OMG! Design the next USS ENTERPRISE (Offical Contest)

[Kenny_10_Bellys]

Maybe we should take this particular debate to a separate thread and thrash it out there?

First off, a pair of ships is NOT harder to destroy, it's often easier. If we are talking about a 50,000 ton warship meeting a 50,000 ton 'splits in two or three' ship at any rate. You have two 25,000 ton ships, each with weight and resources wasted on the linking systems, each requiring their own power, life support and damage control systems, etc. In real terms your small ships might be a third as powerful as your adversary because of this. Your only advantage is that you might split the big ships fire, which isn't much. Divide your forces and you are asking to be destroyed in detail.

Anyway, its been tried before. Go look up the 'Jeune Ecole' in reference to 19th century French Battleship theory. They figured they couldn't outbuild the British in terms of battleships, so they thought 'let's build shit-loads of small torpedo boats and small ships carrying a big-ship gun' since they could build loads for the price of one battleship. They got humped. Too weak, too small to stay on patrol long, too easily destroyed when caught in small numbers, useless in bad weather, useless weapons platforms, difficult to coordinate attacks, etc, etc.

[Norade]

Add in that the split vessels, in a scifi setting, will each have half the shielding and reactor output that they should and things start to look even worse for the two ships in one idea. You also now need at least two bridge towers and two sets of expensive radar and comm equipment or one half of your unit will be blind and dumb. You also lose firepower when a ship goes down, and in the real world sense if you launch aircraft, split your carrier and half sinks, what happens to the aircraft? They can't land on half a flight deck because carriers are as large as they are for a reason.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I wonder how the contest would handle a situation be if, say, someone with ideas but without artistic skill commissioned an artist to produce the idea based on the commissioner's detailed descriptions.



As regards starship designs, it would help if the person making the design had been familiarized with basic Trek design conventions. For instance, on Starfleet vessels, the warp nacelles are supposed to be un-obscured from the forward profile because Starfleet designs traditionally place Bussard collectors, which collect interstellar gases while in Warp flight, on the front of the warp nacelles. However, while using warp nacelles to produce the warp field is a common method, it's by no means universal; Klingon ships, for instance, may have nacelles, but many of them, especially older models like the B'rel-class Bird of Prey, do not have nacelles, and have no apparent Bussard collectors; their warp drive may be generated by stumpy, fat coils along the "hump back" of the ship, or they may not, I just don't know. Similarly, the Vulcan D'Kyr-class exploration vessel has neither nacelles nor visibly-apparent collectors, instead possessing that warp ring configuration.

Imagine if the Vulcans had shared their warp technology with the humans of Johnathan Archer's era; Starfleet ships might all have Rings instead of Nacelles.


Someone who wants to design a ship needs to have a good, functioning grasp of the elements that make a good ship, then he needs to design a new one with those elements. He doesn't really have to consider function preceeding form since it's a story and function can follow form, just as long as it's not too godawfully stupid.

Fuzzy's daughter's ship, for instance, looks like it would work as a ship, but (and I don't mean to disparage here,) it doesn't look like an Enterprise. (Sorry, Fuzzy's Daughter. ) It looks more like a transport ship, a very special transport ship used to transport critically-important tree specimens. It's just too small to be a flagship, and too much of its volume is dedicated to one task. I could see a much, much larger ship with a prominent transparent-windows arboretum somewhere in it passing muster, though a milwanker might bawwww horribly about such a big exposed vulnerable target on a warship, and much like they baww about having the bridge on the top of the ship and obvious, they could be ignored.

So, identify the elements that make a Starfleet ship, then start to think about how to change them. Those elements, for a 'normal' starfleet ship, are:
1: Saucer, usually considerably wider than the engineering hull. Typically contains phaser emplacements (either emitters for TOS style ships or banks for TNG,) a bridge on the top of the saucer, and a Captain's Yacht integrated into the underside that Cryptic are never going to give us access to when they can make us pay a hundred and twenty-five grand for Danube runabouts. Has so far always been the leading element of a ship. Sometimes contains shuttlebays.
2: Neck, joining the Saucer and the Engineering Hull. Often, though not always, carries the forward torpedo armaments and sometimes carries impulse engines.
3: Engineering Hull. Notably the place where the big honking Matter/Antimatter Reaction Assembly (M/ARA) and fuel is stored. Typically has a big honking deflector dish on the forward end, which in early (TOS) eras was a brassy parabolic antenna and later became a blue concave parabola flush with and inset into the engineering hull. Often has a shuttlebay on the aft end, and also sometimes has a rear torpedo launcher.
4: Pylons separate the engineering hull from the warp nacelles, and often look ridiculously flimsy or difficult to traverse. Please please PLEASE don't put speed holes or science holes in them, and "Cryptic does it" is not an excuse! I wouldn't poop in a normal room* on a ship with pylons that had speed holes in them. Feel free to fit these with phaser banks.
5: Warp Nacelles: The business end of both the star and trek part of the show, without these we'd be having a Sol Journey instead. They make the ship travel at warp speeds, and traditionally have Bussard collectors attached to the front, and also traditionally need an obscured forward view. If they're large enough, feel free to fit them with phaser banks. Traditionally these are supposed to come in pairs, but the real rule is that the number of warp coils on the ship must be even. For instance, the Galaxy-X seen in the last episode of The Next Generation had three of these warp nacelles; the reason this slid was because the Big E and other Galaxy ships actually have four warp coils, two to a nacelle, so adding a third nacelle raised the number of coils to 6.

