The Armory

In my last post I spoke of how large weaponry will have spaces near the weapon to safely store the ammunition needed to reload the weapon. Now I’d like to talk about smaller weaponry, namely hand weapons. Does the crew of your ship prefer hand to hand combat, as many violent species do (think of the Klingons on Star Trek) or do they prefer long range weapons, as most do even nowadays, such as a pistol, phaser, or rifle. Once you know that you need to decide where those weapons are kept. If your crew always wears their weapons there is no reason to have a lot of extra weapons around, although having reload stations for energy or projectile weapons or safe rooms to protect your crew from any enemy boarding parties.
However, if your crew doesn’t carry their weapons at all times, or many of them don’t, then you need an armory. An armory is where weapons are kept ready so they are ready to stop any hostile threat able to board your ship. Someone is always nearby to help arm people in less than five minutes time and make sure none of the crew goes crazy and arm themselves for a murderous trip through the halls of the ship. The special thing about an armory is that it’s designed to be easy to defend: one or two doors and thick walls. It usually has only one door but if you use energy weapons that don’t require more than picking up the weapon and checking the safety is on after getting on the body armor it may be smarter to have an exit and entrance door near each other or easily defended to speed the arming. Another thing to remember is that bigger ships often have more than one armory. A ship of nearly a thousand crewmembers and officers probably has two armories and storage rooms called magazines. For every armory, there should probably be at least a small magazine of ammunition for the weapons in that armory. Most ships should carry enough backup supplies for five or six gun fights, just in case, especially for the space battles.