Somtaaw wrote:Grayson superdreadnoughts had enormous galleries for the "honor guard" everytime a certain Admiral boarded and departed, which also included "inspecting" the Marine Guard, even if she was only leaving for a few hours.
Also, there was that "emergency" meeting at Hancock, where Sarnow and Honor boarded and they had all the honor guards, and so on, who were also looking harassed because there was a shuttle hot on their butts that was going to come in... as soon as they were out of the way.
The boarding/departing area is large enough, and seems to be safe enough aboard all ships, Manticoran, Grayson or Havenite, that relatively large chunks of crew can assemble for short periods. The shuttles themselves, you're right Maxx ARE in hard vacuum, and require engineers and maintenance workers to suit up to do their jobs. But you could still go into that general vicinity, to get that "open area" feeling without being required to wear your skinsuit.
Max is correct in that the assault shuttle bays for the Tepes, were definitely mounted in the broadsides, but one could make that assumption about any 'real' army/marine assault ship. I assume any Honorverse ground assault ships to have boat bays more like those in Starship Troopers, where the need to embark/disembark dozens to hundreds of troopers quickly to be far more important than the small tubes that only allow a handful to board at a time. This also aids in getting tanks loaded, you can just drive them right in, a platoon or two of troops piles in behind, and the assault shuttle can take off within minutes of the go order. Minutes compared to the half hour it would take for a platoons worth of naval ratings to slowly cycle through their ceremony for entry or leaving and swimming a tube.
For reference, this image shows the windows to the gallery:
http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -427888076 The gallery extends the entire width of the ship, minus passageways at either end, and is roughly 20 meters wide. 20 x 30 meters = 600m^2 (very roughly 5500ft^2). And that's on a CA (Star Knight class).
Edit: BuNine has the galleries on different-size ships extending across the width of whichever ship it is and about 20 meters deep, so the larger the warship, the larger the gallery. Ships with multiple boat bays, such as this one:
http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/R ... -485503372 will have a gallery at either end, and in the dividers between boat bays. The divider galleries are somewhat smaller, though - same width, just not as deep.
To add further detail, there are maintenance bays that are inside the ship that are large enough to handle one of the air-breathing engines from a pinnace. A large maintenance airlock is built into the boat bay to allow something of that size to pass through for shirtsleeve environment work to be done, if necessary.
However, there is only a single maintenance airlock for large equipment, and it's located at one end, which means if there is some kind of issue, either the big part needs to be drifted to the airlock through vacuum and zero-g, or the pinnace needs to be moved closer, so that the movement of the part is as short as possible.
Most cargo goes through the cargo boarding tubes (the large boarding tube in the center) in the boat bay, or through external cargo tubes seen here (centerline, below the personnel tube):
http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/art/F ... -471274950 There are lifts in the gallery(ies) to lower cargo to the next deck down, which is the main cargo deck, and where the external cargo tube is already located.
There are also larger cargo hatches in the sides of larger ships, if they are needed. Missiles are loaded through special loading hatches on the broadsides, through a tube running from the missile collier to the hatches.