These elements make up the basics of Starfleet's big exploration cruisers from the Constitution-class to the Galaxy Class, encompassing the Excelsior and Ambassador classes as well. The Sovereign class broke with this tradition in the way the Intrepid did before it, by making the 'neck' so wide and so well-melded and so short as to be functionally indistinguishable from the saucer and the hull.

You, too, may play with the elements that make a Starfleet vessel. You can simply change the proportions as if moving sliders, then modify the shape of some elements, make an evolutionary change to the formula, making cosmetic changes to the design of the parts, and what you come up with might well be an Enterprise, like this ship did:



This is recognizable a Starfleet vessel, and an exploration cruiser; it has a far shorter neck in proportion than any of the others, but the neck is distinguishable from the hull and the saucer. It's fitted with absolutely hugely long pylons, though that seems to be a perspective trick as the technical overlay at the bottom-left shows them not being any farther out than the edges of the saucer, so either the saucer's far fatter than it appears, or the nacelles seem far farther from the engineering hull. It has the deflector dish in the right place, saucer in the right place, etcetera.

This is a thoroughly evolutionary design. The only real deviation from TNG+ era ships is that it has a dome on the underside of the saucer reminiscent of the Constitution-class Enterprise; possibly they replaced the Captain's yacht with something else, possibly a weapon system or sensor dome. It's simple, elegant, formulaic, and I could see this thing sailing in to save the day or introduce the title credits with the numbers 1701 painted on its hull somewhere.

But, you can deviate from the formula, if you're willing to get revolutionary instead. Many starships lack an engineering hull in the vein of the exploration cruisers, instead having a beefed-up saucer, such as the Miranda, and they may have something like a catamaran pair of hulls sticking out the rear of the saucer, such as the Akira or the sadly much-maligned NX-01 Enterprise. (Not a bad ship.)

Some might have a ball instead of a saucer, in the vein of the Daedalus-class or the second tier of Science vessels available in Star Trek Online, which are beautiful (but that I sadly did not get to play, since I had a surplus of energy credits and totally pwned the Lt. Commander rank in a Nebula. )

If you're feeling brave, you can get really frisky. For instance, instead of nacelles, you might give a Federation starship a Vulcan-style Warp Ring, or even hybridize it with a ring that has nacelles built into its structure. Some starships have "roll bars"/mission pods, like the Nebula or the Miranda. You can play fast and loose with the saucer shape, building it up in places, or even building little towers on it. Whatever you build, it should probably be symmetrical, though if you want to be brave you could try playing with some minor asymmetry.

You might try attaching the nacelles somewhere other than, or in addition to, the pylons; the Steamrunner class and Oberth class (not appearing in STO,) have nacelles attached to the saucer and the hull. In the Oberth's case, it omits the neck entirely, which makes it look really stupid since you realize that anyone wanting to travel from the saucer to the hull has to go EVA or use a transporter, since there's no way anybody's getting through those nacelles unless they want to crawl a Jeffries tube, even if they can get to the pylons through the nacelles.

For reference, by the way, this is the Federation Starship Chart for ships currently in Star Trek Online. It surely can't escape your notice that every Enterprise to carry the numbers NCC-1701 has been a Cruiser, which are the ships with the most Engineering consoles and most Engineering officers. Even the un-refit Connie, which is playable at newbie tier for those who throw the monies at Cryptic, shows this trait in that it has a space for an extra Engineering console. Though the NX-01 Enterprise is available at the same time, it's an Escort, since it has an extra Tac console and tractor beams (and their grappler) are mainly useful for keeping other people in a specific firing arc, which is again mainly useful for Escorts since they tend to boat heavy cannons up front and turrets (360 fire arcs) in the rear.

