How important is the shuttle?

[Captain Rob]

Instead of trying to physically connect the aircraft engines to the ship for propulsion. Why don't we steal the previously mentioned method of strapping aircraft to the deck of a WWII era ship to maneuver it. Put all aircraft on deck and lash them down as secure as possible pointing forward. Then just fire up their engines all at the same time. You've got yourself a jet-propelled aircraft carrier. Easy-peasy.
As for sensors, you'd be using shuttles like they did Raptors in Battlestar Galactica to scout ahead for safe jump coordinates. A emergency blind jump to warp for just a few seconds shouldn't be too much of a problem. As the old saying goes: "Anywhere is better than here getting our asses blown to hell". Just get far enough away to get out of enemy scanning range or they'll be on you in a flash.
Oh and aren't the Aegis-class and Burke-class powered by marine gas turbines derived from large commercial aircraft engines?
Found it. Burke-class powered by four GE LM2500 marine gas turbines each generating 27000 shp. Derived from the CF-6 aircraft engine used to power the Boeing 767 and MD-11 and some 747s. Also used to power C5 Galaxys and Airbus A300, and A330s.
Again this is a silly idea since aircraft carriers have redundant nuclear powerplants. Maybe our lovely Sovereign-class, Galaxy-class and Intrepid-class starships should have redundant warp cores. Of course if you look at the MSDs for Enterprise-E and Voyager, there seems to be a second warp core, perhaps spare parts. If the requirements for warp drive is only a single core then maybe we can have extra ones dedicated to weapons and shields. Just thinking outloud. Would have came in handy on "Insurrection".

 

[KJbushway]

I can't understanf fully what you too are going on about, but have you both agreed that an aircraft carrier can run on warp plasma?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Instead of trying to physically connect the aircraft engines to the ship for propulsion. Why don't we steal the previously mentioned method of strapping aircraft to the deck of a WWII era ship to maneuver it. Put all aircraft on deck and lash them down as secure as possible pointing forward. Then just fire up their engines all at the same time. You've got yourself a jet-propelled aircraft carrier. Easy-peasy.

Modern carriers are a tad too big for that. Even without the water, you're talking over a hundred million kilograms worth of vessel; even under afterburner, the combined thrust of forty twin-engined jets would only provide about 500 tons of thrust. Divide that by 100,000 tons of carrier, you end up with a miniscule amount of actual propulsion; it would move at a snail's pace--literally, in fact; about 50mm per second--even WITHOUT the thousands of tons worth of drag from the water.

Really, it would be more efficient to hoist a bunch of sails on the flight deck and try to tack with the wind.

Again this is a silly idea since aircraft carriers have redundant nuclear powerplants. Maybe our lovely Sovereign-class, Galaxy-class and Intrepid-class starships should have redundant warp cores. Of course if you look at the MSDs for Enterprise-E and Voyager, there seems to be a second warp core, perhaps spare parts. If the requirements for warp drive is only a single core then maybe we can have extra ones dedicated to weapons and shields. Just thinking outloud. Would have came in handy on "Insurrection".

All true, but we're really talking about an emergency scenario here. I'd be willing to grant that rigging a shuttlecraft engine to power the warp drive would be about as complicated in practice as rigging several military jet engines to the propeller shaft (or even the heat exchanger) of an aircraft carrier. It's something you could do in a post-apocalyptic scenario when your reactor's gone cold and your prospects on a refit are virtually zero, but it's not something you could pull off, say, in the hours after Khan takes out your energizers.

 

[Captain Rob]

^^ Well I said that you'd have a jet-propelled aircraft carrier. I didn't say that it would be a fast jet-propelled aircraft carrier. I seem to remember from physics class that F=MV or Force equals Mass times Velocity. So take the big force generated by all of those aircraft engines and divide by the REALLY BIG mass of the ship and you get a REALLY TINY velocity. Works for me. Might be enough to nudge up against a dockside but that's about it. Which is what the pinwheeling (sp?) stunt I mentioned earlier was used for.
As for the starship-shuttle scenario. Your talking about rigging one fictitious device to power another fictitious device. So I assume that we've got more leeway. How many times have I said "I assume" in this thread? I "suppose" that a shuttle warp core has a maximum power output and the ship's engines a minimum power requirement to reach warp velocity, if only briefly. How about we yank the shuttle's core out. Or beam the entire shuttle into main engineering. Hook it into the ship's warp plasma system. Then dump the core's maximum output into the engines for one short burst of warp speed. Probably burning out the shuttle core hopefully without blowing the ship or main engineering up with it. Sort of like a firecracker under a tin can.
Whoa.... wait a minute. Didn't Wesley Crusher do just that with a science experiment one time?
NOOO! ...I'm thinking like Wesley Crusher!! Kill me NOW!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Whoa.... wait a minute. Didn't Wesley Crusher do just that with a science experiment one time?

