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The floor area is 68 centicubits by 88 centicubits and it is 52 centicubits high.
That is for the standard ones anyway.
By RAW, it is smaller than a 20' (half sized) shipping container.
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A Light Freighter can get a Shuttle bay for two expansion slots which would otherwise give you two cargo bays, but now you can fit a shuttle in it.
The shuttle itself has three slots that can be turned into cargo bays.
So your two slots can now fit a whole shuttle that has THREE slots on its own. shuttleception
Whilst you can fit a 3 cargo bayed shuttle in the space, if it was a cargo bay instead of a shuttle bay you could only get a large sized object in it.
The size of the bays is woefully small - and when you look at a starship map it becomes clear how far out it all is.
The sunrise maiden cargo holds can fit about 5 x 20' containers with a bit of spare space.
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Yep I'm well aware of the . . . issues . . . with ship design which is why this is in general not rules. I'm just curious what people have decided a regular expansion bay is in their games if like me they enjoy that sort of world building.
For me personally I use the following.
Cargo Hold on normal ship.
1) Total weight of loaded cargo must be 25 tons or less.
2) It can store 24 pallets of goods with each pallet being 96 by 125 inches (2.4 m by 3.2 m) and up to 120-inches (3.05-m) tall.
3) Total size of any object loaded must be large or smaller to fit through the hatch/access panel.
Cargo Hold on dedicated cargo ship.
1) Each bay can hold a number of 20' shipping containers in its bay equal to tier x 25. A Bulk freighter (huge) can hold 25 x 5 = 125 20' shipping containers or around 60 forty foot containers.
2) Items loaded can be any size.
3) They can carry loose items like grain or liquids like oil.
4) They CAN'T land or deal with anything more than the minimal gravity of space. Even if they have the best thrusters a light weight asteroid is going to ground them permanently.
Expansion Bay/Cargo Hold Size (Can be subdivided as desired.
20 x 23 x 3.2 meters or 65.62 x 75.45 x 10.5 feet.
If your curious how I reached this decision here's the full details and some of the process I used to work out these values.
Cargo
This was an easy one for me when I looked at airplane cargo capacity. There you have two things that limit how much a plane can carry. The first is carry weight this is how much a plane can carry and still get off the ground. So you have a max carry weight from which you deduct the plane (wiring, frame, crew, fuel, etc) which leaves you a maximum amount of weight that the plane can have loaded onto it and still fly. The second is access if you can't fit it through the hatch then obviously you can't load it which is why you have dedicated cargo planes that eat the cargo as seen here.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z1M6_ZlzU-s/maxresdefault.jpg
Nom, nom, nom. Basically the front opens up allowing you to use the entire length of the plane as cargo storage meaning extremely large items can be loaded in.
So when you add in the rule about GM being able to overide limits I had my cargo ship and my ship that can carry cargo. I then added a rule about size and was happy.
For PC's they'll normally have a ship that can carry cargo. Something that is large or smaller so it can land on planets and is not dedicated specifically to cargo haulage. Which means its subject to the agreed upon standards for pact world ship design. That specifies a ship must have a MINIMUM cargo carry capacity of 25 tons and a hatch that allows a large or smaller pallet to be loaded. I also took the standard airplane pallet and said it can carry that many pallets.
Depending on ship design that may not be the case for your specific ship e.g. a GM may rule that since a L4 thruster can exist a planet with normal gravity a L12 can exit a planet with 3 times the cargo (75 tons) in the cargo bay. They may rule you have a section of the ship that can open up to load a huge or bigger vehicle through it. However an off the rack ship is only going to have a large size hatch and a guaranteed carrying capacity of 25 tons. It may take more but you wont be covered in case of damages. However that's up to GM/game needs.
So your standard cargo bay added to a ship that can carry cargo but is not a cargo ship has 3 criteria.
1) Total weight of loaded cargo must be 25 tons or less.