Following this, it seems likely that the design chosen will be meant to be a Cruiser, especially since Cryptic have a history of ignoring vote results in favor of just picking what they like from a contest. (For example, they held a contest to name the Dervish, and the name "Rapemobile Class" won by a landslide.) So you might want to bear that in mind and not actually deviate too radically in favor of something that would be more appropriate for an escort.


*Thank you, Instant Sunrise, thanks to you and Commander Pimp-Daddy D of the U.S.S. Thuggaprise I've made that into something of a minor meme on STO.

[Norade]

[quote="ShadowDragon8685]Someone who wants to design a ship needs to have a good, functioning grasp of the elements that make a good ship, then he needs to design a new one with those elements. He doesn't really have to consider function preceeding form since it's a story and function can follow form, just as long as it's not too godawfully stupid.

Fuzzy's daughter's ship, for instance, looks like it would work as a ship, but (and I don't mean to disparage here,) it doesn't look like an Enterprise. (Sorry, Fuzzy's Daughter. ) It looks more like a transport ship, a very special transport ship used to transport critically-important tree specimens. It's just too small to be a flagship, and too much of its volume is dedicated to one task. I could see a much, much larger ship with a prominent transparent-windows arboretum somewhere in it passing muster, though a milwanker might bawwww horribly about such a big exposed vulnerable target on a warship, and much like they baww about having the bridge on the top of the ship and obvious, they could be ignored.[/quote]

You're an idiot - a village idiot as luck would have it - that was obviously just a for fun design done for a daughter as a family thing.

<Snip the obvious>

Your little description doesn't tell anybody making a design here anything they don't already know. Have you even looked at the thread.

The rest is equally worthless.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

I've been trying to come up with a way to show you what I've been working on without breaking the contest rules or offering myself up for plagiarism. This is what I arrived at:



[edit]
I found you post insightful ShadowDragon8685. Thanks for the time and effort

[Molyneux]

Someone who wants to design a ship needs to have a good, functioning grasp of the elements that make a good ship, then he needs to design a new one with those elements. He doesn't really have to consider function preceeding form since it's a story and function can follow form, just as long as it's not too godawfully stupid.

Fuzzy's daughter's ship, for instance, looks like it would work as a ship, but (and I don't mean to disparage here,) it doesn't look like an Enterprise. (Sorry, Fuzzy's Daughter. ) It looks more like a transport ship, a very special transport ship used to transport critically-important tree specimens. It's just too small to be a flagship, and too much of its volume is dedicated to one task. I could see a much, much larger ship with a prominent transparent-windows arboretum somewhere in it passing muster, though a milwanker might bawwww horribly about such a big exposed vulnerable target on a warship, and much like they baww about having the bridge on the top of the ship and obvious, they could be ignored.

You're an idiot - a village idiot as luck would have it - that was obviously just a for fun design done for a daughter as a family thing.

<Snip the obvious>

Your little description doesn't tell anybody making a design here anything they don't already know. Have you even looked at the thread.

The rest is equally worthless.

I quite enjoyed reading his post, actually.
You have a good point with regard to split ships, though.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Someone who wants to design a ship needs to have a good, functioning grasp of the elements that make a good ship, then he needs to design a new one with those elements. He doesn't really have to consider function preceeding form since it's a story and function can follow form, just as long as it's not too godawfully stupid.

Fuzzy's daughter's ship, for instance, looks like it would work as a ship, but (and I don't mean to disparage here,) it doesn't look like an Enterprise. (Sorry, Fuzzy's Daughter. ) It looks more like a transport ship, a very special transport ship used to transport critically-important tree specimens. It's just too small to be a flagship, and too much of its volume is dedicated to one task. I could see a much, much larger ship with a prominent transparent-windows arboretum somewhere in it passing muster, though a milwanker might bawwww horribly about such a big exposed vulnerable target on a warship, and much like they baww about having the bridge on the top of the ship and obvious, they could be ignored.

You're an idiot - a village idiot as luck would have it - that was obviously just a for fun design done for a daughter as a family thing.

Funny, you calling me an idiot and yet failing so hard at quote tags. It takes a considerable amount of fail to arrive at such a point.


As for it being a just for fun thing... Well, mainly I made comment about it because when I read Fuzzy's original idea, I had this image in my head of this massive, graceful exploration cruiser with this big, huge windowed space in the middle front of the neck, up high towards the saucer, within which trees could be seen growing, and not some little greenhouse but an amazing arboretum about three or four decks tall.

