Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 3:31 PM
Ignatz,
These look great! There are plenty of them, and I'd imagine they could easily cover a spherical area around the ship out to a considerable distance.
What would you say to a couple of radio antennae? Maybe fore and aft, or even below? I figure they could just look like thin, nondescript poles, with little blinky lights on the end. I dunno. Just a thought.
At one point, you had a question or two about the presence or location of emergency life boats. I know that's a somewhat standard trope of the genre, but I don't actually think they'd be of much use. First off, unless a ship is going to imminently explode, or a band of murderous pirates have gotten aboard or something, there's virtually no scenario I can think of where it's safer to be in a tiny craft, out in the middle of nowhere, instead of in a larger one.
Small craft have fewer options, less protection from solar and cosmic radiation, less fuel and life support, and far less chance of being spotted by rescuers. Because the ships in Stardrifter don't utilize super-powerful or unstable reactors, like antimatter drives or whatever, a major disaster of that nature is quite rare. And despite their outsized presence in the public consciousness and (future) modern legend, the overwhelming majority of commercial vessels never have a single run-in with pirates.
Taken together, I would think that few vessels would have integrated lifeboats. Perhaps passenger liners, moving large numbers of people in cold passage, would have the ability to "eject" the pods in event of a disaster. If so, each would be equipped with a beacon so they could be located later, and the people within revived. Cold passage requires relatively little power, so a person could be safely floating in space, sleeping, for years. Military vessels might have a similar set-up, or something different all together.
Anyway, loving the sensors!
-David