...specifically, talk to me about where/how the heck it loads and unloads its cargo.
(I apologize if this is the wrong forum, but for reasons somewhat opaque to me Fan Articles seems to be the go-to now for discussing the minutiae of a single specific unit.)
Fluff says the
Buccaneer has two main cargo bays with 1000 tons of capacity each on either side of the ship. The areas shaded in yellow in the attached images look kind of like doors, and are the ONLY things that look at all like doors to my eye. The problem is that they are above the wing and would open directly on to the wings...
We're not even going to talk about the 300-ton secondary bay which is supposed to be above the transit drive because transit drives in general are such a groaner, but presumably most of the area on the bottom of the
Buccaneer's (proportionally) very thin fuselage is taken up by the transit drive and the docking collar, so I don't see how there can be any loading doors on the belly. I guess since we have no rear view it's plausible there are ramp doors under the tail, but then I have trouble seeing where the atmospheric drive exhaust could fit.
Are we just supposed to assume that the ship's inner wings are reinforced to allow cargo to be stacked on them during loading/unloading, and that the vehicle carrier version, not being a dedicated military ship but rather a conversion, is only suitable for use in rear areas because you need a crane to get the tanks down? (I guess hovertanks could just drive off the wings without too much trouble but wheeled and tracked are stuck.) But remember that the
Buccaneer was also originally supposed to have been a company-sized 'Mech carrier that lost out to the
Union... hopping down off the wing is one thing but it seems to me 'Mechs without jump jets would be at a loss to get on board under their own power at all.
I am thinking about how this would work an unreasonable amount because I wanted to use the
Buccaneer in a fanfic and it's making me unreasonably irritated. Someone, please tell me I'm missing something and that this isn't just a case of Dana Knutson drawing a really cool-looking "giant aerospace fighter" DropShip in 1988 that makes no practical sense.
Edit: OK, so we're going to talk about transit drives after all I guess. I just realized the DA novel
Fortress of Lies features a description of a
Buccaneer which strongly implies it's one of the aerodyne types which actually has no belly transit drive at all, rather featuring a reconfigurable interior where corridors pull double duty as ladder shafts and such. I guess this makes belly loading doors more plausible... but it also makes the original DropShips & JumpShips sourcebook description of "a central fuselage with a large cargo bay attached to either side" match up even less to the way the ship is actually drawn.