New page on main site

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2002-10-19 12:37pm

Does anybody want to contribute toward a new page on the main site?

I want to do a mock Starfleet Engineering Council disciplinary hearing of Leah Brahms, designer of the Enterprise-D. The premise is that during the Dominion War, the council head was sacked for incompetence, and the new council chair intends to clean house, restore order, and bring sanity back into Federation engineering. Now that the war is over, they're disciplining unlicensed practitioners and/or revoking licenses {EDIT: and possibly even initiating serious legal action with the possibility of imprisonment for reckless public endangerment and the irresponsible recommendation that GCS's were safe for civilian transport} for those who have demonstrated incompetence.

Anyway, I'm interested to know if anybody has any feedback on this idea (or even potential contributions toward the page, which would be credited of course).

EDIT: de-stickyfied

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2002-10-19 12:40pm

I know FAR23/25 regs pretty well (actually after next years design project I'll know them by heart), I would be interested but could we wait till exams are over (Nov 20)?

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2002-10-19 12:43pm

It would be hilarious

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2002-10-19 12:43pm

Crown wrote:I know FAR23/25 regs pretty well (actually after next years design project I'll know them by heart), I would be interested but could we wait till exams are over (Nov 20)?

Sure, I was hoping to let this percolate and perhaps accumulate lots of good suggestions, while I slowly added to the Canon Database in the meantime.

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2002-10-19 12:50pm

Cool, now I have to find someway to translate FAR and MAR to Sci-fi specifications. Doesn't help that I have like zero knowledge of ST, I have never really watched it...

Luke Starkiller · Post by **Luke Starkiller** » 2002-10-19 12:54pm

I think that that would be very entertaining to read. I wish I were a year or two farther along so I could actually help out with it.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2002-10-19 12:56pm

Crown wrote:Cool, now I have to find someway to translate FAR and MAR to Sci-fi specifications. Doesn't help that I have like zero knowledge of ST, I have never really watched it...

The trick is to get it to sound authentic. I'm not too familiar with the protocols of these types of hearings, so if I just "wing it" on my own, it might not come out right.

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2002-10-19 01:02pm

Well our design supervisor pretty much told us if we follow the regulations then our only defence that we need (if something goes terribly wrong) is; I followed the regs and nothing can touch us. So if we show that the design of ST ships somehow violates the regs (which ever regs they are) then you can hang engineers by the balls.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-10-19 01:16pm

The trick is to get it to sound authentic. I'm not too familiar with the protocols of these types of hearings, so if I just "wing it" on my own, it might not come out right.

I know how the Military does it at least(Or at least I think I remeber it corretly)

Three to five memeber board(Tradtionaly three) plus prosecuitor and the defendant who each pled thier case and then rule on it(Keep your lisence, burned at the stake, whatever)

Post by **NecronLord** » 2002-10-19 02:28pm

Starfleet has an engineering council?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2002-10-19 05:30pm

NecronLord wrote:Starfleet has an engineering council?

They do now. The premise of the page will be that an actual engineer finally takes the reins of this council, which has been gripped by corruption, cronyism, and general incompetence throughout the entirety of the TNG era.

Sothis · Post by **Sothis** » 2002-10-19 05:44pm

A lot of repetition and long-winded phrases, a lot of complexity for the sake of not being caught out by a loop-hole- and I'm serious. I get to read arret sheets and criminal case papers at work. There's a lot of redundancy.

In the case of public endangerment, probably something like this will work:

On dates between (oh, lets say January to May) 2364 the defendant did, either wilfully or through gloss negligence, fail to be aware of the design deficiencies of the Galaxy class starship, deficiences which resulted in the death and/or injury of both Starfleet personnel and of civilians aboard said class of ship.

Contrary to the <insert act here>

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2002-10-19 06:06pm

[quote="Darth Wong"I want to do a mock Starfleet Engineering Council disciplinary hearing of Leah Brahms, designer of the Enterprise-D.[/quote]

Umm, wasn't Brahms the lead designer of the warp drive system rather than lead designer for the entire ship?

Did Trek even stoop so low as to claim that something as complex as the E-D was designed by only one person?

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-10-19 06:55pm

According to Startrek.com's library, she officially designed the warp drive system, but had "major contributions to the Galaxy-Class Starship Development Project". I think that's enough to lambast her. Consider her a scapegoat.

