I think 200 days of consumables is serious gold plating. The reason I find bays acceptable is because the breakeven point between them and actual quarters is around 100 days, and DropShips can draw consumables from JumpShips for long journeys. The classic 'mech carriers are landing craft built to be part of a much larger fleet that have been pressed into roles they weren't designed for. And it seems we don't have actual designs for them under the current rule set. I suspect a "corrected" Union will come in under 5,000 tons, with proper crew quarters for the crew and bay quarters for everyone else.
Dude. Full quarters are literally ten times - that is
1000%, more efficient. Budgetary reasons
alone demand full quarters, let alone logistical reasons, let alone morale effects. And The "They can just resupply from JumpShips" argument is baloney - JumpShips barely have enough room to carry supplies for their
own crews, let alone anybody else; and
canonically rely on the
DropShips to provide themselves resupply. You also have to add a shedload of quarters anyway, as the stock transport bays don't account for the necessary AsTechs to get anything done in sane amounts of time, and frankly, we're being
very generous in assuming a single tech team per vehicle is sufficient - realistically, it would be more like
three. The simple fact of the matter is that attempting to use the bay quarters is penny wise but pound foolish; you lower the up front price somewhat but then pay for ten times the per person operating cost.
Basically, unless you both add 6 to the Bay Personnel of basically everything, and state that they're at least half as efficient as Steerage Quarters if not outright equivalent, they make no sense from an economic, logistical or unit morale perspective.
If anything, I would expect Star League era designs to be putting everyone into
officer quarters, because the SLDF was very much a Conspicuous Consumption project basically right from the start. But that actually
would be extravagant, so I went with Crew Quarters.
And from a lore perspective, it also greatly alleviates the density problem, because unless significant portions of a DropShip's structure are comprised of aerogel (which granted isn't
completely improbable, the stuff is an
amazing thermal insulator and that is something a ship that expects to make hundreds thousands of reentries over its service life would care about,) you end up with average density values that make no sense. Even 10000ish tons is probably still too light for the stated dimensions, but you don't need more than that to get everything you need into it and you have to draw the line
somewhere.Edit: also, 200 days of consumables is the "at full establishment and with only the as designed for passenger count", neither of which are necessarily the case at any given time, and moreover amounts to all of 1 ton per person and 180 tons besides. It's less than
two percent of the unit's total mass; even accounting for the necessary Quarters you're still talking about less than ten percent of the mass here.
Bay Quarters just. They do. Not. Make. Sense. Not economically, not logistically, and not for force readiness and morale. You do not want to be paying for ten times the supplies, which must be sourced and transported with the unit; you do not want to have to spend a week or three recovering from the poor conditions when you get to your destination before your force is combat ready.
And from a further lore perspective, the kind of things that the extra supply mass is supposed to be representing just aren't reflected in the "on screen" appearances of DropShips. We never see people bitching about temporary hygiene and waste reclimation facilities, or fretting over running out of water or air, or anything like that. And we
do see DropShips transporting staff officers and dependants-both of passengers and crew-regularly and without issues, which strongly suggests that there are spare quarters integrated into the design for such purposes; we see people griping about notoriously
small or poor quarters, but not ever implying that said quarters don't exist.
And finally, I don't think any sane military would accept "literally camping in a cargo bay" as the standard mode of transportation,
for literally months at a time, of their very expensive pilots and slightly less expensive but still not exactly trivial tank crews; and even for Infantry I tend to handwave putting them in Steerage Quarters as being a combined Barracks for
esprit de corps reasons.
Now, I will say that there
is a place for Bay Quarters or something like them: Pre-KF boom DropShuttles. For
those, bay quarters make sense; you aren't going to be in a DropShuttle for more than a few hours, so having long term habitation isn't necessary; Small Craft built as light landers are similar.
But, we somewhat digress from the point here. The point is, if we are discarding the canonical designs, we need to
discard the canonical designs, and work backwards from "this is what they can do in lore, how do we make a ship that can do those things." Halfassing it by trying to cram things into the low end mass range used in canon just results in ships that
still don't match their lore performance even if they are significantly more functional. That design (and several others like it) are the results of me
starting from a place of "None of the canon stats exist and we are putting statistics on this for the first time. Here's our list of lore feats, we need the ship to be able to accomplish them (at least with good rolls and or poor ones for the enemy); what do we need for that."
