Starship

The Russel Buckett (aka "The Rusty Bucket")
Your ship is a 200 ton Manta class "long merchant", although in some ways, it is more like a yacht. It is Jump-3 (sort of), Maneuver-2. Eight small staterooms, two low berths, and about 30 tons of cargo space.  This is a very old ship, well over a hundred years old, and in deteriorating bad repair.  Things are always breaking and going wrong on the ship, so you can pretty much expect a problem every jump or two.

Fuel Supplies

Technically, this ship is Jump-3, but not really. The fuel tankage is too small to support a Jump-3 and a reasonable amount of after jump maneuvering and life support. So the ship can do a Jump-3, but it can barely turn after it comes out of jump. The only safe way to do this (safe being a relative term) is to plot a course so that you come out of jump on course to skim a gas giant or dock with a fueling station. There is enough fuel to trim a course a little, but that is about it. You can not land the ship on a planet with anything close to real gravity after a jump-3.

Fuel Filters


In the past, you modified this ship by installing very high end fuel filters. This allows you to get fuel from places that other space ships can not, and also greatly reduces the chance of fuel problems, even when using unrefined or even marginal fuels.

Weapons

Your ship has two weapons, in two separate turrets:

One turret contains a pretty standard exploratory weapons package: one missile launcher, one laser, and one countermeasures launchers.

The second turret contains a small particle weapon, which is military surplus from the fourth frontier war. This is not a civilian weapon, and can get you talked about in some planetary systems; maybe even detained, if you are not polite to the local gunboats. You had to convert the air/raft hanger on the main deck to hold the particle weapon, so you now store the air/raft in the main cargo store.

Main Deck Changes

The "center stateroom" (right behind the bridge) has been removed to create more shared space and connect the "crew" space on the left with the "passenger" space on the right, since on this ship it is all really crew space.

The stateroom right next to the low berths, and the low births themselves are merged into one room, which is used for three purposes: first there are low births for two people, second there is a space that can be used as either a sick bay or lab space (although not both at the same time).

Finally, the air/raft space on this deck has been converted to a particle-beam barette (see weapons, above).

Cargo Deck Changes


The only change to the cargo deck, is that the air/raft is stored here, and that means to launch it in space, the entire cargo deck must be depressurized.

History

After the second adventure, as part of  payment for that adventure, the ship was put through about 13 days of dry dock repairs, so is in the best shape it has been for probably a hundred years!

Between the first and second adventures, your engineering crew installed a series of external welders to the ship's hull.  These can be extended and roboticly controlled (one at a time) to do external repair work.