No, he apparently borrowed a small amount of antimatter from engineering using a "science experiment" of his and used it to power the Hathaway for a single burst of acceleration. That it worked at all is probably a miracle; that it failed to blow up the entire ship is probably thanks to Riker, Worf and Geordi's combined Hero Shields.

Since we're talking about space craft and not aircraft carriers, the real equivalent would basically be Wesley taking a keg of White Lightning and hooking it up to a rocket engine along with a tank of leftover LOX. It would be enough for a very wimpy and unimpressive ignition for about three quarters of a second, but if you get it to burn right it might give you half a ton of thrust for those three quarters.

Anyway, I don't like the "fictional technology, let's give them some leeway" thing. That's a copout. Just because the technology is fictional doesn't mean you can treat it like magic and one character simply waves his magic wand and the thing's been "modified" to do something perfectly convenient. Hell, half the tools in the engineering set already FUNCTION like magic wands in the first place, this sort of "leeway" should not be further encouraged.

 

[Vanyel]

Not in the real world, tho, as stars are far too thinly spread for that. Nor in Star Trek. A panicky five minutes at extreme warp would not take the ship far enough to hit another star...

Well Captain Rob was saying that he would (or the best option to using a shuttles sensors) take off at maximum warp in whatever direction he was facing. While the odds of him hitting a star or super nova or anything are low for a quick 5 minute jump are low, the odds for some sort of impact increase the further you go.

Example: 1701E in battle loses it's sensors. It's blind. It can only fire blindly hoping to hit something, or it can run. Running would be the best option, but it still needs to see. A warp capable shuttle while sitting in the shuttle bay can use its FTL sensors to help the ship navigate and see if it's being pursued. Worst case, the sensors can also help direct weapons fire. As long as the ship can keep seeing it can keep going, perhaps getting close enough to a Starbase or another Federation or allied ship to render aid and/or defense.

 

[T'Girl]

sensors to help the ship navigate and see if it's being pursued. Worst case, the sensors can also help direct weapons fire

Kind of what the US Navy has been doing for years with the E2 Hawkeye aircraft. The fleet puts it out ahead and it uses it's sensors while the fleet turns off all of their active sensors, so the ships are harder to spot. Aircraft too switch off their individual radars and fire their weapons using the Hawkeyes instructions.

 

[KJbushway]

OK, so you both still don't agree that an aircraft carrier can't run on plasma?

 

[Vanyel]

OK, so you both still don't agree that an aircraft carrier can't run on plasma?

Who?

 

[T'Girl]

OK, so you both still don't agree that an aircraft carrier can't run on plasma?

The multiple propellers on an aircraft carrier are each connected to a drive shaft which in turn are connected to a transmission/steam turbine.

If you could use your plasma to generate steam great, problem solved, everything else aboard the carrier is already in place. Skipping the turbines, your plasma would have to in some other way generate the neccasary torque to turn the shafts and propellers (shafts alone are five feet in diameter).

The newest US carrier, the Gerald Ford, "I think" uses isopods (like the ones on cruise ships), for the isopods to work you need to convert the plasma into a form of electricity that they can use, plasma is already a form of electricity so you just need to step it down, decrease to voltage and really decrease the amperage.

 

[C.E. Evans]

In such a case, it'd probably be more practical to use something other than electroplasma, an energy source that the carrier can more readily use.

 

[Timo]

While the odds of him hitting a star or super nova or anything are low for a quick 5 minute jump are low, the odds for some sort of impact increase the further you go.

Actually, it ought to be vice versa: for the first few seconds or minutes, it might be theoretically possible to hit the star from the star system within which the original battle was being fought (since most battles seem to happen inside star systems, and probably justly so because what else would be worth fighting about than a star system?). But after the ship clears the local star, there oughtn't be anything at all in her way until hours or days into the emergency warp.

A warp capable shuttle while sitting in the shuttle bay can use its FTL sensors to help the ship navigate and see if it's being pursued. Worst case, the sensors can also help direct weapons fire.

(But would a shuttlecraft's sensor even penetrate the shuttlebay walls?)

