Gazelle, Close Escort
FF&S v2 and version 3.3 of Andrew Akins spreadsheet
Designed by Greg Svenson, Svenson's Small Craft, LIC

Design Notes
The Gazelle is intended to provide a potent escort for merchant ships. There are many Gazelles in service throughout known space. This version of the Gazelle is especially popular with the Ariisite Colonial Fleet (Ariis Ariis/Verge) because of the long jump range, which is a necessity for any ships operating within the rift to rimward of the 3^rd Imperium in Verge sector.

The jump-4 capability allows it to escort the newer merchant ships with long jump ranges. The 5G acceleration allows it to keep up with just about any corsair it is likely to encounter.

The Gazelle has fuel scoops and a fuel purification plant to allow frontier refueling.

The Gazelle is well armed with two triple laser turrets, and two missile turrets. Each turret has a gunner, an MFD and a LIDAR for target tracking.

Defensively, the hull of the Gazelle class is thick. There is a sandcaster turret for laser protection. There are two automated triple VRF PD lasers for missile protection, each with an MFD, a LIDAR and a flight computer. There is a nuclear damper turret. There are also many ECM features such as stealth, military black paint, a deceptive active jammer, a passive jammer, drive masking, and neutrino masking.

The crew is provided with a gym and lounge for recreation. The ship's officers all have private staterooms. The large stateroom being reserved for the ship's captain. The enlisted men each share their room with another crewman (basically, two bunks in a small stateroom). The galley has sufficient food for 13 weeks without re-supplying the ship.

Should there be a need to abandon ship, the ship's boat will act as a lifeboat for the crew.

This Gazelle class design is based on the original design of the same name from Traveller Supplement 7: Traders and Gunboats copyright GDW 1980. There are some differences, though, due to the differences between CT and the FFS2 design systems. The main difference is that removing the drop tanks didn't save any performance for the ship (hydrogen is very light…), so I took the liberty of removing them and replacing them with internal fuel tanks. This actually made a significant amount of additional space available for the ship's design. The additional space was used to beef up the ship's armor, the laser turret's rate of fire, to add more missiles to the missile turret's magazines, add a crew's lounge and add a bit of extra cargo capacity. The PA barbettes did not seem to make sense in FFS2, either. I was unable to design one that seemed useful in combat for so small a ship. So, I replaced them with missile turrets.

Return to the SSC LIC Patrol Cruiser Page, SSC LIC Products Page,
Svenson Small Craft LIC page, my Traveller page, or my home page.

Send your comments to Greg Svenson