TOS- and pre-TOS-era freighters

[Wingsley]

Recently, discussion has been revived over the design of "freighter"-type space vessels from the United Federation of Planets, and/or Earth. Over the past four years, I've been aware of two discussions in the Trek Art forum, one on the Federation Starship Huron (TAS: "The Pirates of Orion") and another on "Antares-type" cargo drones (TAS: "More Tribbles, More Troubles") and even the Starship Antares (TOS-R's "Charlie X"). I see this aspect of the STAR TREK Universe as (mostly) untapped for story and art potential.

This is also a topic that I've bandied about (on the technical side) in the past. In 2008, I started a thread in this forum about freighters/transports being warp-tugs. The essence of this thread was to find a way to establish that "freighter" and "transport" in the 23rd century would have meant a warp-tug hauling cargo-pods, perhaps similar to those seen in Franz Joseph Schnaubelt's 1975 Technical Manual. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The most recent art discussion, of the Huron, is just getting started. In that discussion, there is a brief speculation that an exterior arch-like structure under the Huron's fantail could conceivably be a docking port for FJ-style tubular cargo pods to hook-onto the aft of the ship, making it a warptug. I added speculation that the wing-like structures hanging from the underside of the bow might be additional attachment-points for hauling more cargo-pods.

Back in 2011, there was a discussion (also linked above) about the TAS cargo drones and TOS-R's Starship Antares. The thread provided some great 3D artwork of this set of ships. It also provided a new design concept: the notion that the aft-underside of these ships could be used as a connection port for a newer, squared-off design of larger cargo pods, and trains of those pods.

There are several issues that pop into my mind from the above discussion threads and their artwork / ideas: Would there be a reason why space fleets would choose cargo-pod hull designs that are either round (cylindrical) or square (rectangular solids)? It would seem to me that the square ones would offer greater internal volumetric efficiency, especially for "starliner" personnel pods. And if a project or a routine freight run required more than one pod design to be used, could these pods be engineered to be "mixed" in a "train"? (Let's say a tubular pod would be ideal for bulk-freight of some liquid or gaseous substance, but a square pod would be ideal for hardware-freight storage or personnel.) And would the Federation, or its member-worlds, in the TOS or pre-TOS-era, be able to use clever technological tricks to compress storage of inanimate freight? (I'm thinking about Sherman's Planet, which may have required huge amounts of grain and maybe agro-chemicals to help the struggling colony sustain itself.) Would they posses that technology?

And what about what these pods do when they are "dropped off" (decoupled from their "freighter"/warptug at their destination? Do these vessels posses the capability to land on an asteroid, planet, or moon on their own? Or do they require "dockyard tugs" to move them around? Could these pods manage a powered landing, or could they use heat shields and parachutes for re-entry?

I'm not wild about STAR TREK being used a military/war-drama, but if the Federation needed to thwart 750 Cubans/Klingons on the island/planetoid of Grenada, could starships guide "freighter" warptugs to close-orbit, let them jettison the pods, and have battalions of troops soft-land, Normandy-glider-style, on the planetoid to jump the Klingons? Or could the Federation at least be plausibly seen using landing of pods to economically deposit colonists on the surface of a strange, new world?

And then there's the matter of speed and types of such craft. In late 2009, I started a discussion here based on "a freighter's maximum speed", a quote from TOS "Friday's Child". Could it be that there are civilian "freighters", Starfleet "transports", and perhaps other related Starfleet vessels, each with a different level of specification and performance Sulu said "the best a freighter could do is Warp 2"; but maybe the Huron as a Starfleet transport would be built differently and thus have different capabilities? In other words, the Deirdre isn't like the Huron, and the Antares may be different than the Huron or the Deirdre? Or would they all be basically the same ship?

 

[Timo]

The best I can do at this time of night and this stage of flu is random sniping:

1) The Antares was called many things, but "freighter" wasn't one of them. Yet the Huron was repeatedly called "freighter" despite (also) being run by people in Starfleet uniforms (the military today would never speak of "freighters", but of "transports"). I'm now basically ready to believe in that funny FASA thing called "Starfleet Merchant Marine": apparently, Starfleet sends its personnel to run freighters were civilian operators dare not go, in order to promote trade. And this is different from the same personnel using the same ships for Starfleet supply runs.

2) We would be much better off if we chose to hear Sulu say "The best the freighter could do is warp 2". That is, Sulu knows the general specs of the real Deirdre, or at least knows what kind of freighters are operating in the vicinity, and thus isn't speaking too broadly to ruin credibility but is being specific.

