So many Mirandas/So few Constitution-refits?

Discussion in 'Trek Tech' started by SicOne, Aug 4, 2013.

  1. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Eh? But aren't those in the concept just torpedo pods?

    I'm increasingly inclined to think refit-style tech and previous had the primary reactors in the nacelles themselves. The only "real" difference between refit and TOS would be that refit tech would be more advanced and more heavily interconnected than in the TOS era. The Excelsior might be the first ship to do differently, with no reactors in the nacelles at all. It would certainly help explain the wraparound band around the Excelsior nacelles.
     
  2. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yeah, I don't think there is too much difference between the TOS warp engines and the TMP warp engines in placement of reactors and power conduits. I think the materials and equipment are more advanced in TMP where they are exposed to the engine room instead of being hidden behind walls of baffle plates during the TOS days.
     
  3. Robert Comsol

    Robert Comsol Commodore Commodore

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    It doesn't say so in the preliminary sketch but if these were just torpedo pods I'd say these are rather huge for just that purpose, wouldn't you agree? ;)

    Bob
     
  4. J.T.B.

    J.T.B. Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Maybe not, if they had torpedoe magazines in them.
     
  5. Praetor

    Praetor Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Eh, I'd wager that by volume, each one isn't any bigger than the single pod on the actual Miranda, and probably smaller.
     
  6. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    It's not glare. It's the same momentarily illumination that belies the impact point on the bird of prey. On Enterprise -- a much larger ship -- The illumination there follows the torpedo's path across the hull and is present BEFORE the torpedo detonates; at the moment of impact it brightens only slightly before being swallowed by the fireball of the subsequent explosion.

    The illumination there suggests an impact point on the starboard side, VERY close to the bridge. The after effects get close to the impulse engine, to be sure, but the are widespread throughout the entire aft portion of the saucer and do not linger significantly near the impact point.

    I already did: it isn't CLOSE enough to light up the impulse deck. It lights up the bridge because its impact point is only about ten meters from the dome; from that same point it's almost fifty meters to the impulse engine.

    Which would have been necessary only if the old ship had actually outlived it's usefulness and was DUE for replacement in the first place.

    Except that, earlier, Valeris says the crew is "turning their own quarters inside-out, but the killers may still be among them."

    If these people are searching this room, it's because it IS their own quarters after all.

    Since when do yeoman rate their own quarters they don't have to share with anyone?

    Previous Enterprises never used them (even Crewman Daniels has his own private cabin on NX-01) nor subsequent Enterprises where even Chief O'Brien seems to have regular-sized quarters big enough to raise a small family. What's do different about Kirk's era?

    Because for few ships we see in DETAIL, it's obvious that they weren't. Stargazer, for example, has LCARS computers sharing space with 2280s duotronic circuitry and even some of its most basic features -- turbolifts, for example -- are unchanged from its original launch configuration.

    For early-model Constellations like Hathaway and Stargazer, that's probably the limits of their capacity to upgrade; the former was on the ragged edge of serviceability in the 24th century while the latter was effectively already in mothballs. More advanced designs like the Excelsiors don't seem to have this problem and can accept LCARS conversion just fine.

    The absence of the Constitution class in the 24th century suggests they could not handle LCARS at all. This is probably because the intermediate step before LCARS (multitronics?) introduced on Excelsior were incredibly difficult to integrate into the older Constitution class.

    Speaking from experience? A load-bearing bulkhead in an inconvenient place that cannot be further compromised to accommodate cable trunking and therefore must be bypassed by an elaborate workaround; later designs would have omitted the bulkhead altogether to allow for easier swapping in/out of computer equipment, but on the older design you have to physically reconstruct the entire compartment in order to fit the new component inside. You can't usually get away with that more than two or three times in a ship's lifespan, and from what we can tell, the Constitutions had already done this at least twice already before the TMP conversion.

