General Star Trek starship thread.

A couple of nuances:

The names K'Vort and B'Rel as applying to the "Yesterday's Enterprise" footage come from different universes. Perhaps the names are simply swapped when one hops through the Mirror? That is, K'Vort in the dark realm is the big ship and B'Rel a smaller one, but in the regular world it's vice versa.

Small variations in size could be covered by assuming that this is an artifact or design feature of the cloaking device. Like a cornered cat, a BoP may appear bigger at the push of a button, or become smaller and less noticeable even if visible when the cloak is being run at a low setting...

But large variations may be fine as well. The entire point of the winged design may be to facilitate planetary assault, and in our reality the craft designed for amphibious assault look basically identical in design across a vast size range, from the humblest LCVP to the big oceangoing LST. A big battle cruiser or "Warbird" and a big landing cruiser or "Bird of Prey" may be equal in size but built for different missions altogether.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Interesting... always liked the Oberth class, such a derpy little design. The redshirt of the Starfleet.

 

For me, the Oberth was the Ultimate Function over Form where the design was pigeon holed as a Planetary Survey Vessel, nothing else.

 

I love the Oberth and wish they created more non-Hero Looking ships. Wasn’t the Equinox supposed to be its replacement? The thing looks like a cross between the Sovereign and a Ceti Eel.

It’s also I think the only Exelsior Era contemporary that I can think of. The Curry and the Centaur are 1) kitbashes of multiple era parts, 2) kitbshes using identical Exelsior parts instead of keeping the spirit of the era but creating original designs, 3) aren’t really screen-ready beyond momentary low-res glances, and 4) came much much later, if that matters.

And it has its issues. 1) there’s no real deflector, regardless what we’d like to imagine behind that solid duranium casing, 2) the pylons probably aren’t thick enough for a turbo lift and maybe only a Jeffries tube, and 3) the line-of-sight issue with the nacelles disturbs me.

And I kinda don’t care about any of that, because I like the design. The deflector I’ll buy is somehow there (as it appears on the orthos), and I’ll take the Jeffries tube idea (if the secondary hull is even inhabitable at all).

It’s actually the line-of-sight that bothers me most. I know plenty of ships break this rule, including, what, most alien ones? But it’s the rule that explains for me the whole look of the Enterprise at all. Why is the secondary hull separate from the primary hull? Because the secondary hull is dangerous (Scotty’s engineering suit) and may need jettisoning. Why are the nacelles separate from the secondary hull? Because they need to look at each other to create the warp effect, and they’re even more dangerous than the the secondary hull. Earlier ships (Daedalus) especially needed the separation, but later ships (neckless Voyager, integrated Saber) less so.

Still, the Oberth is cute, so it stays.

 

I seem to remember a line about billion ton super spacers in the TMP novel...

 

What's a "Super Spacer"?

 

A spacey equivalent to the super tankers which ply the oceans of todays world.

 

I would like to see the Star Trek universe version of a ship shipping ship, shipping shipping ships.

 

Ship Orgy: Winner Best Trech Pic Porn Prize of the Day, with Distinction for Alliteration.

 

I don't need the special effect between the nacelles to do the line-of-sight magic (it would probably undermine the viability of a lot of ships), but I found Probert's image researching another thread and thought I'd share. It is beautiful anyway.

 

Never was a fan much of the warp effect. Though I do wonder where Star Trek would be if they adopted that from TMP going forward...

On the matter of Oberths, is it worth trying to discuss why so many of the TMP designs have such longevity... at the expense of the Wolf 359 fleet (which clearly showed contemporary designs to the Next Generation)? I wonder why the production crew didn't just create copies of the wrecked ships to feature throughout the series. You'd think from the result that the Federation basically halved their entire starship production after 2293, going from hundreds of ships to mere dozens. By how vanishingly rare classes like the Niagra, New Orleans, and Cheyanne are on-screen it would seem one major conflict was enough to decimate the entire class.

It is noteworthy that only the Cheyenne seemed to have been revisited since its appearance in Wolf 359 with it showing up in STO. The New Orleans has joined it now, but that's a long period of time with these one-off designs not being revisited... in spite of them supposedly being the bulk of the Federation at the time.