3) In the style of Todd Guenther's old musings, I tend to see the Antares as highly modular, with the crew pod a definite add-on (vis-á-vis the automated TAS version) but with the other elements also variable. Some of the structures dangling on the bellies of the two types I see as stacks of generic cargo boxes, for carrying of small items and general goods. If tasked with towing big ore barges, the ships might leave those smaller boxes ashore. The Woden would be a barge tug, blessedly free of those expensive barges when M-5 destroys her, but easily modified to other configurations as well if necessary.

Many other Trek cargo ships have small ventral pods or containers for carrying of freight (say, the Batris and her ilk), so I'm all the more confident in thinking the TAS/TOS-R ship also has this configuration - and that the Huron follows the pattern, her odd ventral shapes being a random collection of available cargo-carrying systems that might have looked quite different two weeks later or earlier.

4) Pod shapes seem to vary a lot, and many are ship-specific rather than readily interchangeable. I'd like to think there's a logistical logic to that, and the use of standard containers is unprofitable in the Trek universe. It would seem obvious why this might be: it's a "frontier economy" rather than a network of equally "civilized" ports with equally high-quality infrastructure. Containers would needlessly accumulate in frontier ports incapable of rapidly filling them with return goods, would sail back half-empty from many assignments, would have to be sent empty to gather valuable but bulky ore from colonies that desire nothing from the core worlds, etc.

Hence the classic Earth container ship dies as soon as the Federation is formed. Instead of containers, ships have holds - and those holds just happen to be modular for the wildly varying needs of the frontier. And the Franz Joseph cylinders, if they exist in canon at all, are not containers, either, but something a tugship can deploy at destination to perform a mission. Essentially, river barges delivered by an oceangoing barge carrier (a hoped-for mode of operations on Earth's oceans before containers replaced it even at destinations with extremely poor port facilities). Some of the barges just loiter in orbit until the meager local resources can stevedore the goods down to the surface. Others become local outposts, temporary garrisons or whatnot. Few behave like today's shipping containers, although that mode of operations is also available for ports capable of making use of it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Antares was referred to at one point as a "cargo vessel", among other things.

 

[Wingsley]

Log entries from "Charlie X":

"Captain's log, stardate 1533.6. Now maneuvering to come alongside cargo vessel Antares. Its captain and first officer are beaming over to us with an unusual passenger."

"Captain's log, stardate 1533.7. We have taken aboard an unusual passenger for transport to Colony Alpha V. Charles Evans, the sole survivor of a transport crash fourteen years ago. The child, alone from age 3, has not only survived, but has grown to intelligent, healthy adolescence."

"Captain's log, stardate 1535.8. UESPA headquarters notified of the mysterious loss of science probe vessel Antares."

 

[Wingsley]

In TMP4 (TVH), McCoy speculates "The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the Universe. We'll get a freighter." I take this to mean that "transport" and "freighter" are likely regarded by Starfleet characters in-universe as interchangeable.

 

[Timo]

Or then McCoy thinks they will be kicked out of Starfleet after all..

Why is the middle quote, about a "transport crash", included there? It doesn't involve the Antares herself.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

I grabbed all three log-entry quotes from the Memory Alpha article because they were together.

 

[Avro Arrow]

This is just going from memory, so I could be wrong, but I believe in the FASA manuals, Starfleet operated both ships called Freighters and called Transports... the difference between the two categorizations was that Freighters carried their cargo internally in holds (like the Huron), and Transports carried their cargo in externally-mounted containers (like FJ's Ptolemy).

Non-canon, obvs.

 

[Wingsley]

Very interesting concept, Avro Arrow.

I've been scratching my head about the concept, dating clear back to when I started my warptug thread in this forum in 2008. It seems Starfleet employs vessels that haul cargo internally; we've seen this with TAS Huron and the TAS robot grain ships, as well as in TNG with the Lantree. We also saw the TAS robot grain ship expanded with a crew module to become the TOS-R Antares, which was identified as a "cargo vessel" and a "science probe vessel".

But canon hasn't show us any warptugs, though. FJ used a (very) loose implication that the "Astral Queen" was a Starliner-pod (TOS "Conscience of the King"), supposedly tugged through space by a Ptolemy-class starship. We never actually saw that, though. The notion that cargo and personnel are hauled only on ships seems severely limiting to me, to the point where it doesn't make sense. A Federation that can build fully-functional automated mining facilities, prefab star bases/space-stations, and heavily support Sherman's Planet from a distance with massive amounts of supplies, is not going to haul all of its cargo and personnel aboard starships as supercargo. (See my warptug from 2008 for a more substantial discussion of this.) They're going to need warptugs and cargo-/starliner-pods. I'm not alone in this thinking; Rich Merk did a great job CGI-ing the TOS-R Antares and robot grain ships and showing them tugging huge, boxy cargo pods. By doing so, Merk gave a new dimension to the concept of "Federation freight" by making those "Antares"-style ships into pod-train-hauling warptugs. I had not thought of that previously, but it does make sense, in-universe.

