Why are you calling it a starship instead of a starbase?
I'm trying to figure out who in this thread had refereed to it as a starship rather than a starbase and then I figure you must have thought it was me as I seem to be the only one who used the word "starship" at all. But I was referring to the "starship docks" that were the outer six globes on the starbase's perimeter, whose function was to provide an enclosed, pressurized if needed, place to tie down (with cables, I should add) up to three starships per globe for a total of 18 starships docked in the station at any given moment.
Also the FJ starbase wouldn't have rotated for a centripetal gravity effect (though I'll concede that when FJ drew it he probably had something like that in mind). An equatorial cross section would show the outer decks as an enormous hexagon which would mean in a spin-gravity situation that "down" would only be experienced while standing in the middle of one of the open areas. The closer you would walk to the hexagon's points (where, I point out, all the major surface structures are located) you would be standing at more and more harrowing angles until you were nearest the point where "down" would feel like about 30 degrees away from perpendicular to the floor. That's a hell of a way to design your buildings. Also, if this were the case, the strength of the gravity effect would be felt most fully in those starship dock globes, which would mean that the ships would "fall" against the outer wall; or need to maintain a powered orbit
inside the globe (which would seem to defeat the purpose of having an enclosed dock in the first place); or that the cables holding the ships in place are a
lot stronger than I gave them credit for all these years. OTOH, the FJ cross section of the starship dock globe
does call out "Work Cranes" which suggest the possibility of gravity being in place, but given the other problems with centripetal gravity simulation in this design, I'm willing to say these cranes are the inconsistency and say that the cranes are actually robot arms and not like conventional cable-pulls-something-up-and-lets-it-back-down cranes at all.
@
Cmdr_Blop: I would argue that FJ's take on the Starbase was in line with TOS aesthetic. The K-7 station had a larger central piece with a prominent flattened sphere shape with smaller projections in a radially symmetrical pattern around that central core. By that description, both objects are certainly in that same school.
--Alex