 

...Or then an upcoming thing, the supposed "Galaxy generation" of starships, that was abandoned altogether because of its poor performance in this crisis? Perhaps ships of that general design

1) didn't fight well?
2) were too slow to reach the battle in time?
3) were too expensive to build in such numbers that they could reach these battles in time?

Since ships of this design do appear in later Trek, but only big ships (Galaxy, Nebula, arguably Akira), perhaps 3 is the most attractive option. The Galaxy characteristics might be superior, but so expensive that the bulk of the fleet would have to be constructed differently.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I always figured that the New Orleans, Cheyenne, Challenger, Springfield, Freedom, and Niagara classes were very good ships that fought as well as newer classes we would see in DS9 and the movies. But they were to expensive to build in large numbers once the threat of the Borg was revealed.
I also always thought that the fleet at this time was phasing out the various Excelsior/Miranda/Oberth classes and their variants in favor of the new ships. However with the Borg Starfleet reactivated a large part of their old ships which had been lying in mothballs. This was done to fill the ranks as much as possible while the new generation of ships were designed.
These new classes. Sabre, Norway, Steamrunner, Akira, Sovereign and of course Defiant, were not as well rounded as the classes that preceded them. Being instead optimised for short term scientific studies and combat. Rather than the long range missions, luxurious crew quarters and extensive scientific facilities of the previous generation.
The exeption to this would be the Galaxy and Nebula classes which was apparently capable of being trimmed down into cheaper to build versions judging from the numbers we saw in the Dominion war. Perhaps Starfleet designers got rid of most of the extra parts of the design in favor of building extremely powerful combat vessels.

 

We didn’t see the Wolf 359 ships again because they sucked. They were never screen ready, and I say that as someone who’s featuring a few of them in my thread Starships of the Galaxy Era. It would have been nice if they had the time and budget to give them the full service, not only installing lights but also addressing countless esthetic issues. There’s not a single ship theat didn’t need an extensive refit to play as a Hero Ship.

Given the completely hideous/senseless models they used in the background shots hovering over DS9 during the Dominion War, I think it’s obvious that they just slap together whatever parts they have lying around at the time. Like they did for 359 at its time.

That said, I’d love it if someone salvaged the Curry Class — with Excelsior Era nacelles/pylons attached to the stardrive, and a saucer perched on an identical but higher neck and further back on a longer Excelsior stardrive. I created and posted pencil/Paint versions ten years ago with some others, but they’re now lost on the internet.

 

I have the feeling that more thought was put into the Wolf 359 kitbashes than the DS9 ones. Between the two W359 took effort to reflect the contemporaries of the galaxy... Ds9 should have done similar to represent updated classes, instead they kitbashed (at the time) seventy year old designs?

I don't recall among W359 that the designs suffered from obvious size disparities in components like the Curry-type with Refit nacelles mated to an Excelsior primary hull (Unless those massive nacelles were, I dunno, salvaged from battleships?). The exception I think are galaxy nacelles mated at different sizes to parent hulls, but even some of them were altered in different ways to reflect different engine types (New Orleans).

This is also just the observation that so much TMP-era technology is still in use after seventy years. I suppose it works given some cold-war examples of vehicles in the present... but the lack of Galaxy and preceding Ambassador types (c.2344) of ships is worth noting. Where was starship development going where two entire generations of ships (Ambassador, Galaxy) were determined unworthy enough to fight the borg, yet strong enough to beat the Cardassians to a standstill? (more points for the Borg I guess...)

I'm not a fan of much of the 2360s designs- too organic- but I do like the New Orleans and Cheyanne and would have loved to see them in an expanded capacity over dragging out the Reliant -again- for more and more modifications.

 

I never had a problem with the DS9 kitbashes. They're way cool, plausible stepsisters to known forefront designs, and a nice spread across decades of distinct design aesthetics, filling some gaps to my great satisfaction. And no, they aren't a hodgepodge of poorly matched era-specific components - except for the Elkins, whose improbable nacelles we never actually saw on screen, and wouldn't have recognized as ill fitting unless the ship came up close.

The Wolf 359 kitbashes are fun, too. But since TNG already had shown Starfleet operating an eclectic mix of ships from different eras, I wouldn't have expected to see the Miarecki ships en masse anyway. Although I dig the marker pen nacelles. Perhaps whenever in doubt, Starfleet goes for boxy, for "interim" engine designs?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well--the high seas version
http://www.cargolaw.com/2009nightmare_margaret.html