Space Semi-Truck

When you're dealing with any kind of Space Colony or colonization story one of the logistical problems that your characters will face is 'how to move the cargo'. A colony will live and die by the supplies that they bring with them or can find while in their new home. In an environment such as the space colony, they probably wouldn't be able to afford large luxury ships with all of the latest gadgets but they could probably pull off buying a few cargo haulers; a semi-truck for space.

Cargo Hauler with four cargo pods attached

This is a model of a ship that I'm going to use for my 'Space Colony' storyline. It is a long frame with engines in the rear, landing pods and a cockpit for aiming it in the right direction. Each one of the cargo pods is about the same size as an average Connex box. When you're moving lots of cargo around, a standard size of 'pod' is required to regulate weight and cost and all that.

Cargo pods for space would be made out of a material resistant to impact, but essentially the same concept.

The cargo containers are rigged between the landing thruster pods so this gives us an approximate scale of how long one of these transports would be. If you connect to semi-trucks together and factor in the size of the cab as being the space between the two as shown in the picture above, this would be the distance between the landing thrusters. Not exactly a small ship but when you're hauling everything that you'll ever be able to bring with you - it won't seem like enough.



One of the modifications that the space colony will end up using is a cargo box that has been altered prior to launch. Rather than holding boxes of cargo, it will be built to serve as either a medical facility, command and communications link or something to that effect. Rather than try an make a structure serve as a temporary 'command' center with all of the computers and electronics that you've had to build while on planet, why not pre-build the thing where you can get all the supplies you need?

This means that once you touch down on the planet and the builders have found a place for you to put the box, you can be up and running as a central hub of your colony's activities within a matter of hours rather than a matter of days. Since it's self-contained, you could just plan on adding tents or pre-fab buildings to the front of it to elongate the usable space. Hardware such as computers, servers and the like would be built in to a protected 'shell' that could be picked up and moved (by some other heavy-lifting vehicle or the like) .