It was a cool image.

<Snip the obvious>

Your little description doesn't tell anybody making a design here anything they don't already know. Have you even looked at the thread.

The rest is equally worthless.

Feel free you insert that noise in your bodily orifice of choosing, provided said orifice is the anus. Not everybody who likes Trek and might be considering drawing something up has contemplated the topic of 25th-century* starship design as much as I have, let alone actually spent long nights reading up on the topic. I felt that some people, inspired to create but without as much of a grounding in the source material as I have, might appreciate a quick primer to the elements that make up an Enterprise.

*And before you go "TNG is in the 24th century, lawl you village idiot," I'm going to point out that yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, took place in the 24th century, but this contest is being held for Star Trek Online, which takes place in the 25th century; 2409, in fact.

I've been trying to come up with a way to show you what I've been working on without breaking the contest rules or offering myself up for plagiarism. This is what I arrived at:

At first I thought that was a screenshot from STO since it's a bit too undetailed to be from one of the movies, then I read your description and I saw the silhouettes in the windows and I have to say: wow. When you've finalized the entry, please please please link it to us!

I quite enjoyed reading his post, actually.
You have a good point with regard to split ships, though.

That you, Molyneux. If the topic of Star Trek ship designs are of interest, you might want to start with Ex-Astris-Scientia, which has quite a lot of good articles on everything Trek, and especially some good ones on ship design.

As far as splitting ships, yeah, that's kind of a dead end. Even in STO - nobody likes using Exploration Cruiser Refits because saucer seperation sucks. It sucks so hard that the Voltron class (the Prometheus) has no mention of it's bullshit multi-vector attack mode in the game and it's a straight-up Escort.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Does this scale (window, escape pod and airlock size) look right to you?

[edit]
Specifics: There are the outside 1st 2nd and 3rd circles of windows. Those are Enterprise D style and size (floor to ceiling), then much wider ones which start at waist height, like office building windows, then, on the deck below the bridge are port hole style, then skylights in the ceiling above. The bride has no windows.

I don't know the exact size of the escape pods, does anyone else? I know they are supposed to seat 10-20.

[edit]
Oh- There are windows on the very bottom right of the image too. Enterprise-D type floor to ceiling. That protrusion on the back of the saucer should now be one deck height tall.

[edit]
Comparison with the Enterprise-E


[edit]
I need more escape pods farther aft. I have 36 to the Enterprise E's 53 (just in that image.)

[edit]

[ShadowDragon8685]

Is it meant to be about 20% or so bigger? That's the impression I get.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Is it meant to be about 20% or so bigger? That's the impression I get.

I was shooting for the saucer width of the D, but longer rather than wider, so 20% sounds about right.

[Norade]

Funny, you calling me an idiot and yet failing so hard at quote tags. It takes a considerable amount of fail to arrive at such a point.

Quoting quickly and rushing out the door is stupidity now?

As for it being a just for fun thing... Well, mainly I made comment about it because when I read Fuzzy's original idea, I had this image in my head of this massive, graceful exploration cruiser with this big, huge windowed space in the middle front of the neck, up high towards the saucer, within which trees could be seen growing, and not some little greenhouse but an amazing arboretum about three or four decks tall.

Why have windows at all? The ship's power plant can run grow-lights and a holodeck like setting can hide them from people's sight when they enter. Now you don't need windows at all and your ship's hull is sturdier.

Feel free you insert that noise in your bodily orifice of choosing, provided said orifice is the anus. Not everybody who likes Trek and might be considering drawing something up has contemplated the topic of 25th-century* starship design as much as I have, let alone actually spent long nights reading up on the topic. I felt that some people, inspired to create but without as much of a grounding in the source material as I have, might appreciate a quick primer to the elements that make up an Enterprise.

*And before you go "TNG is in the 24th century, lawl you village idiot," I'm going to point out that yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, took place in the 24th century, but this contest is being held for Star Trek Online, which takes place in the 25th century; 2409, in fact.

I think google and looking at the designs themselves would have done the same thing, but if people found what you wrote interesting, good for you I suppose.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

retracted

[Norade]

Fuzzy, could you make some of your escape pods double rows?

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Fuzzy, could you make some of your escape pods double rows?

yes.. but...

Designed a new escape pod style:


Still?

[Norade]

Fuzzy, could you make some of your escape pods double rows?

yes.. but...

Stylistically I don't think doubling up your rows will change the look too much and they only take a small slice of external hull space so taking up an extra few decks isn't an issue. Alternatively making them a bit bigger, say 30% would skew the numbers back to your favor again.

