Another take on the Original Enterprise...
- Thread starter Cary L. Brown
- Start date
- Status
[grumbles about days-long DSL outages]
As Shaw pointed out, the wiring above the fantail looks a lot like a compact fluorescent bulb ... you can make out the screw base and the characteristically fat ballast. I thought that was a fascinating addition to the ship ... obviously not part of the original design. And look at all those finishing nails in the fantail! I bet that section is covered with some kind of laminate sheeting and at some point someone decided it'd be easier to secure it with finishing nails than glue. Putty, sand, and paint over them and it'd take an x-ray to reveal the work.
I pointed this out to Cary because I was curious about his take on the way the model's pylon structure [edit to add:]works.
The whole post is here. And there are lots of us pestering for more x-ray photos.
Last edited:
I looked throughout my collection for a larger version of that image but they are all about that size or smaller. Still, it is a great idea, I'll see if I can find a nice dock image (to avoid having to build one). And I'm guessing you'd want it in color.I find this image of the ship particularly compelling for some reason. It just begs for someone (*cough*Shaw?*cough*) to photoshop it into a Trekverse in drydock/under construction photo.
I'll post the results of my efforts in the Photoshop thread in a couple days.
There's no "E" in my name... I'll never understand why four simple letters are so difficult, but hey, it must be since it happens so often... (sigh)
To your question - Yeah, I'm back. I got home ridiculously early Sunday morning... sort of unpacked, slept for a few hours, and had to be at work on Monday morning (that would be yesterday). I'm a total #%@*ing ZOMBIE right now, though. This sort of trip really takes it out of you... but I hope I can make it through another day without falling asleep on my keyboard, and with any luck I'll get a "normal" night's sleep tonight and be mostly-back-to-normal tomorrow.
I doubt, very much, that I'll do any more work on this project this week, however... I've got to rebuild my laptop, which somehow mysteriously got disassembled and reassembled... but not reassembled CORRECTLY... while I was out of my room. Plus, for good measure, a nice little "rootkit" somehow got installed on my previously-clean hard drive during the same four-hour window. Sorta make ya go "hmmm." Fortunately, despite the ineptness of the whole deal, I can repair things easily enough... just takes a little time. (Thank God for Norton Ghost...)
Which is why when I travel internationally, I either don't take my laptop, or I burn all my data to CD immediately then shred/wipe the HDD before returning - (conducting no vital business with a system that has been out of my line of sight since departing the US) and then re-imaging the system from my backup image made prior to departure once back home. Yes, I know I sound paranoid, but I was an Intel Analyst in the Army, so I come by it naturally.
Well, I actually traveled with two systems... my personal one (with music, movies, games, etc... all the "western entertainment" a guy would want) and my company-controlled "work computer." I would have brought only the one (the "work" one) except that I couldn't lay my hands on a charger or "extended battery" for my laptop in time to make the trip, and with a 16-hour flight, you need SOMETHING to keep you from going totally batty.
In the future, I suspect I'll just put personal stuff on the company laptop (violate policy, but oh well) and carry the one... but I'll need to get an aircraft power supply suitable for that laptop, first. Trivial, but it takes time, and this trip was sort of "off the cuff," without a lot of advance planning time.
I really expected to be hassled a bit, being a military-intelligence vet (and having been focused largely on S/E Asia, no less!). I certainly knew better than to take anything I couldn't afford to lose, or to reveal any potentially significant information about myself or my company.
It's not like any real HARM could be done here... it's just really, really ANNOYING. I'm sure that they mirrored my hard drive... hope they enjoy trying to find some "hidden meaning" to my collection of song files and video files!
Truth be told, if they'd only done a "good job" with it... that is, not left such obvious "fingerprints" due to their ineptness... I really wouldn't mind so much. I planned to reformat and restore my hard drive anyway, upon returning (hence the "ghost" image reference from above). The disassemble/reassemble thing isn't too bad, either... I know where everything goes, and it's a good idea to strip these things down once a year or so to get the dust and grime out anyway, so I was due. I've reflashed my BIOS, low-level-reformatted my drive and have the data being restored right now, so it should all work out fine.
The "annoyance" part, really, comes from the fact that, with the damnd thing being non-functional, I had to basically twiddle my thumbs for the 16 hour flight home. I mean, in-flight-movies are OK, but you can only watch "Paul Blart, Mall Cop" so many times...
"Mr. Brown, what's in this folder called 'P.Hilton?'"
"I can't tell you. It's classified, and very sexy. Sexy Classified."
That's hot.
