Ship Design

The more I observe, the larger the bullshit flag gets when I look at Traveller deck plans.

The first place it really hit was watching The Caine Mutiny where, "The Caine is the inboard ship," when ensign Keith first arrives.

There are at least two destroyers tied up and they climb up to the deck of the outboard ship and pass over to the Caine.

I started paying attention and noticing that many ships have a passage about amidships that allows for traffic from a ship berthed outboard through ships inboard to the dock.

In Traveller terms that'd mean an airlock on both sides and a passage straight from one to the other to allow this kind of stacking.

One reason this is a design feature of American destroyers is because of our extensive use of destroyer tenders in the Pacific.  One tender would support several destroyers and they tied up alongside each other.

There's a lot of practical considerations that are not reflected on any Traveller deckplan.

Just look at access into the Type-S.  There's a down hatch from the avionics bay, but access from the avionics bay to the bridge is a maintenance hatch.  Maintenance hatches require tools to open and they only open from the inside.  To use this as the ships entrance means unbolting that maintenance hatch and leaving it open.  The aft bulkhead has two iris valves.  One leads into a multipurpose space, the other into the engine room.

There are zero airlocks, unless you count flooding the air-raft bay.

There's more than one design that doesn't keep the passengers separate from the crew with the attendant security problems inherent with such intermixing.

And the limited number of airlocks and hatches would be murdered by liability lawyers.  Though considering the black humor of the low-lottery, perhaps they've all been murdered for the good of humaniti.