So I had a nifty idea of building a small ship for kicks, and for use for an NPC team that I'm going to have coming and going in a story; aiding the PCs, feeding them info, etc (not to mention just for the sake of designing a ship). I'm trying to design the ship for both form, and function, and I'm getting a bit confused by the templates, ship examples, and the lack of definition in certain fields.
I'm trying to design a dropship smaller than the Vesk Norikama (medium transport) vessel given in the ship examples, then have the characters refit it for their own purposes). My design uses the small shuttle template and is based around a smaller troop transport or dropship that has been refit to haul a small bit of cargo (like for smuggling/ transporting artifacts, etc for Starfinders.) Shuttle template has 3 bays, so one as crew, 2 as cargo)
My questions are: when you have an expansion bay, what's the general size (like, in square feet) of the bay?
How many people could you fit in a bay in a troop transport (like Starship troopers dropship style) in an expansion bay? (I'm assuming 16, going by the Passenger Seating expansion descriptor, and assuming that regardless of harness or w/e system used, they'll take up about the same space).
Would this mean that using a small shuttle template, I would basically have approx. 3 4x4 squares (each square being 5') of space to work with when I draw it on graphing paper? (Not counting cockpit, engines, etc)
I'm finding this a bit confusing, because the book uses the Ringworks Wanderer as a fighter/small shuttle, and it certainly doesn't look like it has 1 expansion bay, let alone 3.
I'm starting to get a basic shape that I like, and I'm currently working on an amalgam/rework along the lines of that ship from the cover of Mel Odom's Master Sergeant (the artist of which I can't find the name for), and something I found online called the Hound Class Transport