Boa

The Boa is a 1,200t light freighter, and was the next Elite ship in line for a Traveller conversion. It turned out to be a real pig to design, split across 7 decks with an angular hull which makes it tricky to work out deck area. Initially I was aiming for six decks, but adding a small lower deck ended up fixing most of the sizing issues and I think the deck plans are now accurate to the nearest displacement tonne.

This was originally going to be double the size of the Python (itself 800t), but I decided to tone it down a bit to bring it more in line with ‘adventurer’ class ships. It’s still big for many players, and can be expensive to run, but it’s also quite flexible.

It would be easy to convert one of the decks to a docking bay, or to add weapon bays where the cargo hatches are. Given that the PDF was already running to eight pages with all the deck plans, I decided not to do more deck plans for variants. At least not just yet.

The full specifications are available as a PDF, and the separate deck plans in 256px resolution are part of the ZIP file which can be downloaded from the usual page. Each deck is 7,168 by 12,288 pixels in size (28 x 48 squares), so probably need scaling down before using them in a VTT.

The Boa could have a much bigger cargo capacity if I’d stuck with a Jump-2 design, but Jump-3 seemed more in keeping with the higher tech design of the ship.

I’ve tried to make the engineering deck with enough space to move around in, just in case boarding actions need to get control of engineering. Most movement up and down the ship is via elevator shafts, but there are some secondary hatches between some levels.

The 3D model is a bit on the plain side, and it has been commented that it looks rather fat. That’s due to trying to keep to the rough vector graphics outline of the original model. It’s not a practical shape, but that’s true of a lot of the Elite ships. I’m tempted to make the Anaconda a lot less angular than the others.

I do like how it compares to the other ships in size. The Python is longer, but it’s only three decks so is very flat looking and only two thirds the size. The Boa doesn’t look that much bigger than some of the fighters, but the size difference is in volume. Multiplying volume by ten is little more than doubling the length.

My next ship will be the Fer-de-lance, a 400t luxury yacht which will only be two decks. Hopefully this should be a lot easier to do due to it being only one third the size. After that I plan to do the Anaconda, which will be twice the size of the Boa. That will leave the Moray, Asp and Constrictor from the original set of Elite ships.