    According to "Brothers" the Repulse is on an active mission of exploration. Also, the Hood's Captain DeSoto is a household name in Starfleet; moreover, the Hood -- a late-model Excelsior type -- is described in various episodes as receiving systems upgrades to stay current with the rest of the fleet. So even if Hood is at least 40 years old, it has upgrade potential that the Constellations and Mirandas -- both much newer than the Constitution class -- unquestionably lack.

    Of course it was designed for new technology (that's what it RECEIVED, isn't it?). What it wasn't designed for is FUTURE technology. Considering the refit only took about three years to complete AND considering how radical that transformation really was, that means all of the systems that were installed on Enterprise (with the possible exception of its warp drives) were fully developed and mature technologies before the ship ever entered space dock. The TMP refit didn't accomplish much, in that case, except to bring the ship up to parity with the rest of the 2270s fleet. Within only ten short years with the release of newer designs and new technologies being developed the ship was AGAIN starting to show its age, and this time further upgrades were no longer feasible.

    And the answer -- once again -- is that Constellation's saucer is five decks thick and considerably wider than the Constitutions. The Miranda's saucer extends into that larger aft compartment which is, again, about five decks thick and large enough to accommodate an entire engineering section.

    Let's consider the latter case for a moment: it could very well be that the original design for the Miranda (or the ships they wound up replacing) were just saucers with warp nacelles bolted onto them, not unlike the Mayflower type starships of the JJ-Verse. The addition of more powerful reactor types and the recognized need for greater cargo/shuttle storage neccesistated the construction of an "engineering wing" to house all of that equipment. Constellation wouldn't have this problem because it's ALREADY large enough to accommodate all of it in a single hull.

    Or maybe the TMP Enterprise is simply larger than we've been told. Its "official" length isn't canon, after all, and various posters here have demonstrated conclusively that most of the ship's components (especially the drop-door in engineering) wouldn't actually fit inside of it unless it was at least 340 meters long.;)

    That's mainly because the torpedo bay didn't explode. A phaser beam tore into it and set the compartment on fire, but it didn't damage the torpedoes or detonate anything else.

    But the internal piping on Reliant DOESN'T have to go through the engine room or through any part of the ship inhabitted by humans. If you haven't noticed, this also the case for the Enterprise-D, which has its plasma conduits leading AWAY from engineering and through sealed trunks that cut through the hull without sharing the habitable environment of the ship.

    Impossible to know, since we know next to nothing about the Excelsiors. OTOH, the presence of the bulge ITSELF is rather difficult to explain, especially considering the odd skinniness of its secondary hull in that section. If the bulge contains a central reactor to feed the nacelles, the skinny hull makes a lot more sense: the engine room would be BENEATH the bulge, and the entire reactor compartment is simply placed at a standoff distance from the rest of the ship in case of a major radiation leak.
     
  7. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    It's glare. For it to be an explosion then the explosion point would illuminate everything in a spherical direction. If it can illuminate the entire starboard side of the bridge module as you suggest it can reach the impulse deck and illuminate it as brightly as well.

    Because it does not, the explosion point cannot be behind/starboard of the bridge but further back, portside of the impulse deck.

    Well then the Enterprise could not be obsolete if she's sent on a high profile escort mission. So obsolete isn't one of the possible reasons. Financial, political, or something else, yes.

    The boots scene with Dax comes later, after Chekov find the blood on the transporter. Spock orders the search expanded out and now everyone available is searching everywhere, including the corridor panels, lockers, clothes area, etc. At this point it is difficult to say it's their "own" quarters.
    SPOCK: Now we expand our search to include uniforms.
    CHEKOV: All uniforms?
    We see earlier that their are at least 9 bunk beds in 3 free standing columns in a room. The scene where we have the boots there were 3 bunks next to a wall. That could boost the room capacity to 12. There were about 9 people dressed as "crew" and 2 officers not including the main cast so those present could be bunking in there or just guys that were opening everything up hanging around.

    We saw Yeoman Rand have her own quarters in "Charlie X". We did not see any other yeoman quarters during TOS, AFAIK. TUC shows crew bunk beds and "Flashback" showed the Excelsior also using bunk beds.

