The Excelsior - uncovering the design

Discussion in 'Trek Tech' started by yotsuya, Mar 28, 2021.

  1. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    I honestly thought it was an improvement on the original design, myself. I incorporated the nacelle upgrades and more aggressive-looking slung-back neck area in a number of my own personal designs. Although I was kind of annoyed that they got rid of the TIE fighter hatches on the top/front of the nacelles. They were a cute touch on the original. :D
     
  2. dupersuper

    dupersuper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Cloaking device???
     
  3. Tallguy

    Tallguy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    In the TMP blueprints the Enterprise AND the K'Tinga both had cloaks.
     
  4. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    According to Memory Alpha, the Treaty of Algeron forbidding Federation cloaks didn’t happen until 2311, so sure, why not? :)

    I think the DC comic series from back in the 80’s called it a “stealth screen” to make it sound less Romulany/Klingony. :D
     
  5. dupersuper

    dupersuper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    That's a violation of a treaty that the Federation will one day sign in good faith!
     
  6. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    It’s not a violation if it hasn’t happened yet. :confused:
     
  7. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Well, something had to happen with the one stolen in The Enterprise Incident.
     
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  8. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Loved those old comics. The Excelsior going at warp 17, tracking phasers, they were charting new territory. Sadly canon kept things so much more conservative.
     
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  9. Henoch

    Henoch Rear Admiral Premium Member

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    Odd power system: The Matter/Antimatter "reactor" in the saucer in front of the impulse engines, pumping power through the "deflection crystal" down into the secondary hull then up into the warp nacelles. Again, a wafer thin main deflector with no machinery behind it. <Sigh.>
     
  10. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    I always thought the impulse deflection crystal made the intermix energy usable for the impulse engines (w/ the fusion reactors used as a backup in case the intermix flow shuts down for any reason), hence the term "impulse deflection". Like what the dilithium crystals do to balance the M/AM stream to make usable intermix energy for the whole system. It doesn't move power down into the ship, it channels it up and out.
     
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  11. Henoch

    Henoch Rear Admiral Premium Member

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    Just reading the labels of the "odd" features in the Excelsior drawing above... mind you, I disagree with the information displayed in the drawing.
     
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  12. Boris Skrbic

    Boris Skrbic Commodore Commodore

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    Regarding the size, Generations makes it very clear where Deck 15 is supposed to be, even if we disregard the fact that until the DSC-E came along, no one behind the scenes dared contradict the famous line-up of the Enterprises by length. I’m not sure how Doug Drexler came up with the deck count in his MSD of the E-B, but we know from the DS9TM that he was perfectly fine with scaling the Defiant at 560’ in the exterior views while fleshing out the four-deck interior (and the same for the station), suggesting his workflow starts with setting a deck count that is requested (as with the Defiant) or one that looks good on the diagram, leaving the overall length to take care of itself.
     
  13. 137th Gebirg

    137th Gebirg Admiral Premium Member

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    Understood - to be fair, tech usage for 23rd century vessels was very inconsistent.

    For years, people have been trying to rationalize early in-dialog technobabble to try to reconcile it with what came later in TNG. TOS' implication that power came entirely from the nacelles flew in the face of TNG's M/AM intermix taking place in main engineering. TOS actually flew in its own face by having multiple points where dilithium crystals would be located throughout the ship. Were they sources of power or catalysts for power distribution? For a time, both, apparently. Further, while TNG closely resembled what was happening in the TMP main engineering, there were still some oddities, especially when they introduced the laterally-placed "reactor room" as more of a dramatic location for Spock to die in TWOK, rather than a facility that served a viable ship function.
     
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  14. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    TOS was wildly inconsistent with their descriptions. most references are one offs and are intended for that episode. Some of it are the writers trying to use antimatter in a sentence. Emphasizing the Babble side of technobabble. I like to go by what we see. I consider that more reliable than the dialog. What we see in TOS is two large nacelles, set out from the main hull for safety. Engineering wise we are shown various uses for dilithium crystals (3 or 4 I think), but the only time we are shown anything with Anti-matter is in That Which Survives in the 3rd seasons which places the the anti-matter stream inside the ship. Scotty is someplace ejectable (which they fortunately don't need to use).