As for the new, style, I like the old one a bit more. the new style looks to busy and like it's attempting be be shiny. A yellow triangle also feels like a warning sign that an escape pod fires out from here.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Designed another escape pod style:

[ShadowDragon8685]

Funny, you calling me an idiot and yet failing so hard at quote tags. It takes a considerable amount of fail to arrive at such a point.

Quoting quickly and rushing out the door is stupidity now?

Ummm... Yeah!

Why have windows at all? The ship's power plant can run grow-lights and a holodeck like setting can hide them from people's sight when they enter. Now you don't need windows at all and your ship's hull is sturdier.

Because the point is to show off to everyone who views the ship the really bitchin' awesome arboretum? And of course it's going to use grow-lights, starlight wouldn't be remotely sufficiently unless it spent almost all of its time orbiting planets near to a sun.

I think google and looking at the designs themselves would have done the same thing, but if people found what you wrote interesting, good for you I suppose.

See again my comment about noise and your orifices.

Is it meant to be about 20% or so bigger? That's the impression I get.

I was shooting for the saucer width of the D, but longer rather than wider, so 20% sounds about right.

Alright, that looks to be on-target, then.

It's kind of hard to tell the bridge apart from the decks below it, too. From the angles we've seen, anyway, it looks kind of like the bridge has huge honkin' windows everywhere. When you said those big windows were ceiling windows in the deck below the bridge I got it, but without seeing that it'd be hard to tell.

Designed another escape pod style:

Are we looking at the side view or the top view? I should point out that in Star Trek Online, ships have a "Windows" option that gives you four sets of windows on your ship varying in position and illumination, but also changes what sort of lifepods you have - you have the ones from the TNG movies and the square ones from the TNG shows, basically. I'd try to avoid changing the lifeboats up for that reason alone - Craptic are lazy bastards and wouldn't want to bother adding your kind of lifeboats in for every Starfleet ship, so they'd just wind up replacing them anyway.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

That's the top view on the escape pods. I took out the sky-lights.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Hey guys- I'm 99.9% done texturing now, but I had one last question before I render and begin polishing the image for submission:

I have nothing on the forward part of my neck where the torpedoes usually go, as mine hang from below the saucer.

Is there any reason not to eject my warp core from the neck forward? As a "Hail Mary" tactic the Enterprise could fire her warp core at the enemy and detonate it, potentially destroying a much more powerful opponent, but rendering herself powerless in the process.

Does the core have to eject back or down with the assumption that you will be running away from it in the event of an impeding breach? I mean, you don't want to shoot it forward and then run into it.

I know! I'll put an ejection port on the back of the neck too. It will almost graze the roof of the shuttle bay, but I think it will be okay.


Maybe some mechanism to aim it a bit? Or just mount a few thrusters on the core it's self?

This won't be a game mechanic of course. That would be ridiculous, but do you like the idea? Is there some obvious flaw in this plan that I'm over looking?

[Questor]

One problem I can think of is that the detonation might come fast enough to endanger the saucer. So you'd have to eject it at a really high acceleration. Going backwards kinda gives the same problem.

Another problem might be that the area between the core and the ejection port will be destroyed, since you can't retract it in time. That's why there are the obvious hatches on the E-D and the E-E.

[Fuzzy_Modem]

I'm imagining that in the event that they can't fire it out the front (the ejection hatch having been destroyed) they could still eject it out the back if need be.

I definitely need a way to fire it out at high velocity...

[Stark]

Or you could realise they have far more efficient ways of delivering a load of antimatter?

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Or you could realise they have far more efficient ways of delivering a load of antimatter?

How much anti-matter is in the average torpedo vs the average warp core?

Now reading:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Photon_torpedo

...

[edit]
Now reading:
http://edwardmuller.com/calculator.htm

[Stark]

A dedicated system to throw the powerplant at the enemy in a way that will almost certainly miss and if it hits probably destroy your ship is somehow better than 'probe full'a bombs' or 'a bigger launcher'?

You even have fore-and-aft facing shafts direct to your powerplant!

[Fuzzy_Modem]

Why would it miss?

Say you are facing off against a single Borg cube, and assume that the firing mechanism will strike and detonate from a quasi-safe distance?

The shafts leading to the core are a valid concern, but what if the core were raised into the firing chamber from below prior to ejection? This would keep it much safer, though more moving parts mean more can go wrong of course...

[edit]
How about a powerful force-field that can hold an breach-in-progress in check for a few seconds until the core hits the enemy?

And what about firing the core with, like, a rail gun?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun