• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

21st Century System Ship (PART 2)

Ok, having been humiliated by members of the trekart forum in regards to my last ship design :( ;) I decided to go for a less dildo looking design so I decided to design a Passenger transport Space vehicle, and here it is guys and gals:

blockship.jpg


Thoughts? Comments?
 
Is that an Orion (i.e. detonate nuclear bombs out the back and it goes) drive?
 
One question - why does it need guns and missiles? Seems like overkill, unless it's going somewhere dangerous.
 
The general configuration of this ship works fine for me. A couple of suggestions:

1) The "Orion" drive plate's shape needs some refinement. Basically, you NEVER want any portion of it to reflect energy back towards the ship... meaning that it needs to be trimmed off (actually, roughly where the vertical "label leadline" is, is where I'd trim it off).

For the rocket engines... I'm a bit confused by why they'd be off-center like that. Remember that thrust must always go directly through the center-of-gravity of the object it's being applied to, unless you want to send yourself off SPINNING WILDLY. So the "center of action" for the chemical rockets really needs to be along the same line as the "center of action" for the Orion system, which obviously should be the center of mass for the whole ship. Generally speaking, you need to do two things to make this "practical"

(a) move the rocket pods up to be on the same centerline (as viewed from the side) as the main propulsion system is.

(b) distribute the fuel tankage into multiple tanks, instead of one big tank, and have them located in multiple locations rather than a single location. Weigh balancing can then be done on-the-fly simply by moving fuel from one tank to another tank... this is a VERY effective system and is used on all modern aircraft, for instance. It also provides a level of safety... ie, if you perforate a single tank, you don't risk losing ALL your fuel stores. Finally, no fluid tank is EVER done as a single large volume... at the very least it would need to be subdivided as an "anti-sloshing" measure.
 
Irishman said:
One question - why does it need guns and missiles? Seems like overkill, unless it's going somewhere dangerous.

Well firstly there are no 'guns' those are antenna for communication. The Nuclear Warheads on the back are for propulsion, they detonate on the drive plate pushing the ship forward, the laser weapon and forward Missile system is for Asteroid deflection in the event of an emergency, also it can be deployed as an emergency military unit.

Cary L. Brown , thanks for the suggestions, I tried to interpret your suggestions the best I could so did this redesign:

blockship2.jpg
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top