Realistic spaceships: How to design a transport spaceship?
OK, here's the problem: I want to have a spaceship that is built for transporting large machines (in particular, heavy mining equipment). It does not and is not designed to leave space; transport down to a planet (if necessary) is done by other, specialized ships. It is operated by two people, and its flights can span several years (that is, the two people must be able to survive that long on the space ship). It is owned by a transport corporation which is interested in saving cost, so it will have to be built as cheaply as possible for this purpose, unless the extra expense is justified in reducing transport costs.
Note that the crew cannot reduced to less than two people (like a one-person ship or even a completely automated one) for legal issues (each ship is required by law to have a captain and an engineer).
In particular, I'm interested in the following questions:
- What general ship design would be the most practical for this purpose, and why?
- How much space would be reserved for crew needs (life support, food supplies, etc)? Recall that the ship owner (a big, greedy corporation) will want to reduce this to the absolute minimum, in order to maximize profits.
- What is a realistic ratio of cargo mass to ship mass?
- Anything else that should be considered when designing the ship?
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