Doing FTL sensing would seem to require pushing some sort of a sensing beam into the FTL realm (subspace or somesuch), which ought to require power most of all. A small shuttle could thus be argued to be inherently limited to shorter scanning distances than a larger runabout, let alone a full starship. The size difference between a shuttle and a starship is significant; the discrepancy in scanning ranges might be comparable, making the shuttle fairly useless as a sensing instrument. Except at extreme close quarters, which might still be of help in ST:NEM.

Similarly, shuttle transporters might only work across point-blank ranges; VOY "Future's End" suggests as much. Again useful in ST:NEM (unless the spatial anomaly precluded the use of any transporters weaker than those of a full starship), but less useful elsewhere.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[KJbushway]

The guys talking about aircraft carriers are on the past few pages. I don't know how the conversation lead from shuttle usage to aircraft carrier possibly running on warp plasma.

 

[Captain Rob]

I'd use one of the heavier long-range shuttles for a sensor relay. Such as the E's Argo, a runabout, or Delta-flyer equivalent. If this is during battle they have better chance of surviving. As for possibly running into stuff. We still have a functioning navigational deflector don't we? I'd like to see some schematics and data on the Argo. It seems like a modified runabout that can carry vehicles. I would have liked to see a shuttle like that used earlier. Would have made a good landing craft during the Dominion War.
As for warp plasma and aircraft carriers. If the stuff's hot enough; stick it in place of the uranium fuel rods to generate steam for the steam turbines (via the heat exchanger). Otherwise call Wesley Crusher.

 

[T'Girl]

Otherwise call Wesley Crusher.

Data: "Wesley, how did you achieve warp 9.96?"

Wesley: "I used the filing from one of my back molars."

 

[Vanyel]

As for possibly running into stuff. We still have a functioning navigational deflector don't we?

It just moves small things out of the way of the ship while it's moving, it's not a sensor. It has a sensor in it, the navigational array, ISTR. But, in my scenario the ship is blind.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

In TOS, the deflector itself acted as a type of sensor; whenever a load was applied to it like, say, a celestial object or an alien forcefield, the load would show up on the navigational board and either Spock or Sulu would report "something's reacting with the deflectors."

 

[T'Cal]

During the Dominion War, I expected to hear that shuttle craft and runabouts would be reconfigured to assist in battle. Engineers could remove everything aft of the pilots seats and keep only impulse engines since they would be launched from the mother ship or station and be short range craft. I imagined a forward facing uni-directional phaser cannon (like the future E-D in AGT) and a torpedo launcher maybe out back.

 

[Mr Silver]

I think Shuttlecrafts are important, but they are never shown to be that much use, for example everytime the Transportes aboard the ship fail, why do they insist on trying to desperately fix it? Why not just fire up the Shuttlecraft Transporter, problem solved

In FC, they end up going on a Spacewalk, sure the Borg might have blocked off the passage to the Shuttlebay, but what about the Captain's Yacht? They could have taken that, blasted the heck out of the Borg and then "disabled" the Deflector Dish using a precise few blasts of the Phasers, No demise of Lt Hawk, no Decompression of Worf and no unnecessary flying about trying to shift metal clamps before the Borg notice something isn't quite right, "Analysis, three men in Spacesuits, weapons detected, threat level confirmed, proceed with primary task", but if they had the Captain's Yacht.... "Oh shit, bloody great Shuttle blasting the fuck out of everything, Abort Abort!!!"

 

[Vanyel]

I think Shuttlecrafts are important, but they are never shown to be that much use, for example everytime the Transportes aboard the ship fail, why do they insist on trying to desperately fix it? Why not just fire up the Shuttlecraft Transporter, problem solved

In FC, they end up going on a Spacewalk, sure the Borg might have blocked off the passage to the Shuttlebay, but what about the Captain's Yacht? They could have taken that, blasted the heck out of the Borg and then "disabled" the Deflector Dish using a precise few blasts of the Phasers, No demise of Lt Hawk, no Decompression of Worf and no unnecessary flying about trying to shift metal clamps before the Borg notice something isn't quite right, "Analysis, three men in Spacesuits, weapons detected, threat level confirmed, proceed with primary task", but if they had the Captain's Yacht.... "Oh shit, bloody great Shuttle blasting the fuck out of everything, Abort Abort!!!"

True, using the shuttles transporters as backups would be a good idea and one that the crew only thought about once, in the episode Power Play.

As for getting the the Captain's Yacht in First Contact, the Borg had the lower decks of the saucer effectively cutting the crew off from shuttles and the Captain's Yacht.