 

[Ithekro]

Remember that the pre-Federation era Earth cargo ships had attached pods with a tiny control ship with the small warp 2 engines and nacelles. The ships were old enough to have had their warp cores signed by Cochrane himself.

 

[Wingsley]

Yes, that seems to (indirectly) validate the FJ external cargo pod concept. Thanks for bringing that into the conversation, Ithekro.

Here's a concept I've seen bandied about on this forum before: ships like the SS Deirdre (TOS: "Friday's Child") only go Warp 2, even in the later half of the 23rd century. I don't remember if there was any specific speed ever assigned to the robot cargo ships in TAS: "More Troubles, More Tribbles", but I did watch TAS: "Pirates of Orion" last night and while specific speeds were never spoken in regards to the U.S.S. Huron, the impression was pretty clear that she was no speed demon, either. This is the concept: ships like the Woden (TOS / TOS-R: "The Ultimate Computer") and the robot cargo grain ships are built from components that are meant to have high reliability and longevity in mind. I assume their nacelles are not high-performance. So they can sustain Warp 2 reliably for very long periods of time, time after time, and require little or no maintenance. They are probably also very easy to maintain and replace. Chances are, they'll never see Warp 3, but they do their job reliably and with little fuss. I assume that other vessels like the Dierdre, Beagle, Huron and Antares, etc. are a similar story. The technology behind these propulsion packages was probably developed in the early 22nd century, so it was probably already proven, refined and with thousands of light-years of operation across various shipping fleets long before the ECS Horizon we saw in ENT.

Here's another issue I'd like to bring up:

• In TAS: "More Tribbles, More Troubles", the cargo ships hauling the grain to Sherman's Planet are specifically called robot ships.
  
• In TOS: "By Any Other Name", Spock tries to persuade Rojan that commandeering the Enterprise is not necessary, suggesting the use of a "robot ship" instead:

In the Rec Room / Mess Hall, Kirk and Rojan are engaged in fisticuffs.

KIRK: Your mission is to find new worlds for your people to live in! You can still do that! We can bring this problem to the Federation! There are many planets in this galaxy that can be inhabited!

ROJAN: You would really do that? You would extend welcome to invaders?

Kirk and Rojan stop fighting.

KIRK: No! But we would welcome friends.

SPOCK: Rojan, you are only a link in a chain, following an order given three hundred years ago. This is an opportunity for you to establish a destiny of your own.

ROJAN: Perhaps. Perhaps it could be done.

SPOCK: A robot ship could be sent to Kelva with the Federation proposal.

• And in TOS: "The Immunity Syndrome", Kirk orders the Enterprise to launch (obviously unmanned) probes to investigate the Gamma Seven-A space amoeba phenomenon.

• We also can note the existence of robots such as Nomad (TOS:"The Changeling") and Flint's M-4 (TOS: "Requiem for Methuselah").

Since this all establishes that robots do exist in TOS/TAS, and that Starfleet and Federation-aligned space travelers obviously see no problem in using them, would it be such a stretch to assume that partially and fully automated cargo vessels such as the Woden and the grain ships may not have any living crew at all, but may have a dedicated crew of utilitarian robots to at least maintain the cargo ship?

 

[T'Girl]

cargo vessel Antares

Bit of guess work, this is what the vessel does.

science probe vessel Antares

And this is who the vessel belongs too.

Similar to referring to a modern ship both as a "cruise ship," and a "Royal Caribbean ship."

 

[Wingsley]

Interesting conjecture, T'Girl.

My take on it is that U.S.S. Antares, being a Federation starship but not a starship-of-the-line, is a general-purpose vessel. She is capable of and regularly performs multiple duties; she can haul cargo and conduct probe-operations or other science research in deep space as needed.

 

[JES]

Sounds like a workhorse to me, but without the armament.

 

[Timo]

Certainly the fact that the Antares stumbled upon Charlie Evans suggests a versatile mission profile - why would a cargo hauler (be it a tramp, a packet ship or a supply vessel) visit a planet where there are no known paying customers?

For all we know, UESPA buys or rents these elderly (?) general transports and equips them for basic survey duty. Starfleet has flashier survey gear, but that's just the silver bullet force; for the bulk of survey work, cheaper solutions must be employed, and Antares is one of them.

It's not as if the episode established the ship performing any sort of transport duties, despite being a "cargo vessel" by description. Might be that it's "cruise ship" by design and "Royal Caribbean ship" by owner but "dropping survey parties on the Antarctica for NOAA" by mission...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Avro Arrow]

But canon hasn't show us any warptugs, though.