    Different ships, different era, different requirements. Sulu's Excelsior also had bunks.

    Then how does that account for the Enterprise-A which if it was a new build would've been close to the USS Hathaway/Stargazer's age. If she was a redesign/upgrade then she'd be the second known conversion. In either case, where do we see on the Stargazer or the Hathaway the use of LCARS?

    It's possible that the cost of continuous upgrading outweighed keeping the Constitutions around. Although I'm not finding any examples of LCARS on the Hathaway or Stargazer so any screencaps would be helpful.


    Speaking from observation, the TOS Enterprise saw more than two changes prior to her conversion especially around the engine room and running new pipes and circuitry around the ship didn't appear to be an issue. In anycase, if based on your argument above that the Constellations didn't upgrade much then the Enterprise-A would've also not needed to upgrade much as it would've had the same systems given that it was built much later / around the time the Hathaway / Stargazer were built.

    Which episodes described the Hood as receiving systems upgrades?

    The question then is what future technology couldn't she take? As you've pointed out, not much changed on the Hathaway and Stargazer.

    That's what I was getting at -the Reliant and Constellation couldn't fit one either and had to build an expansion to house it which would be equivalent to the Constitution's engineering hull. So saying the Constitution's saucer was too small to fit a main reactor is true in all three cases and they still had to build something else to accommodate it.

    Of course and one of the reasons IMO that the Constitutions didn't continue on was simply lack of cargo space compared to the Reliant's and Constellations. The engineering hull simply wasn't big enough.

    Still, the long corridor in front of the engineering room would push it back which would prevent the intermix shaft from passing in between the torpedo tubes, even on a ship as large as 355m.

    Even if it did explode like the Reliant's pod, the Enterprise has got a far thicker neck than the Reliant's thin rollbar. If the Reliant's pod didn't get blown clean off, I am doubting that the Enterprise would be any worse.

    The piping has to connect to the vertical shaft somewhere in the engine room.

    The Enterprise's horizontal shaft doesn't pass through any "inhabited" parts of the ship unless you count that access area that can be sealed by the dropdown door. If that's what you're counting as "inhabited" then the Reliant would have the same problem.

    I can't comment as I don't know what the conduit looks like beyond the point it branches off the vertical core.

    We do have a scene in TSFS where we catch the edge of a vertical intermix shaft so it's likely going to resemble the Enterprise's engineering. In Generations we can see the MSDS show what appears to be a vertical shaft behind the main sensor/deflector in the engineering hull but not one in the hump.
     
  8. Robert Comsol

    Robert Comsol Commodore Commodore

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    Yeoman Rand had a special and privileged status acting as the captain's secretary, maid and else. In "Charlie X" she's apparently working on a report and given occasional "captain's-eyes-only" reports she needs to have a private cabin in contrast to other crew members.

    :confused: Considering the space aboard Enterprise now devoted to freight in the engineering hull in TMP I'm unable to follow here.

    I'd say that's inconclusive. Reliant's impulse deflection crystal had been destroyed so it stands to reason than any vertical intermix shaft leading up there was shut and/or sealed off.
    What we saw later could have just been a vertical shaft next to / extending from the port nacelle (i.e, there's one port and starboard).

    We barely catch this edge on the left side of the frame .
    What we do see is a crewman standing at a console next to a wall which could indicate a desire not to reveal the shaft (or does it just shield the main energizer room ST II from curious eyes?) There is some kind of cylindrical object in front of him (apparently a segment of the intermix shaft) that could equally pass for a TOS engine room floor casing containing the dilithium crystal converter assembly.
    The absence of illumination from the shaft that's supposed to be there could suggest something different. Even if the system was offline there should be bluish illumination somehow according to ST II.

    Bob
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2013
  9. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yeah, the Captain's Yeoman would likely have her own private quarters compared to the other Yeomans.


