Yeah, but you'd need to modify that a bit of liners.....
One variation:
Your 'spine-liner' has crew quarters (bridge and engineering crews, nav/helm), reactor, jump drives, limited maneuver drives.
Cargo modules for the 'liner' would include:
a) Stateroom pod (high or mid)
b) Low berth pod
c) Common area pods
- many variations, depending on fair class and how fancy the trip was
- dining pod
- entertainment pods
- library pod
- commercial pod (so you could shop)
d) Crew pod (for stewards, security, a medic, plus galley, sick bay, etc)
e) For smaller ships, a full hospitality pod (staterooms, galley, etc with one steward/medic embarked with the passengers)
All pods would (when connected to the 'spine-liner') draw power from the main plant, but all would also have battery backups for transit from ground up or from highport to liner. Pods could have interconnects pod-to-pod to make for a 'bigger' ship. Pods might be segregated by passenger class (so no rabble get into the High Passage areas). Pods would have escape pods.
In this setup, you might exchange only data and power between the main ship and the pods. This helps secure the ship from passenger hijinks (much harder to hijack) and it also means that any illnesses or whatever can be contained in 'passenger space' with only the stewards and medics and such exposed.
When you get to a destination, reload new pods (some or all) and jump to the next.
My idea of this physically could be an unsteamlined spine with drive, bridge and a modest crew area (kind of like the Discovery in 2001).
The pods would be added in rings. Smaller spine-liners would have one to three rings. Larger ones could have 10 or 20 ring sections that are multi-layer so you could have 20 x 3 deep rings.
You could spin those sections and save on CG costs if you wanted (if the math looked sensible).
In a multi-tier ring system, you'd note where passengers were debarking and load their passengers in the ring that made sense - next destination, outer ring, next +1 destination, middle ring layer, next destination +2 or more, inner ring layer.
One ring or more rings, I would consider aft locating, on larger liners would load 'fuel pods' instead of people pods. Thus refueling could be faster - pre loaded pods of refined fuel ready to snap on at the highport or in orbit at a refueling station.
You could also have some transport pods if the liner wasn't full or passengers had heavier needs to move stuff.
You could use the fuel pod idea with spine-freighters too.
The fact you could have a mission-configurable mix of fuel/passenger/support pods would make these decent civilian and military multi-purpose vessels as well as liners or freighters. Throw on some hospital modules or load troop modules and you've got a very different ship.
This would be more adaptable than single purpose designs, but pod design and support would have a bit of overhead.
TomB