The original version of "The Ultimate Computer" showed the Woden as a reuse of the Botany Bay model, which features cargo pods arranged around the body of the spindle-like ship. Not quite the same as FJ's concept, but similar. Now, it doesn't seem likely that the UFP would still be using DY-100s in the mid-23rd century, but possibly the Woden represented the DY-500 class, which Kirk was familiar with, and therefore might actually feature warp drive and such?

Of course, this was replaced entirely in TOS-R with a TAS robot ship.

They're going to need warptugs and cargo-/starliner-pods. I'm not alone in this thinking; Rich Merk did a great job CGI-ing the TOS-R Antares and robot grain ships and showing them tugging huge, boxy cargo pods.

Those are great! Thanks for linking to that thread!

Since this all establishes that robots do exist in TOS/TAS, and that Starfleet and Federation-aligned space travelers obviously see no problem in using them, would it be such a stretch to assume that partially and fully automated cargo vessels such as the Woden and the grain ships may not have any living crew at all, but may have a dedicated crew of utilitarian robots to at least maintain the cargo ship?

I guess I just always assumed that the ships themselves were the "robots", not that they were crewed with autonomous robots. Sorta like definition #4 found here. Sentient beings would load the ships at their departure points, then send them on their way, and then another group of sentient beings would unload them at their destination. They probably use them only in "safe" areas (or else you have to send them with a heavy cruiser escort, like in TAS), and to transport cargo that wouldn't require monitoring or intervention.

Nomad was originally just a space probe, and was made into a "robot" by another alien probe. M-4 was made by reclusive genius "Flint", who had already removed himself from UFP society. I don't recall any evidence from TOS or TAS that would show that Starfleet, or the UFP at large, routinely uses robots of the type you describe?

 

[Wingsley]

Certainly the fact that the Antares stumbled upon Charlie Evans suggests a versatile mission profile - why would a cargo hauler (be it a tramp, a packet ship or a supply vessel) visit a planet where there are no known paying customers?

For all we know, UESPA buys or rents these elderly (?) general transports and equips them for basic survey duty. Starfleet has flashier survey gear, but that's just the silver bullet force; for the bulk of survey work, cheaper solutions must be employed, and Antares is one of them.

It's not as if the episode established the ship performing any sort of transport duties, despite being a "cargo vessel" by description. Might be that it's "cruise ship" by design and "Royal Caribbean ship" by owner but "dropping survey parties on the Antarctica for NOAA" by mission...

Timo Saloniemi

This is what I had in mind.

I envisioned the very first general-purpose starships like this to be the Earth ringships of the early 22nd century (pre-ENT) era; the rings would not be engines but instead a superstructure onto which mission modules would be docked. (lab module, crew module, cargo module, "shuttlecraft" module, etc.) This allowed the ringships to be capable of a broad variety of mission profiles, including freight hauling, both locally and interstellar.

Earth's pre-ENT ringships would be the great-grandaddy of general-purpose starships like the Deirdre, the Huron, the Antares. These newer ships would be slow and crude next to graceful starships-of-the-line like the Enterprise, but still remarkably powerful, versatile and valuable.

I see ships like these having tug capability as well. Rich Merk did a great job in his artwork illustrating how vessels like the Antares could haul trains of cargo pods. I like this because it echoes what was said in my earlier thread on warptugs.

 

[Wingsley]

I guess I just always assumed that the ships themselves were the "robots", not that they were crewed with autonomous robots. Sorta like definition #4 found here. Sentient beings would load the ships at their departure points, then send them on their way, and then another group of sentient beings would unload them at their destination. They probably use them only in "safe" areas (or else you have to send them with a heavy cruiser escort, like in TAS), and to transport cargo that wouldn't require monitoring or intervention.

Nomad was originally just a space probe, and was made into a "robot" by another alien probe. M-4 was made by reclusive genius "Flint", who had already removed himself from UFP society. I don't recall any evidence from TOS or TAS that would show that Starfleet, or the UFP at large, routinely uses robots of the type you describe?

TOS and TAS were skirting this issue, but in Vonda McIntyre's novelization of TMP2, Scott reported to Kirk that his "repair robot" broke down due to the radiation.

I always assumed that if the Federation would allow robotic probes and sending a robotic ship to Kelva, then at least crude semi-autonomous custodial repair robots must be permissible/practical. After all, if you have a robot cargo ship hauling tons of grain, what's wrong with robots doing maintenance?

 

[Timo]

Interestingly enough, TAS only showed the robot ships operating under escort and control by the crewed starship. It took TOS-R to show the redone Woden of that design operating truly solo. Although of course the original Woden had done that already, just without any "robot ship" terminology associated with her.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Avro Arrow]

Although of course the original Woden had done that already, just without any "robot ship" terminology associated with her.

I'm not sure what you mean by that? Daystrom explicitly referred to Woden as a "robot ship" in dialogue.