Part I -Where to Find Freighter in the Game
The Silent Death universe often speaks of freighters. After all this game isn’t based in The Great War on the Western Front, where enemies met each other on patrol most of the time, when not escorting bombers or attaching observation balloons! In an interstellar setting populated with billions of people living in kinds of conditions, where war is always happening somewhere, prize taking, raiding privateering or straight forward piracy is logically going to present itself for game scenarios.
Before we speak of Freighters and we need to consider some concepts and rules which will be familiar to most people who have read a science fiction book – often space opera – or have watched a science fiction film or TV Series. Salvage Claws and Tractor Beams! Without these common concepts that are by now surely recognized as part Science Fiction entertainment canon, having a way to take charge of a ship without blasting it to pieces presents quite an advantage when one wishes to capture some cargo.

Renegades: The Espan Rebellion was designated as the fourth expansion for the original Silent Death: Metal Express game. The original much loved game was somewhat unbalanced and had already introduced a number of additional, important rules during the previous expansions, necessitating a second edition, Silent Death: The Next Millennium. Renegades was refactored to align it to the new rule set and effectively became the first expansion of TNM. While it did not introduce freighters, it added further inertia to the original kernel – the smugglers favorite Shryak Shuttle in the core rules.
Renegades added the Crescent (blockage runner) and Conestoga (heavy transport). Renegades also introduced a very useful example of a salvage orientated ship: The Scorpion.

The first true freighter was detailed in the Sunrunners forces supplement which saw publication the following year.

The Borax Freighter is a slow, unarmed ship that, while provided a gunship style display for damage tracking, does not even get a write up about who built it or its history. Bold ‘C’s at specific positions in the side damage tracks are implicitly cargo slots which if hit mean a loss of cargo. The Critical Hit section also details special events for cargo loss. I could not find any other specific mention of this in the rules, but it is interesting to note the positioning of the cargo – see Part II of this article below. Sunrunners also repeated the Salvage Claw and Tractor Beam rules as well as the Scorpion’s ship display meaning one did not have to own Renegades to benefit from this specific aspect of its content.
Special mention should also be made of the Curtiss Shuttle in the same book. While not specifically classed as a cargo ship and having no specific cargo slots on its damage track, as an apparently reasonably sized shuttle, it could carry cargo internally. Faster, cheaper and more capable of taking some damage than a Shryak Shuttle, the Curtiss Shuttle has no armament so would be best employed in safe environments or with a fighter escort.
When it comes to Cargo in Silent Death, one has to look at the Kashmere Commonwealth house supplement. Published the following year from Sunrunners, it clarifies the implicit ‘C’ slot rule, further details Cargo Damage and Capacity while defining a system to design ones own Freighter. (TNM provided a system to design Fighters and Gunships).

House Kashmere is all about trade and this book defines the Ushas mega-freighter. Technically an Escort Class vessel it uses a Warhound ship display. It can also swap portions one or both of its massive side mounted holds to mount Battle Pods. On the other side of the scale is the Lakshmi, a swift and pretty deadly two person fighter with capacity to carry a small cargo in a reinforced bay. In between these tow is the Vishnu, a slow but heavily armored freighter, carrying some mild defensive weaponry and using the gunship style ship display. Although there are thousands of Vishnu plying the trade routes, one has to be careful that its dangerous twin is not encountered. The Yama is for all intents and purposes a Vishnu, but mounts Battle Pods instead of cargo, turning the slow well armoured freighter into a slow well armoured and deadly gunship!

The Hostile Takeover annex book takes all the rules built on in the previous three books and ties them into a campaign, linking back to Renegades: he Espan Rebellion.
In terms of this article, note should be made of the Tractor Shielding rule introduced in Hostile Takeover, which helps negate the pull of a Tractor Beam.
Hostile Takeover details the last freighter to be noted in this article, the Astrahauler. Like the Borax Freighter and Curtis Shuttle it does not get its own picture on its gunship style ship display, but it does at least get a write up (sans ship picture) of its providence, where we learn it is made by the same Rio Rojo shipyards as who made the Conestoga.
The Astrahauler follows what can by now be seen as a standard mid size freighter pattern – slow and able to take a bit of damage before it starts to lose bits of cargo or ship components. To its benefit it is fitted with blast canons fore and aft which, against small fighters could do some damage.
Part 2 – What Space Freighters Could Look Like
In Part I we looked through what Silent Death had to offer in the line of Freighters and by extension heavy transports and shuttles. The concept of Space Freighters mounting containers alongside their core is hardly new and I believe Silent Death followed this Zeitgeist. (I specifically used that word as I want to touch on this in another article sometime).
To try and be brief, where I am going here is that modular containers are the norm currently, no paradigm shift to fundamentally change that pattern has occurred (like the paradigm shift from crates loaded into holds to modular containers), so in our current understanding of the world it is logical Space Freighters may take a similar form.
This can be seen in the Original Battlestar Galactica.

I asked for permission to publish these from the BSG Modelling Group (GALACTICA Model FX) on Facebook.

In terms of Silent Death these massive freighters would have to be tendered at an orbital satiation or a space station freight hub, being unable to land. Certain books or shows may take a different view – that with the right technology one could land one of these monsters, but I tend to like the space only concept, backing it up with a “well perhaps if unencumbered”, as the sheer weight they would carry plus even light gravity would have have to be a structural integrity risk.
The same rule may not apply for shuttle, heavy carrier or even mid size carriers who may depending on their design and intended capabilities, have atmospheric capabilities. Silent Death, like many a science fiction universe has a special fuel which allows for trans light capability, but that can only work with ships large enough or built to take the necessary engineering. Landing on any earth like planet thus comes with the added cost of ascending again, which is also a consideration when it comes to fueling, special trans light engine or not. Fuel converts to energy energy is never free.
The makers of Silent Death only ever made models of the Vishnu and Ushas freighters. These are still available via Silent-Death.mx.
That said I found this beautiful model on a web search. I have tried to contact the maker – Sublight Drive – via ETSY but my messages keep bouncing. No idea as to the scale.


The conundrum remains however, how does one accommodate models of the non pictured Silent Death Ships? the Borax Freighter, the Astrahauler, the Curtis Shuttle?
This is the crux of the article to an extent. We have established what a freighter may look like. By now 3D printing has become relatively common, many people know someone who has a printer, or can access a printing concern to undertake a custom print. To this end many a CAD artist has done the work already, either through passion or perhaps identifying a gap in the market. There are many other games out there, or even dedicated Silent Death players designing their own freighters and needing a suitable model.

I forgot to take own the URL for the above picture, but will endeavor to search it out and update here. This could easily be an Astrahauler or Borax Freighter, if that is how your imagined it. Or for a slightly larger, more modular effect, I quite like this one I found at CG Trader.

The biggest question would have to be what kind of scale the models are and if they fit with your game.
To be fair, Silent Death had scale issues with its original metal core ships often enough. The original Night Hawk (later Cossack in TNM) single person fighter was massive compared to say the original Pharsii – which was thankfully re launched in a more realistic size (original model got reassigned as the Bat)