    I've been studying volume between the three ships and will post up a graphic this evening. Basically the thinking was how upgradeable would the ship be if future engineering equipment needed more space? The Enterprise would be trading it's cargo space for engineering space and she has alot less of it due to the shape of the engineering hull.

    My reply is questioning Crazie Eddie's assertion that horizontal power conduits ("piping") would not have to go through the engine room. We know that to run the power to the nacelles you need to connect to the vertical shaft in the engine room at least one horizontal shaft to lead off to the nacelles so the piping must be present in the engine room. It has nothing to do with the impulse deflection crystal.

    We catch enough to see the edge of the connecting ring (bottom left) and the edge of one of the "blades" that make up a section of the intermix shaft.

    Having a system offline would be different than having it shutoff and cold. In TWOK, offline was not having the ability to use the energizers to power stuff but the main reactor was still on. Excelsior's main reactor appears to have been turned off for whatever reason at the time Scotty is walking out.
     
  10. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Inverse square law: the brightness of the flash reduces as a function of distance (which is why the TORPEDO doesn't illuminate everything around it.

    Only if it is equidistant from the impulse deck. In this case, it is actually 5 times closer to the bridge dome as the impulse deck, which means the reflection on the bridge dome is 25 times greater. The reflection on the rest of the ship is apparently too dim to be perceived at all.

    Simple: Enterprise-A wasn't a new build.

    The displays on the back wall of the Stargazer bridge feature an LCARS-style graphic. Hathaway, IIRC, has several such displays in its engine room and a few on its bridge consoles. The Stargazer's log screen is more ambiguous, but fortunately is totally consistent with the display style seen on the Excelsior class ships. It COULD be consistent with some of the displays on the Enterprise-A, which -- again -- would explain why the ship was in such a sorry state in TFF (the retrofits didn't work nearly as well as Starfleet hoped).

    Actually my suggestion is that the Constellations DID manage to upgrade a bit over the years; they were able to be kept current with only minor expansions and replacements of instrumentation, sensors, weapons and other drop-in components that could be easily integrated into their systems. The point here is that even the converted Constitutions couldn't be kept current so easily.

    There are about a dozen references in Okudagrams and background references. It's also implied as recieving the same upgrades as the Lakota in time for the Dominion War.

    I've seen feasibility studies floated by analysts who proposed upgrading the space shuttle orbiters using more modern/off-the-shelf technology. Someone pointed out -- correctly -- that contemporary avionics systems used in military aircraft had twenty to thirty times the computing power of the shuttle's entire computing array and that all seven of the oribter's GPCs could be repalced by a single computing module. This also turned out to be true of the ship's life support and cooling systems, which were slightly revised 1970s technology.

    All of those studies came around, however, to the same basic conclusion: for the cost of breaking down, redesigning and rebuilding the space shuttle's avionics, electronics and life support systems just to upgrade them, it would actually be cheaper to build a totally new one and design those systems into the new design in the first place.

    In the case of the Constitution class, it appears the new systems that were being retrofitted at CONSIDERABLE cost -- to the old Constitution class ships were being designed into brand new starships from the outset, which would have unquestionably included expansion slots for new systems that were being planned but not yet fully realized. Since the original Enterprise was destroyed and the inauspicious Enterprise-A was eventually decommissioned (likewise, probably a very old design) it would as simple as starfleet simply choosing not to build any more Constitutions after the last two in the fleet were pulled.

    An expansion which was a feature of every NEW Miranda and Constellation the moment their hulls began construction. They wouldn't build them to the old configuration and convert them later, they'd just build them that way from the very beginning.

    Exactly: in order to accommodate it, they built something OTHER than a Constitution class.

    It doesn't HAVE to at all. It possibly does, because Starfleet engineers like to be able to physically look at their drive cores, but on Reliant the intermix chamber can be isolated from the rest of the engineering compartment room (the same way it can on the Enterprise-D) without dropping a gigantic pressure door and cutting the main plasma conduit in half.

    Not after Khan gets through with it, no.:p
     
  11. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    We're talking about the beginning of the explosion which is a lot brighter and thus causing the glare.

