ship design

[sunshine220]

I've always hated the nacelle on the fed ships , they just seems really frigile and expose on those sskinny pilons.
1)Would a ship need nacelles for transwarp ?
2) Are the nacelles on the fed ships as fragile as they look ?
3 would it be more efficent/better to build war ships like the defiant ?just bigger for battleship killing ?
4) How would you design a fed warship ?
5) Would a ship like the daedalus fom stargate fit in the stargate universe(just th design)? Or would it be really ugly and look primitive compair to other race ships?

Am creating senario where there is a 4th major power in the alpha quadrant . They are friendly just believe in a strng defense , am having truble imagining a efficent and a nice looking ship for them .

[The Romulan Republic]

You clearly don't need nacels for transwarp, since Borg ships don't have them.

As for how fragile they are, I'm not sure.

The Defiant is a good design. But if I was going to design my own ship, I'd go for something compact, with both armour and shields, and a lot of torpedos. And if possible, I'd give it a cloak and a transwarp drive.

As for the Daedalus, I've seen ships just as ugly as it in Star Trek.

[Enigma]

You clearly don't need nacels for transwarp, since Borg ships don't have them.

As for how fragile they are, I'm not sure.

The Defiant is a good design. But if I was going to design my own ship, I'd go for something compact, with both armour and shields, and a lot of torpedos. And if possible, I'd give it a cloak and a transwarp drive.

As for the Daedalus, I've seen ships just as ugly as it in Star Trek.

One of them happens to be the Daedalus class.....

[Skylon]

As for how fragile they are, I'm not sure.

Depends. The Enterprise blasted the shit out of Reliant's with one phaser salvo to its unshielded nacelle. A subsequent photon torpedo then blasted the thing off.

The USS Odyssey in DS9 took hits to its nacelle which knocked out warp, but it seemed repairable (but time wasn't on their side ultimately).

And of course a direct collision to the nacelle somehow destroyed the Ent-D.

Go ahead...make sense out of all that.

[Sea Skimmer]

Nacelle vulnerability may actively vary depending on the state of the warp drive and power flow into said nacelle. Nothing specific backs this up, but its kind of logical.

[Stofsk]

3 would it be more efficent/better to build war ships like the defiant ?just bigger for battleship killing ?

I think have more small ships like the Defiant would be better for defence purposes than having a small number of big ships like the Enterprise. The Galaxy-class and the Sovereign-class can be beefy when the writers want them to be, but they don't seem to have a lot of numbers (Excelsiors and Mirandas are more numerous). Ships like the Defiant can punch above their weight to a ridiculous degree, so it would be foolish not to invest heavily into them. Each one has a crew of around 50, while an Excelsior has hundreds, and a Galaxy has the capacity for thousands (the Enterprise has a thousand people onboard her, some of those are civilians, but its mission during the show was peaceful exploration; the actual saucer section is large in volume and can hold thousands of people. Ostensibly this is for stuff like emergency evacuation of colonies, but as we saw in 'Yesterday's Enterprise' it's not hard to put that space to use for more crew and transporting troops).

4) How would you design a fed warship ?

I wouldn't, because they already have. Use the Defiant, and the Sovereign. The Sovereign is a great design for a post-Wolf 359 Starfleet. The advantage of the Defiant is the small crew requirement and the fact that it's small enough that you could probably build a large number of them in a short span of time compared to big ships like the Sovereign or Galaxy.

[Darth Tedious]

You don't even need nacelles for regular warp. Old Klingon BoP's, big Ferengi ships and every Borg ship ever built have no nacelles at all. Pretty sure there were Cardassian and Breen ships without nacelles, too.

Maybe they are a shitty idea...

[Stofsk]

I can't point to anything to prove this, but I always thought that having nacelles allows you better warp velocities/longer sustained warp travel or something like that.

Because the Enterprise is usually the fastest ship in the galaxy, leaving aside stuff like the borg cube (which are outside context problems for everybody, not just the Federation).

EDIT It's the same thing with those huge navigational deflectors on Starfleet ships. You don't *need* them, because nobody else seems to put them on their ships. Or they don't put big obvious ones. But the navigational deflector confers other advantages, like I think they're also sensor platforms and of course, are kind of like the Star Trek equivalent of a swiss army knife.

[Darth Tedious]

There might be some kind of safety consideration (radiation leakage if an internal nacelle equivalent fails?) that causes the two design philosophies.

External nacelles = more fragile ship, but a better chance of crew survival
while
Internal whatevers = sturdier ship that irradiates the crew if it gets crippled

Of course I'm just throwing theories and supposition around, I can't back any of this up. But it makes sense (to me at least).

[Stofsk]

Me as well. Basically we can come up with anything to explain it, I don't think the show ever gave a definitive answer.

I think Matt Jeffries intended it that way when he was designing it, which is one of the reasons why all TOS ships have nacelles. But I can't remember where I read that (or if I read that at all).

[Skylon]

Me as well. Basically we can come up with anything to explain it, I don't think the show ever gave a definitive answer.

I think Matt Jeffries intended it that way when he was designing it, which is one of the reasons why all TOS ships have nacelles. But I can't remember where I read that (or if I read that at all).

You didn't:

"I was concerned about the design of ship that Gene told me would have 'warp' drive. I thought, 'What the hell is warp drive?' But I gathered that this ship had to have powerful engines – extremely powerful. To me, that meant that they had to be designed away from the body.

Memory Alpha has a whole article on designing the Enterprise: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Constit ... lass_model

It bugs me when people rip on the Starfleet design of warp nacelles. I think there is something sleek about them. Not to mention, I like Jefferies rationalization. The type of things designers sometimes may have to worry about - sometimes practical concerns come to a head...it makes an exploitable flaw, but there is no way around it.

[Terralthra]

It's been fairly well-established that having nacelle separation is linked to speed. Federation ships are consistently the fastest (other than Borg). Romulans are depicted as nearly as fast, even able to outrun the Enterprise D if they push their engines enough to damage them. D'Deridex also have prominent nacelle separation. It also seems to be a factor in size: Vor'cha and other large Klingon battlecruisers have nacelles out on pylons. Dominion ships have separated nacelles, and also are designed for performance and speed.