    In TMP we are shown a great vertical shaft and a horizontal shaft leading to the nacelles, but nothing is explained on screen. What I did find is that the reaction was at the base of the vertical shaft with the contents split between the deflection crystal and the two nacelles. In TMP. like the series, we see something related to the main engines in the engine room that can be fixed to get main power back. In Elaan of Troyious they take the pieces from Elaan's necklace and stick them in a socket in the engine room that is vaguely reminiscent of what Spock would later mess with in TWOK.

    TNG established that the dilithium, now an irregular crystal, sits at the point where matter and anti-matter meet. It is used to fine tune and control the reaction. That is quite different from how it was explained in TOS where the crystals are part of converting the power of the matter/anti-matter reaction into power for ship's systems. We don't really find out how they do that on the TNG ship. So somewhere between things changed. Since the TNG core set then retroactively appeared as the 1701-A warp core, we could guess that the Excelsior might be the source of some of those changes. Though the only glimpse we get of the Excelsior NX warp core is the TMP warp core/Engineering set. We only catch a corner of the core itself. So we can guess that the warp core redesign starts with the Excelsior. It was an experiment to improve warp drive. We know that the Constellation is in the NX phase in Star Trek VI and that the Hathway, long retired, has the TNG warp core. the only oddity is that the Voyager used the TMP warp core set.

    But once we have the shaft system, whether the reaction is at the base or at the junction, the reaction happens inside and the system is full of plasma that heads to the defection crystal and the nacelles and is the source of main power and warp speed. That Which Survives is the precursor to that system. And I think Enterprise back engineered that system to be of the same lineage as well. So if you ignore the outliers, there is a consistent and long term pattern to the Star Trek power systems.
     
    Last edited: Apr 3, 2021
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  15. dupersuper

    dupersuper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yeah, then the crew all turned into salamanders and started having sex with each other...those comics sure got weird.
     
  16. RichT

    RichT Guest

    The only thing about the Ingram design I prefer over the regular Excelsior is the nacelle pylons being attached to the secondary hull directly. That strange "bump" the Excelsior has that the nacelles attach to bugs me from a structural point of view.

    Everything else on the regular Excelsior though is much more elegant. In particular I hate backward-sloped necks on starship designs, like the Ingram has – it makes them look like an affronted duck.
     
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  17. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    I believe the patents were for making toys and models, not some weird attempt to protect the designs via a non-Copyright sense.
     
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  18. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Hard to argue with since the patent was for a toy, but at the same time, it is the only way to protect that IP. And you can argue that the main focus was indeed miniatures. After all, no one has the technology to build a full size version in space. But it would also prevent anyone from copying the design for another movie. Because, to be blunt, without a patent, anyone can use the ship design as they see fit. When you get into the markings and names you can run afoul of trademark, which is why I think the Reliant plans were for the Avenger or Miranda initially. FJ even hedged his bets and drew the Constitution. So I think there is a case to be made that the patents Paramount did were for the IP and ALL the various avenues it could be used. Of course it is easy to investigate trademarks and patents and I have never been able to find any trademarks on the ships or markings. Not that they don't have the right to file for it if they want (trademarks are a bit different in how they can be applied for and used).
     
  19. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    If it was that easy the moment the patent expired there would be copies. And designs not "patented" would be copied all over the place.
     
    Last edited: Apr 4, 2021
  20. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Ah, but that is what happens with other properties. But the brilliance of how things have worked out is that there is this impression that the properties are protected. Franz Joseph licensing to Paramount (which let him use the Star Trek name) laid out this idea that the designs are copyrighted. Paramount did their research and found out they aren't so they filed patents. That officially protected all the patented designs, but only while the patent lasted. The US intellectual property protection system is skewed to capitalism. Items that can be produced must be patented to be protected because they cannot be copyrighted. You cannot copyright a car design, or a boat design, or an airplane. For marketing accurate toys and models to the desired audience you need the name and the trademark, but for those who don't care about that, the design itself is fair game after the patent expires. I dug into this extensively. Only building drawings can be copyrighted. No other object drawing can be copyrighted. It is considered a part. The same with fonts. The typeface cannot be copyrighted. It can be patented (also done with Star Trek TMP). A vector font of a typeface CAN be copyrighted, but that copyright ends when a user converts said font into a bitmap of the typeface again. So you can get around a copyrighted font by generating the characters into bitmap and then tracing them and cleaning them up. You have created a brand new, although similar, font of the same typeface.

    The odd things in our laws are mind boggling.