    The initial explosion frame shows that everything is slightly brighter compared to the previous frames. That is consistent with glare. You can see this effect when the sun is causing glare on the road. In the link the sun's glare appears to be on top of or very close to the trees but we know it's alot farther away.

    If it were where you say it was, then the front of the impulse deck should have received enough illumination to be noticeable, like the other frame that I point out in my earlier graphic.

    Scotty thinks it is.
    SCOTT: U.S.S. Enterprise, shakedown cruise report. I think this new ship was put together by monkeys.
    Now it could be argued that they got a "new ship" as in a ship they've never had before, but normally you wouldn't need to take an existing ship on a shakedown cruise. If it were a conversion ala TMP then this upgraded ship would've gotten new equipment just like a new build.

    I've seen them but they don't look like LCARS. They have a more movie-feel to them, IMHO.

    If it was a retrofit, they ironed out the problems by TUC. If it was a new-build as dialogue indicated in TFF, then they still ironed out the problems by TUC :)


    I'm in agreement here.

    I figured all Starfleet ships should've got a huge upgrade for the Dominion War :) I'm just not familiar with these inset graphics/okudagrams that show an upgrade.

    I'm in agreement. Starfleet probably looked at the next upgrade/modernization for the Constitutions and canceled it.

    Agreed.

    The E-D still had the horizontal piping connected to the vertical core. In TWOK, even though the pressure door was down, the Enterprise could still go to warp (we never see it lifted off.) IMO, that pressure door was up for easy access but there doesn't appear to be any reason why it couldn't be down.
     
  12. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Hardly "alot." It only illuminates a slightly larger portion of the bridge dome than the torpedo itself. It also isn't "glare" since the illumination of the bridge dome is offset from the actual impact point.

    Only if the torpedo was as close to the impulse deck as it was to the bridge dome.

    We don't know anything about the Enterprise-A except that it was given to Kirk as part of his punishment/demotion. For all we know, they dragged it out of mothballs a week ago and refurbished it just for Kirk.

    Which, if you remember, could be physically isolated along with the rest of the core by the big drop door in the event of an emergency (which is exactly what happened in The Drumhead). E-D's engine room also seems to have a convenient transparency installed so that the chief engineer can still run the engines from his office AND visually see the warp core in the event that the reactor compartment has been sealed off.

    TMP Enterprise doesn't have this option: when the big door comes down, most of the engine room is still locked in with the potentially-exploding intermix chamber and cannot even access their controls without swimming through a cloud of radiation. The offset dilithium chamber in the Wrath of Khan version at least has the virtue of being locked behind a barrier of some kind (as does its larger Abramsverse counterpart) but the plasma conduits are still exposed to the open air and cannot really be isolated in an emergency.
     
  13. blssdwlf

    blssdwlf Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Then how do you account for portions of the bridge dome not in Line of Sight to your hypothetical explosion point getting lit? The explosion point would need to be far to the port side of the bridge to illuminate it that way. It can only be glare.

    [​IMG]

    Sure but we do see that by TUC she has a different vertical shaft than from her TWOK days. It doesn't appear to be older equipment.

    The TMP Enterprise appears to have room for another door to slide down a gap to further isolate the vertical shaft and a control panel foyer (the one near where Kirk gives Decker the bad news). Of course the TUC version doesn't have this potential problem since it uses the same room design as the E-D.
     
  14. Chuck4

    Chuck4 Ensign Red Shirt

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    I propose the constitutions and Mirandas simply represented a high-low mix similar to f-15/f-16, f-22/f-35, and Ticonderoga/Burke. While the two classes have broadly analogous design elements and equipments, suggesting they were of the same equipment/Technology generation; Connies have the big deflector dish absent from Mirandas. All later high end federation ship designs like excelsior and successive enterprises down the line all had the dish. This suggests Connies were also the high end of the mix and were correspondingly more lavishly equipped for higher end, elite missions, while being more expensive to man and run and somewhat less flexible in performing low end yeoman missions. Miranda with two shuttle bays and no deflector dish could be designed as low end of the mix, meant to fill more pedestrian missions and produced in quantity to fill out numbers for the star fleet in case of war.

