ST XI ships

[Ronald Held]

I though that it might be an older design than the Enterprise. I also think the upper "nacelle" may be the engineering hull.

[Herkimer Jitty]

Dukhat wrote:

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The ship and the lettering looks very military to me. As if the Kelvin were built by the U.S. Army. I'd be interested in seeing what the duty uniforms look like for Robao and George Kirk.

Well, the registry lettering is basically the same as the TOS lettering, with red outlining and a border added. The name font looks a lot like the TMP name font.

[Samurai8472]

heres a nice new shot

[shipfisher]

My two cents worth has the Kelvin with over/under nacelles sporting blue/red ram scoops. The blue "eye" on top is pretty much what you'd expect those turbine ramscoops on the trailer 1701 would look like when run up and opertional. As I've said in another thread, dual colour scoops could mean segregated functions in the gas collection cycle (ie. ionize/collect).

By the way, is some sort of deflector mounted centerline on the front of a nacelle such a horrible thought? We know trek def dishes have been portrayed as multi-function devices before. Couldn't doubling up a dish/scoop be an option when ship design requires frontal area be kept to a minimum, for what ever reason?

[JuanBolio]

shipfisher wrote:

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My two cents worth has the Kelvin with over/under nacelles sporting blue/red ram scoops. The blue "eye" on top is pretty much what you'd expect those turbine ramscoops on the trailer 1701 would look like when run up and opertional. As I've said in another thread, dual colour scoops could mean segregated functions in the gas collection cycle (ie. ionize/collect).

So far my thoughts are running along the same lines... but I could always be wrong.

[shipfisher]

JuanBOOlio wrote:

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So far my thoughts are running along the same lines... but I could always be wrong.

Nice to have someone thinking along the same lines, though as you say, we may be the ones off the mark. The alternate idea that the Kelvin has only one ventral nacelle and a big deflector hoisted up well above the main saucer is, well, truly "fugly" IMO, both in looks and possibly dynamics.

[Herkimer Jitty]

Personally, I think they're going to stick with what we know, IE, the bussards aren't going to be anything but amber or red. I think the ship would look far less ugly in motion (And indeed having visualized this in my mind, this holds true).

[Captain Robert April]

A mishmash of design elements by someone who clearly doesn't know the technological progression as shown in the various series and movies.

It's like putting a whale-tail spoiler on a Model T and sticking the monstrosity in an episode of "Gunsmoke".

[JuanBolio]

Nah, its not that bad. We don't even have a good shot to go on yet, not the Enterprise for comparison.

[Christopher]

shipfisher wrote:

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My two cents worth has the Kelvin with over/under nacelles sporting blue/red ram scoops. The blue "eye" on top is pretty much what you'd expect those turbine ramscoops on the trailer 1701 would look like when run up and opertional. As I've said in another thread, dual colour scoops could mean segregated functions in the gas collection cycle (ie. ionize/collect).

The idea behind the "turbines" in the trailer was to be the machinery behind the red nacelle domes, the source of the spinning light patterns we all know and love. The ship was under construction, so the nacelles weren't complete, and the interior machinery was exposed.

The so-called "eye" looks almost exactly like the TMP Enterprise's deflector dish. Given that there's a strong TMP influence on the designs, I think it has to be a deflector.

By the way, is some sort of deflector mounted centerline on the front of a nacelle such a horrible thought? We know trek def dishes have been portrayed as multi-function devices before. Couldn't doubling up a dish/scoop be an option when ship design requires frontal area be kept to a minimum, for what ever reason?

How can the same instrument both deflect interstellar matter and suck it up at the same time?

shipfisher wrote:

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The alternate idea that the Kelvin has only one ventral nacelle and a big deflector hoisted up well above the main saucer is, well, truly "fugly" IMO, both in looks and possibly dynamics.

Why? There's no up or down in space, except relative to the ship interior. We've seen in First Contact and ENT that the gravity field doesn't extend past the hull (even though that makes absolutely no physical sense). So why is an engineering hull "above" the saucer any different dynamically from an engineering hull "below" it? For that matter, remember that Jefferies's original design sketch for the Enterprise did, in fact, have the engineering hull above the saucer and the nacelles below it. The Kelvin appears to be a cross between that original orientation and the Franz Joseph Saladin or Hermes class.

[shipfisher]

Christopher wrote:

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How can the same instrument both deflect interstellar matter and suck it up at the same time?

I suppose I was thinking of using the deflector to repel/ionize interstellar matter/gas with a collector of suitable geometry (heck, probably still a dome) mounted directly behind it, drawing ionized gas in laterally around the plume of cleared space directly in the ship's path. When you consider that the collection area involved here could be on the order of many km in diameter (hundreds, thousands?), would the usual def dish/ram scoop forward angle offset of a few dozen metres be a considerably different situation?

The other option is a dual mode device which wouldn't perform deflection and collection operations concurrently, however in saying that, I've always wondered about a single ram scoop unit that would both ionize and collect gas and assumed that the deflector might be providing the ionizing radiation that made the collection cycle work in any case.

[Timo]

...'Course, if you are going to manipulate the flight paths of gas molecules, why not manipulate them so that the desired percentage flies into your collector and the desired percentage misses the ship? One and the same device might be the economical way of doing that.

If the upper protrusion of the Kelvin is just a stubby pod and not an elongated nacelle, we might argue that this is the "canonical" take on Hermes and Saladin classes (as the shape roughly matches the fuzzy silhouettes we saw on the displays of the TOS movie bridges, much like the movie display versions of NCC-1701 are fuzzy matches for the real thing), and that NCC-514 just received a big dorsal sensor pod at some point of her service life, along with a name change from the martial Rahman to the scientific Kelvin plus the additional letter O to specify an Observation role.

Timo Saloniemi

[jolau]

Perhaps it's not a number 0 in that registry number but in fact the letter O

[Timo]

Experts on fonts would probably immediately tell us that an O would have to be wider than the onscreen digit 0. Then again, there are more fonts out there than there are typewriters even today; we really couldn't say anything definite about fictional 23rd century fonts.

Certainly a TAS-style descriptive letter would be pretty cool, at least to my perverted mind. It would also be consistent with the onscreen appearances of three-digit registries, none of which have had the preceding zero so far. And as said, I'd love to continue believing in NCC-514, USS Rahman, in addition to believing in this new old ship.

I wonder if we will learn the class of the Kelvin in the movie? That'd be a first, really...

Timo Saloniemi

[MarianLH]

Timo wrote:

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I wonder if we will learn the class of the Kelvin in the movie? That'd be a first, really...

It isn't 1982 anymore; they know we're interested in these things. The class name may not be in the movie, but I'm sure it'll be published in some way. It didn't take too long for "Sovereign class" to become known. Unlike the 9(?) year gap between Star Trek II and the first use of the term Miranda.


Marian