Need help with research.

[Spence]

I am in the middle of working up deck plans for various ships. Now for Age of Sail warships I have tons of references. One entire section of my library is filled with books, which is great for my ongoing project to map out an armed merchantman, which IMO is the best ship "type" for a RPG in that era. But on to the relevant problem at hand.

 

I have found some, some not many, books that cover the merchant ships of 1880-1930 era. But nothing with any real usable detail. What I would really like to find is a book that has detailed coverage of a “tramp†freighter of the early 1900’s. You know the Pulp staple small freighter that carries 10-20 passengers and hold and deck cargo. I have served at sea aboard a warship, but not a merchantman. So I can come up with many missing pieces on my own, but not the cargo holds and cargo handling setup. This is important! How can the hero's track down the mysterious killer hiding in the hold, if we don’t have a good idea of the holds layout? Hmmmmm? Hmmm?

[Guest Celt]

Re: Need help with research.

 

This diving reference page here includes an image of a cross section of a quote "Typical 1930s tramp freighter", specifically this image: http://www.njscuba.net/artifacts/img/ship_freighter_dwg.gif (copy and paste the url of the image)

 

Here's a pdf document of a small container ship from someone's Twilight 2000 pages here. The cranes and booms look a little advanced but otherwise it seems to fit the bill for a stern superstructure tramp freighter.