Ships are big

Ships in Traveller are big. I’ve started putting together some maps for starports – just small class E starports with a landing pad and a couple of buildings. Most of my ‘tactical’ battlemaps which I use for Roll20 range from 20×20 squares to 40×40 squares in size. My small starport is 50×50, and doesn’t leave much room for space around the edges.

Even a small ship’s boat is about 20 squares long. A Far Trader is over 30 squares long, which takes up most of the map. Which means the landing pad needs to be considerable in size just to be able to fit one typical trading vessel.

Making Dungeoncraft assets out of the ships is also fun. Standard resolution for Dungeoncraft objects is 256dpi (256 pixels per square). This means the Far Trader above is 8704 x 6144 pixels in size (a 22MB XCF file, reduced to a mere 10MB when converted to PNG).

I was thinking that a variety of ship tokens would be nice to include in Dungeoncraft assets, but that’s going to mean one huge asset file. If I redrew them in SVG, and used flat colours rather than the shading of these Blender generated images then the size would probably drop, but they wouldn’t look as nice.

Maybe I should keep them out of the Dungeondraft assets, and have them as separate tokens. Since ships are probably a dynamic part of the map, it might make more sense to add them afterwards in Roll20 or Foundry as movable objects. I possibly need just a couple of simple objects which can be used as templates for scale when putting together a map.