Pauli Hakala wrote:
Great many real world vehicle designs do use pods - if there was no advantage at all to using pods, then why do so many real world vehicles use them?
Pods do have advantages with respect to access space. Those advantages are just poorly represented by the way Vehicles handles them.
The basic point of access space is that maintenance crews need to be able to reach the component they're working on, so the vehicle has access space to make those components reachable. In general, a vehicle with long term access space has spaces you can actually walk into, while a vehicle with short term access space has spaces you can reach into or possibly wiggle into, and a vehicle with no access space can only be maintained by disassembling it. You basically need long term access space for any component above a certain size (which depends on the component, but one hullspace is fair).
Pods make the inside of a component easier to reach because they place the guts of the component close to the surface. What this means is that they only give you a benefit when the pod is small enough that the insides can be reached from the outside.
You can get reasonable pods by saying pods have short term (not no) access space, and then placing an upper limit on the size of a pod (upper limit depends on what you're working on, but is generally less than one hullspace in Space 3e terms).
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