Royalty class Transport, an approximation

[Liam's Ghost]

Author's note: The royalty class jumpship came to us by way of battletechnology magazine, issue 20, which describes a salvaged vessel recovered by mercenaries. Re-creating the original is... a trial. First off, the stats the issue gives us aren't for the original version, but the refit, so one has to interpret the sometimes vague or absent fluff to turn out the original specifications. For another thing, the stats... well... they're weird. They're not like the original "we made this up as we went along" for the star league warships. There are assigned numbers for every bit, including tonnages.

But they aren't battlespace numbers. It looks almost like a strange hybrid between first edition aerotech and battlespace, maybe even an early playtest version of the battlespace rules (or an early attempt to create construction rules for large spacecraft) before they'd nailed everything down and decided how they'd reconcile things. Or maybe the battletechnology staff invented their numbers from whole cloth. Probably that.

Regardless, fitting the ship into the new rules required some finagling. I went with a full compact jump core (the magazine lists a jump drive mass that doesn't correspond to either standard or compact cores, and it's too new to be a primitive jumpship, and I don't think you could make the mass balance right regardless). Thrust capacity is either at or above what the fluff and stats suggest, but in line with the transit drive mass in the magazine. Armor tonnage and points per ton match exactly (using ferro aluminium armor). Distribution doesn't, but then the ship has a different number of locations than in the magazine.

Some of the weapons I could pull from the fluff, the rest I had to do my best guess based on what I had. The advanced technology might look a bit out of place, given it's a periphery vessel and not even a front line combat ship, but that's what the fluff demanded. It was a long time ago, I don't think everybody agreed on what the Rim Worlds military should look like.

The total feel is something like the Carrack, though smaller and maybe fancier? Between the high tech and the name, it sorta has a feel of a high end transport for VIPs rather than a simple military cargo hauler. It does the job jumpships do, but with extra style, class, and money. So along those lines I added some passenger bays and a marine detachment for extra security. There probably wouldn't have been many built, and by the nature of their design, they probably would have been kept out of combat as much as possible. Whether or not any would have survived is probably a coin flip. In the successor states, they probably wouldn't be usable as much more than overengineered jumpships, though Kerensky might have appreciated the extra lift capacity for the exodus and taken any examples they captured with him.

Royalty class Transport
Mass: 210,000 tons
Technology Base: Inner Sphere (Advanced) 
Introduced: 2695
Mass: 210,000
Battle Value: 5,558
Tech Rating/Availability: E/E-X-E-F
Cost: 7,536,512,000 C-bills

Fuel: 500 tons (2,500)
Safe Thrust: 2
Maximum Thrust: 3
Sail Integrity: 4
KF Drive Integrity: 6
Heat Sinks: 0
Structural Integrity: 24

Armor
    Nose: 17
    Fore Sides: 16/16
    Aft Sides: 16/16
    Aft: 11

Cargo
    Bay 1:  Small Craft (4)         1 Door    
    Bay 2:  Fighter (12)            3 Doors   
    Bay 3:  Cargo (74550.0 tons)    4 Doors   

Ammunition:
    96 rounds of Gauss Rifle [IS] ammunition (4 tons), 
    180 rounds of SRM 6 Artemis-capable ammunition (6 tons), 
    20 rounds of Barracuda ammunition (30 tons)

Dropship Capacity: 4
Grav Decks: 1 (120 m)
Escape Pods: 10
Life Boats: 20
Crew:  16 officers, 71 enlisted/non-rated, 8 gunners, 44 bay personnel, 40 passengers, 20 marines      

Notes: Mounts 100 tons of improved ferro-aluminum armor.

Weapons:                                    Capital Attack Values (Standard)
Arc (Heat)                              Heat  SRV     MRV     LRV      ERV    Class       
Nose (46 Heat)
2 Capital Missile Launcher (Barracuda)  20   4(40)   4(40)   4(40)    4(40)   Capital Missile
    Barracuda Ammo (20 shots)
1 Large Pulse Laser                     26   3(33)    1(9)    0(0)     0(0)   Pulse Laser 
    4 Medium Pulse Laser
FRS/FLS (15 Heat)
1 Gauss Rifle                            1   2(15)   2(15)   2(15)     0(0)   AC          
    Gauss Rifle Ammo [IS] (24 shots)
1 Large Pulse Laser                     10    1(9)    1(9)    0(0)     0(0)   Pulse Laser 
1 SRM 6+Artemis IV                       4    1(    0(0)    0(0)     0(0)   SRM         
    SRM 6 Artemis-capable Ammo (30 shots)
RBS/LBS (30 Heat)
1 Large Pulse Laser                     26   3(33)    1(9)    0(0)     0(0)   Pulse Laser 
    4 Medium Pulse Laser
1 SRM 6+Artemis IV                       4    1(    0(0)    0(0)     0(0)   SRM         
    SRM 6 Artemis-capable Ammo (30 shots)
ARS/ALS (15 Heat)
1 Gauss Rifle                            1   2(15)   2(15)   2(15)     0(0)   AC          
    Gauss Rifle Ammo [IS] (24 shots)
1 Large Pulse Laser                     10    1(9)    1(9)    0(0)     0(0)   Pulse Laser 
1 SRM 6+Artemis IV                       4    1(    0(0)    0(0)     0(0)   SRM         
    SRM 6 Artemis-capable Ammo (30 shots)
Aft (26 Heat)
1 Large Pulse Laser                     26   3(33)    1(9)    0(0)     0(0)   Pulse Laser 
    4 Medium Pulse Laser

[Frabby]

When I wrote the Sarna article about the Royalty class, I got into contact with the author, Gerald Hall. He told me that he had "fudged" the construction rules to make it work. I haven't checked if the Royalty class can be constructed under current rules as a primitive JumpShip or WarShip. The stated thrust rating probably requires it to be built as a WarShip.

[Daryk]

Code tags will kill the emoticons in the weapon damage list...

[Liam's Ghost]

Code tags will kill the emoticons in the weapon damage list...

Eh, it's inaccurate anyway. It looks like megameklab isn't adding in the affects of artemis IV on either the text readout or the record sheet.

When I wrote the Sarna article about the Royalty class, I got into contact with the author, Gerald Hall. He told me that he had "fudged" the construction rules to make it work. I haven't checked if the Royalty class can be constructed under current rules as a primitive JumpShip or WarShip. The stated thrust rating probably requires it to be built as a WarShip.

Weirdly he fudged it somewhere between battlespace and aerotech, rather than picking one or the other.

As a primitive vessel, the closest you could get the jump core is 77% of the ship's mass, which would give it a jump range of 24 light years. But it still wouldn't have made much sense, since even the periphery had stopped building primitive jumpships almost two hundred years prior.

(note I can see justifications for still building primitive jumpships after that. It's just that canonically they didn't).

I probably should have given it a 1/2 thrust capacity based on the published mass of the transit drive, though even that doesn't correspond accurately. It doesn't even seem to correspond to the fractional thrust originally allowed by battlespace rules. 

Basically, there's no way to make it fit exactly, and I wonder how much was fudging and how much was just making it up.