    Typically in any systematic procurement plan, higher end assets in any fleet are kept more up to date, and replaced more promptly as they became obsolescent, while lower end assets, are allowed to soldier on longer.
     
  15. Nob Akimoto

    Nob Akimoto Captain Captain

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    Well, let's avoid that analogy, because this was primarily a size issue at that point. In fact when the US Navy got around to actually building a ship of the line circa 1814, the USS Independence, nominally a 74-gun two decker was in fact larger than most of the Royal Navy's 80-gun ships and had an actual armament of 90-guns. This was born out of strategic necessity, as the USN wasn't expected to contest superiority at sea, but rather was a "break out" force that would break free out of blockaded ports and try to cause as much havoc among the blockading squadron as possible.
     
  16. Robert Comsol

    Robert Comsol Commodore Commodore

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    Welcome to the BBS, and although I read in another thread that you don't like the idea of starships performing mundane cargo transport duties, I can't help to remind that these openings at the stern of the Miranda Class look anything but shuttlebays compared to the visual design language of shuttlebays from the TOS Enterprise to the Voyager.

    I think these are inserts (and exterior connect hardpoints above) for cargo containers, but by the 24th Century Sisko's Saratoga obviously uses this space for shuttlecraft (just as I use my garage to store bikes and junk but not what the garage had been originally designed for). ;)

    Bob
     
  17. Chuck4

    Chuck4 Ensign Red Shirt

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    If star ship's shuttle function is secondary to its main design criteria, then one would expect the design language of the shuttle bay to adapt to the main design criteria of the ship, rather than the other way round, right?

    If reliant is designed with an extended saucer section for a more important reason than to convenience the shuttle arrangement, the it is the shuttle handling arrangement that must change to adapt to the design of the extended saucer section, not the other way round. Right?

    So how would one design the shuttle handling arrangement on the Miranda/reliant without imposing changes on the basic arrangement of the extended saucer section? It seems two rectangular doors on either side of impulse engine makes sense.

    You could say it is a modular space adaptable to both shuttle and cargo use. I have no problem with that. But my view is anything built like either enterprise or reliant clearly weren't designed with maximizing cargo space in mind. A sphere or a cube provides much more useful volume for the same structural weight as the complicated and convoluted star ship shape with saucers and pylons. It simply makes no sense that ships designed the way federation starships are designed could have had cargo space as a high priority.
     
  18. Robert Comsol

    Robert Comsol Commodore Commodore

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    I think the first question should be whether the Miranda Class needs shuttlecraft storage in the first place and whether shuttlecraft are truly a part of its "work description".

    I had always felt that the two shuttlebay doors (compared to the Enterprise's) simply look like one too much. They can (and will) use transporter rooms instead.

    And then we have the Constellation Class ships from the same era that appears to have plenty of shuttle and cargo space.

    Yes, the DS9 pilot episode seems to suggest that, although it takes place in the 24th Century and large cargo containers may have gone out of fashion.

    Not necessarily a high priority, but we can't exclude the possibility that transporting cargo containers had a higher priority in the late 23rd Century than carrying shuttlecraft. ;)

    Bob
     
  19. Chuck4

    Chuck4 Ensign Red Shirt

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    Since there is no material fact behind any of this, only wishful interpretation of what other people made up, sometimes on the spot, I'd say we can't exclude anything.
    :)

    But being a Trekkie and a naval history buff, I have to prefer an interpretation with a naval analogy. I would think transporter is nice, but it is only a substitute for one of a ship's shuttles' many possible roles. A reasonable collection of versatile shuttles are, like the collection of ship's boats that grace every sailing warship, vital to the a starship expected to operate independently, away from heavily built up federation economic and logistic centers, for lengthy periods of time.