That's not EXACTLY what I was thinking, but I like it. I agree with your comment about continuation of the "keel" as well.I had some video capture software I wanted to try out, so I put together a video response to some of the recent posts. This also saved us all from having to wade through another one of my walls of text.
After I finished recording, I learned that I ran a little long for YouTube to handle, so there are some skips in the presentation where I made rough edits. And the video software I used took over an hour to transcode the file into something YouTube understood.
So while that was cooking, I realized I needed to make more changes to the model that appears in the video. Here's that result:
YARN, what if I brought the keel out the bottom again and ran the spine off it like the one above?
The only place I deviated from what you did, in my own thought process, was the idea of having the pylons going generally upwards at angles from that spine. Since that's roughly at the centerline, you'd have to "split" the impulse deck to avoid firing into the pylons. Maybe even split them by a significant distance, more along the lines of what the 1701-D did. But that's just a thought.
When I was suggesting extending a "rib" from the back of the neck, yes, that's kind of what I meant... but not exactly. I assumed that it would "fill" and attach to the spin of the secondary hull, and that it would go rought 2/3 of the way back from the neck to the hangar bay.
I was thinking that the semi-vertical pylons would come off of that, at angles, and would be slanted (ala the TMP pylons) and would attach to "ribs" inside the ring. Those pylons could then be used, as you mentioned, as heat radiators (remember, a radiator really needs to have its normal direction pointing away from any other part of the ship, or else you're just radiating right back into the ship!)
I just spent a few moments sketching this up in CorelDraw. Ignore the lack of detail and any "iffy" proportional issues... this is just to show the concept I was thinking of.
Pictures paint a thousand words and all that...
