Lighter, which replaced the passenger compartment with a 6.5 ton cargo bay. Other more expensive variants were built over the years. 

A notable and enduring variant is the Nemo-class personal spaceship. Originally built as a special order for the eccentric Ingiisi heir Millenia Ingiisi, the Nemo was designed to be a system-wide runabout, with 5g acceleration and radiation shielding to protect against the radiation belts of the Nakris system's larger gas giant. At less than MCr 6, the tiny Nemo remains a popular plaything for people rich enough to afford it, but not rich enough to afford a true yacht, though the Nemo has also become a subsidiary vehicle aboard some yachts.

By 1050, Ingiisi Yards had become well known for its small and often inexpensive ships. While hardly technologically sophisticated, they were simple and sturdy enough to develop a good reputation. Seeking the bottom of personal spaceship market and noticing that most Nemo owners rarely landed on Nakris itself, Ingiisi developed the spherical 10-ton ship named, unimaginably, the Sphere Pod. The 6m sphere combined the features of life pod and Nemo, but with 1g drives and a cheap spherical hull, the ship cost only MCr 1.38, Cr 350,000 cheaper than the cylindrical pod-based Dory budget model.

Now established as the producer of the cheapest spacecrafts in the Confederation, Ingiisi branched out into completely unstreamlined ships. A marketing ploy produced the Rock Rocket, a light planetoid ship equipped with only a reaction drive and solar panels for Cr 160,000, but even though it could haul more than 5 tons cargo with 8 g-hours endurance, the ship found few buyers.

However, the Grunt Rig-class utility tug, basically a cockpit with two engine pods and a 6.4-ton cargo shed for Cr 678,000, found a strong market, even though many operators attached MCr+ light or heavy grappling arms to the frame.

While not even in the top five shipbuilders in gross revenue, Ingiisi remains by far the yard that produces the largest number of smallcraft in the Nakris Confederation. Its ships, especially the Taxis, Lighters and Grunt Rigs can be found at nearly every major starport in Humaniti's territories in The Beyond.