By the way, I've begun writing the minutes for such a deposition, but I'm approaching it from a humorous point of view.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2002-10-19 07:29pm

You want to model the inquiry off of real-life investigations into various engineering disasters, such as the Apollo 1 capsule fire, the Apollo 13 accident, the American inquiry into the sinking of RMS Titanic (as opposed to the one conducted by Lord Mersey in England, the purpose of which was to whitewash White Star Lines), and the Rogers Commission investigation into the destruction of the shuttlecraft Challenger. Evidence for examination by the inquiry board would include forensic examinations of recovered wreckage from various starships and failure mode analyses of disasters such as the one which befell the starship USS Yamato NCC71807 and the failure of the core ejection systems aboard starship USS Enterprise NCC1710D.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-10-19 07:40pm

Already on it, Patrick. I basically went through Wong's canon database of TNG, and am picking out the juiciest examples of poor design and applying them to a deposition in which three council members ask Brahms to justify her design decisions.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2002-10-19 08:11pm

Cool! BTW, "failure to recommend corrective action even after serious problems were identified" should be added to her list of charges.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2002-10-19 08:24pm

Keep in mind that Leah Brahms was just the propulsion design expert. While she can certainly be held liable for designing warp reactors and power-feeds that tended to explode if anybody sneezed too hard at them, I doubt that she also designed the computer systems which could get so easily infested with an alien system virus, the ejection systems which had a disturbing tendency to not actually eject anything when required, or idiot proof failsafes which certainly failed and proved to be proof only against idiots and nobody else.

Let's face it: a good chunk of the corps of design and manufacturing engineers who produced "today's" Starfleet should be up for the high-jump in this —as well as the engineering schools which certified people who are evident cretins and continued to recertify them year after year. The commissioning plaque aboard the Enterprise gives us a whole list of people responsible for the very poor design and construction of a Galaxy-class starship.

The way things might go in the investigation, we're talking about a wholesale purge being necessary. Perhaps we should have Nora Satie on board as chair of the commission.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-10-19 08:34pm

I doubt that she also designed the computer systems which could get so easily infested with an alien system virus

True, but it must've been her decision to run the propulsion safety systems through the main computer. The charges against her aren't based on the computer itself, but in having absolutely no hard backups in case the computer should fail.

I mean, let's face it... it's all well and good to have a big red button marked "Warp Core Ejection", but if that should fail, there should be at least a lever somewhere in engineering that will manually do all the work.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-10-19 08:34pm

Oh, and Mr. Wong... consider your suggestion added to her charges.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2002-10-19 08:49pm

All right, all finished. A little short for a "realistic" deposition - six and a half pages - but I think it's amusing. Should I E-mail it, or post it, or what?

Parallax · Post by **Parallax** » 2002-10-19 08:51pm

There are certainly a LOT of design flaws;
lack of fuses which ties in with exploding consoles, unnecessarily dangerous power transfer systems, inability to easily get to systems for maintainence, fundamentally highly unstable power systems, reliance on integrity fields to keep the ship together, badly designed control systems, etc etc.

There's certainly a LOT of material to work with

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2002-10-19 09:02pm

SPOOFE wrote:
I doubt that she also designed the computer systems which could get so easily infested with an alien system virus
True, but it must've been her decision to run the propulsion safety systems through the main computer. The charges against her aren't based on the computer itself, but in having absolutely no hard backups in case the computer should fail.

That wouldn't have been her responsibility on the design project. Even a "star" engineer is just one member of a team of literally thousands. Her speciality was in the warp propulsion system. Since every system aboard a Federation starship, including weight-training dumbbells, is routed through computer, the only aspect she would have been responsible for in that area would have been the inclusion of hookups to the main computer in the schematic.

Where Dr. Brahms' fault lies is in the basic instability of her warp core design; how the regulators fail to properly control reactant feed to the intermix chamber and, conceivably, the entire concept of using inertial confinement fusion for the reaction mechanism where steady-state fusion would have been safer and, overall, more efficent in terms of reactor vessel life and fuel regulation/consumption.

I mean, let's face it... it's all well and good to have a big red button marked "Warp Core Ejection", but if that should fail, there should be at least a lever somewhere in engineering that will manually do all the work.

Then that's down to whichever ignoramus designed the alleged failsafe system.

Parallax · Post by **Parallax** » 2002-10-19 09:18pm

Hmmm ... I wonder if they could add small thrusters to the Warp Core so once it's ejected (which seems to be attempted every three episodes or so) they could make it move *towards* an enemy or even away from the ship instead of just relying on inertia from the ejection...

"We've done it! We've nudged their warp nacelle and our sensors say their warp core is going to explode!"
"Joy to us!"
"Um, what's that cyclinder shaped thing heading towards us?"
"ooooooh ... crap."

Dennis Toy · Post by **Dennis Toy** » 2002-10-20 12:15am

im gonna contribute to this one, my perticular beef is the Warp Core Ejection System as you could see. It's a badly designed piece of shit. Othwrs include the jeffries tubes, the badly designed computer software, and the lack of fire suppression like the HALON system and or sprinklers.

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