2) It can store 24 pallets of goods with each pallet being 96 by 125 inches (2.4 m by 3.2 m) and up to 120-inches (3.05-m) tall (this is from information on airplane cargo). Before you say that should be 25 this is based on something that came up when I worked out expansion bay size but I'll get to that in a moment.
3) Total size of any object loaded must be large or smaller to fit through the hatch/access panel.
Then we have ships the players aren't likely to have which are custom built to carry cargo. For these I decided rather than airplanes that have to take off/land I'd look at ships and their containers.
So a cargo ship has holds that can store loose items like grain or liquids like oil. They can have the ability to open up at the front allowing the entire length of the ship to be used. Most importantly they are not intended to deal with gravity by landing on a planet since they only move in space. So their cargo capacity is multiplied by their size tier and only refers to the smaller 20' containers.
So a cargo bay on a dedicated cargo ship has these rules.
1) Each bay can hold a number of 20' shipping containers in its bay equal to tier x 25. A Bulk freighter (huge) can hold 25 x 5 = 125 20' shipping containers or around 60 forty foot containers.
2) Items loaded can be any size.
3) They can carry loose items like grain or liquids like oil.
4) They CAN'T land or deal with anything more than the minimal gravity of space. Even if they have the best thrusters a light weight asteroid is going to ground them permanently.
If your curious about weight's this site gives all the different weight's for different types of shipping containers https://www.icontainers.com/the-different-types-of-containers/ but as a rough comparison a standard 20' general purpose cargo container (the ones that tier x 25 determines how many can be carried) has a maximum weight of 21,727 KG. Meaning a bulk freighter (125 cargo containers) can easily haul 2,715,875 or 2993.74 US tons in one loaded cargo bay as its usual load. Though obviously this is going to vary depending on ship size/etc. A light Freighter (small) could only carry 25 x 2 = 50 shipping containers less than half the capacity of a bulk freighter.
I'm also seriously considering a ruling that dedicated cargo ships can only be the freighter and maybe carrier frames. Anyway this leads nicely to . . .
Expansion Bays
Once I had gotten this far it occured to me that an unused expansion bay was a cargo hold waiting to happen so for my curiosity about size perhaps I should compare the two and see what I came up with. So by my cargo rules I had 25 pallets worth of space I could back in and I needed to decide how to do so. Now the standard pallet is roughly 8.2 x 10.5 x 10 feet in its dimensions. That's not bad for a "room" its a little smaller especially the 8' one but these aren't rooms on a ship where you can put walls wherever you like this is overall bay size. So now I knew what I was dealing with how to set it up. I decided to make 2 models one single pallet high, one 2 pallets high and see how they worked out.
Single Pallet
25 pallets gives us a 5 x 5 x 1 area . . .
2.4 side
1, 1, 1, 1, 1 3.2 side
1, 1, 1, 1, 1
1, 1, 1, 1, 1
1, 1, 1, 1, 1
1, 1, 1, 1, 1
Which would work out at a size of 2.4 x 5, 3.2 x 5, 3.05 or 12 x 16 x 3.05 meters or 39.37 x 52.49 x 10 feet.
Double Pallet
2, 2, 2, 2
2, 2, 2, 2
2, 2, 2, 2
1 left over
So to me the choice seemed obvious go with the single pallet that gave a 10' ceiling and a nice even bay layout. Then I looked online to see how high a normal room was and found a modern house's rooms were apparently usually around 8' high. So I recalculated with the 2.4 as my height and the 3.05 as another side that gave me 15.25 x 16 x 2.4 meters or 50 x 52.49 x 8.2.
Meaning I now had to options to choose from for my cargo hold/expansion bay size . . .
1) 39.37 x 52.49 x 10 feet.
2) 50 x 52.49 x 8.2 feet.
One a little more rectangular but with a bit more height, the other more square but lower height. Now large creatures have a height/length of 8-16 feet so I decided to go with the first option to give them a little more room to move though they may still need to crouch. However I still had the 2 pallet high with 1 left over that would hit 16-20 feet if I ever wound up with a primarily large party who'd need a ship built for that.
Thus I thought I had my standard expansion bay size 39.37 feet by 52.49 feet x 10 feet then I realized the cargo hold was fully packed with no way to get at the rear crates without moving the ones in front and unlike an airplane it wouldn't be fully loaded/unloaded after each trip. So I went back to the drawing board and put in pathways around/through the pallets so any given one can be accessed and moved the pallets around a bit giving me . . .
2.4 side
X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X
X, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, X 3.2 side
X, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, X
X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X
X, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, X
X, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, X
X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X
Then since each X or moving bit of deck would need to be pallet size I recalculated my room giving me . . .
19.2 x 22.4 x 3.05 or 62.99 x 73.49 x 10 feet.
After a bit of thought I rounded them all up to give a bit of room around the edges for the pallets to not be scraping giving me a final value of . . .
20 x 23 x 3.2 meters or 65.62 x 75.45 x 10.5 feet finally I had my expansion bay.
EDIT
You can obviously save some space by having a single middle access path front to back or even go with the "pack it to the walls" if you don't mind what you want being in the middle of the stack and needing everything unpacked.
The design I settled on allows any given pallet to be unloaded/accessed and the space around the outside allows the cargo hold to be accessed from any direction hatches/airlocks, doors to secondary holds, decontamination showers, etc as you like.
Yes you could make it smaller but I don't feel this is wasted space its to allow easy access to any given bit of cargo in a ship that is not a dedicated cargo ship and thus will not want to pack its holds to the brim because its not doing bulk runs of All 500 containers go from planet A to planet B where it offloads them and loads another 500 containers of a different product to go to planet E. They'll maybe pick up a pallet here and store it with their supplies and then pick up another 2 pallets at planet B before ofloading 1 at planet c then the original and another at planet e. If you see what I mean?
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Honestly for cargo bays I just mostly handwave it. It's not useful in general, so I mostly let them use as they want to with a gut feeling limit on what they're attempting to do.
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A Light Freighter can get a Shuttle bay for two expansion slots which would otherwise give you two cargo bays, but now you can fit a shuttle in it.
The shuttle itself has three slots that can be turned into cargo bays.
So your two slots can now fit a whole shuttle that has THREE slots on its own. shuttleception
You mean a Bulk Freighter (huge), not a Light Freighter (medium). A Shuttle Bay can only be installed in a Huge or larger starship (Pocket CRB pg 299)
Shuttleception is still an issue - personally I think they should scale cargo capacity based on size of ship, or just give huge ships far more expansion bays (this would also solve the 'not enough escape pods for the crew' problem). Weirdly some expansion bays have hard limits (such as cargo bays, escape pods and guest quarters) but others don't and could be assumed to scale up on a bigger ship (such as recreation suite for a 50 crew bulk freighter instead of a 6 crew shuttle). It would be more consistent if the rules picked one option for all bays and ran with it (and less complicated than adding a sliding scale for capacities by ship size).
Whilst you can fit a 3 cargo bayed shuttle in the space, if it was a cargo bay instead of a shuttle bay you could only get a large sized object in it.No, you can fit any number of large-sized objects in as long as their total weight is less than 50 tonnes (for the 2 cargo bay 'space'). You just can't fit any one object bigger than Large (so no Huge objects) without 4 cargo bays, although the rule does say 'usually', and specifically says it can be overidden at GM discretion (Pocket CRB pg 299).
I'm not denying the rules have issues, but they aren't as bad as you made out.
I agree fully that larger ships should have more expansion bay's I mean seriously a medium transport gets 5 yet a Huge cruiser 2 sizes bigger, 800-2,000 feet and 420-1,200 tons vs 120-300 and 40-150 tons. Its nearly 3 times as long and massive (minimum) yet it has 1 more only one more bay? I mean take it too extremes and you can build a 120 foot long, 40 ton ship with 5 bays but a 2,000 foot long and 1,200 ton ship gets 1 more bay. It just doesn't work.
Personally, I don't think large ships need more expansion bays, rather, I think expansion bays need a dedicated classification system.
Small expansion mount, medium, large, massive. That way, a shuttle could have three expansion bays and a frigate only two, but the classification of the two would be distinct. Three small exp-bays vs two medium exp-bays, representing different mounting capabilities. Yes, that would mean having to make size iterations of some expansion systems, IE, small hold, medium hold, large hold, massive hold.
It would also allow for ships to have "x" amount of small bays, "y" amount of medium, "z" amount of large, etc etc etc. You can then regulate systems by mount size, rather than how many expansion bays it takes, or at least in conjunction thereby.
System "A" requires a large mount space, System "B" requires a small space. System "C" requires a massive space. System "D" requires two large spaces.
*Caveat*
This is me spitballing, as I am currently 200mi away from my Starfinder literature and can't compare/contrast ideas against content where I'm at.
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That could work too. The current system though is just nearly identical amounts of bays for most ships and making us spend them on things that really should come by default for a lot of designs escape pods (all ships), brigs (military ships), surveying sensors (take up a bay rather than just an increase in PCU/BP).
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Something to keep in mind on cargo weight (we've argued over escape pods before so lets just agree to disagree on that) is it doesn't work compared to real life.
The AMD cargo container for aircraft is 6.8 metric tonnes total loaded weight and a rough payload of 112 metric tonnes. That means a starfinder cargo hold can carry 3 AMD containers or a 5th of a boeing 747. In other words a medium transport that's ONLY cargo holds has roughly the same ability to carry cargo as a boeing inspite of having far more advanced systems. This isn't based on room its based on max payload i.e. the ability of the plane to get off the ground and fly. I think roomwise it can actually take 30 of these ULD's or 205 metric tonnes. Obviously it can hold more than it could actually carry if they were all fully loaded so I think I made a mistake somewhere in my google fu hence my posting both values. based on weight it can take 125 tonnes or 18 AMD ULD's, based on room it can take 30 AMD ULD's or 205 tonnes. As compared to a medium transports maximum with nothing but cargo holds of 100 tonnes or 14 AMD ULD's.
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Something to keep in mind on cargo weight (we've argued over escape pods before so lets just agree to disagree on that) is it doesn't work compared to real life.
The AMD cargo container for aircraft is 6.8 metric tonnes total loaded weight and a rough payload of 112 metric tonnes. That means a starfinder cargo hold can carry 3 AMD containers or a 5th of a boeing 747. In other words a medium transport that's ONLY cargo holds has roughly the same ability to carry cargo as a boeing inspite of having far more advanced systems. This isn't based on room its based on max payload i.e. the ability of the plane to get off the ground and fly. I think roomwise it can actually take 30 of these ULD's or 205 metric tonnes. Obviously it can hold more than it could actually carry if they were all fully loaded so I think I made a mistake somewhere in my google fu hence my posting both values. based on weight it can take 125 tonnes or 18 AMD ULD's, based on room it can take 30 AMD ULD's or 205 tonnes. As compared to a medium transports maximum with nothing but cargo holds of 100 tonnes or 14 AMD ULD's.
Weight in space is rather unimportant except when the engines have a too low thrust to accelerate all that mass at an acceptable rate. But why would they add undersized engines or make the ship larger than what the ship can handle?
Thats especially true as the way the drift is written there is no real reason to leave the atmosphere or even start to enter the drift. You could do that while standing on the runway and then enjoy 0-GThats why imo the capacity should be compared to ships, not planes.
While they can go into drift from the ground I believe that it'd have a number of drawbacks (travel times, unsure arrival destination, risk of loss of cargo that is higher in drift than in system). Though this does feed back into my thinking I would be better off applying these rules to "Dedicated cargo ship variant" which can be applied to allow more cargo capacity but uses ALL expansion bays nothing else. This would move the focus to ship design more than anything else.
I do use ship based cargo limits for my "Cargo Ship" variant (Basically a huge hold or holds with the best thrusters and limited crew facilities strapped on). Other ship variants use the airline variant with smaller ULD's and a 30 tonne limit that they must be under. That's not they can only fly with 25 tonne's loaded but any cargo hold built for these ships must be able to enter orbit with up to 25 tonne's loaded.
To put it another way my rules move the cargo hold limits to size for ships not entering/leaving atmosphere, thruster capability for ships entering/leaving atmosphere and size again for ships dedicated as a cargo hauler.
So a light freighter in the dedicated cargo variant can enter and leave gravity wells while carrying a little over 3,000 tonne's of cargo that can be any size. A Bulk Freighter in the dedicated cargo variant could carry that in one bay with a total of 30,000 tonnes of cargo for the ship. However as mentioned above that's based on container weight not a weight limit their limit is 50 20' ship type cargo containers per bay for a light freighter and 150 20' ship type cargo containers per bay for a bulk freighter.
This works to me fairly well as an "average" cargo ship can carry around 25,000 tonnes worth of cargo and an "average" bulk freighter can carry around 30,000 tonnes of cargo. You could also using these rules build a Dreadnaught Class Cargo ship that could carry 75,000 tonnes of cargo. Plus it means a light freighter could fully load/unload a bulk freighters cargo hold while transporting the contents to/from a planet.
Meanwhile if the ship is entering/leaving a planet I use the rules saying they can land on and leave a normal or low gravity planet with T4 thrusters and a high gravity planet with T8. This means for my calculations if they're entering a planetary well and aren't a cargo variant they can carry up to 25 tonnes in a normal/low environment with T4 thrusters and half that in a high environment with T8. Then you just scale appropriately. If they have T8 they can cary up to 25 tonnes on heavy gravity planets or up to 50 tonnes on normal ones. The size of their load doesn't change but the thrusters determine how much they can get into orbit.
Cargo Variant
Assumes Best Thrusters
Only Cargo Hold Expansion bay's allowed
Carry Capacity: Tier x 25 20' containers per bay
So the bigger the ship the more 20' cargo containers it can carry per bay. For weight just look up a ships cargo container gross weight and there you go.
Non-cargo variant
Assumes class 4 thruster for normal gravity to enter orbit with 25 tonnes or less.
Any expansion bay's allowed (as per normal rules)
Carry Capacity: Usually up to 3 AMD ULD Pallets per cargo hold*.
* AMD pallets are . . .
Length: 2.438 meters/96 inches
Width: 3.175 meters/125 inches
Height: 2.979 meters/117.3 inches.
Depending on preferred measurement system.
Gross Weight: 6.8 tonnes
So a ship can enter/leave a normal gravity or lower planet with T4 thrusters carrying up to 25 tonnes or 3 AMD ULD's per Cargo Hold. If you have T12 thrusters the ship can enter/leave a normal gravity or lower planet with up to 75 tonnes per bay or 11 AMD ULD's loaded.
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Thinking about it over lunch if you want to keep the Cargo ship vs general ship but still use ship style limits you could try something like this.
Tier -1 x 4 AMD's per hold.
So a tiny ship could store 1 AMD size container about 6.8 tonness and fly but a large ship could store 12 AMD's per cargo hold around 80 Tonnes.
This way a ship built to haul cargo can haul a lot more and more specialized varieties e.g. liquids than a general purpose ship but you don't need to worry about the 25 tonne limit just your crates which are each about the size of a normal room.
As for the large I've always viewed that as applying to what fits through the hatch more than what fits in the bay.
Honestly for cargo bays I just mostly handwave it. It's not useful in general, so I mostly let them use as they want to with a gut feeling limit on what they're attempting to do.
This is also what I do too.
Smaller ships hold less and larger ships hold more, plain and simple.
My group and I are far more concerned about story and roleplay than figuring
out mathematical formulas to determine if the group can fit another pallet of kumquats on their supply run to Nebari Prime.