Is she doing what I think she's doing? It's hard to tell with the night vision camera....
Okayyyyy...
It's been a couple of weeks since I touched this... since before my China trip. The week after, I was jetjagged all to hell, and then I just sort of lost my motivation for a bit.
But... tonight I STARTED on the nacelles again. I'm leaning towards "gutsifying" only one of the two nacelles, since the whole point of that would be illustrative (and my system does have finite resources, after all!) First, I'm gonna finish the exterior details on the nacelles, however. Tonight, I got the inside channels done, and tomorrow, if I'm in the mood again, I'll probably try to get the intercoolers into place.
I'm sort of going back and forth over how I want to do the bussard collector assemblies. I've been toying with the idea of actually creating "guts" for that, but I've also been thinking about just suspend Maya light sources in the appropriate locations in open space. I could do a physical "fan blade" or just do that as an animated texture as well. Originally, I planned to only do physical stuff, but I've been getting more interested in trying to make something "pretty" as time goes on. It'll never be as graphically-nice as some of the stuff some other guys have done (and that's not really my intention, remember), but I'd still like something I can look at and say "that looks real." (Something which, IMHO, the "new" Enterprise failed at... it looks like a really cool SFX shot, not a real mechanism... my concern is real-world believability, as much as is possible, not visual polish. But still... )
It's been a couple of weeks since I touched this... since before my China trip. The week after, I was jetjagged all to hell, and then I just sort of lost my motivation for a bit.
But... tonight I STARTED on the nacelles again. I'm leaning towards "gutsifying" only one of the two nacelles, since the whole point of that would be illustrative (and my system does have finite resources, after all!) First, I'm gonna finish the exterior details on the nacelles, however. Tonight, I got the inside channels done, and tomorrow, if I'm in the mood again, I'll probably try to get the intercoolers into place.
I'm sort of going back and forth over how I want to do the bussard collector assemblies. I've been toying with the idea of actually creating "guts" for that, but I've also been thinking about just suspend Maya light sources in the appropriate locations in open space. I could do a physical "fan blade" or just do that as an animated texture as well. Originally, I planned to only do physical stuff, but I've been getting more interested in trying to make something "pretty" as time goes on. It'll never be as graphically-nice as some of the stuff some other guys have done (and that's not really my intention, remember), but I'd still like something I can look at and say "that looks real." (Something which, IMHO, the "new" Enterprise failed at... it looks like a really cool SFX shot, not a real mechanism... my concern is real-world believability, as much as is possible, not visual polish. But still...
)
Quick question about your VASMIR-style impulse drives, if I may be allowed to jump back to an earlier sub-topic (I just found this thread, and while my own mental Enterprise differs from yours on a few key points, I LOVE they work you're doing here).
OK, the impulse drive. As you're setting them up as simple Newtonian VASMIR rockets, have you given consideration to the problem of propellant volume? Even in slush deuterium form, the amount of hydrogen needed to boost the ship up to relativistic impulse speeds would be enormous - 70% of the ship's mass or more, to say nothing about slowing down and maneuvering. VASMIR is a killer design in the modern day for interplanetary rockets and such... but how much space are you willing to devote to deuterium tanakge to make it work for the Enterprise?
OK, the impulse drive. As you're setting them up as simple Newtonian VASMIR rockets, have you given consideration to the problem of propellant volume? Even in slush deuterium form, the amount of hydrogen needed to boost the ship up to relativistic impulse speeds would be enormous - 70% of the ship's mass or more, to say nothing about slowing down and maneuvering. VASMIR is a killer design in the modern day for interplanetary rockets and such... but how much space are you willing to devote to deuterium tanakge to make it work for the Enterprise?
Hi Juan,
There are two things that apply here which help.
The first is the fact that Enterprise has Bussard devices... which are basically hydrogen ramscoops (in the Enterprise's case, they're force-field/magnetics based, while in most "practical" designs they're actually massive physical conical scoops, of course).
This means that the ship continually replenishes its hydrogen supply.
I know, most of the hydrogen in the universe isn't in the form of one of the higher-order isotopes (ie, deuterium or tritium). And while you might get better "bang for your buck" from the more massive tritium or deuterium isotopes, the "plain" hydrogen is essentially limitless free fuel, so my assumption is that the Enterprise collects this plain hydrogen and uses it as the primary fuel, both as a reactant (in the fusion powerplants) and as a propellant (in the VASIMR-ish thrust system).
Internal tankage serves mainly as a BUFFER, in case you need a momentary increase in power/thrust production, or if you're in a "lean" area of space with very little free hydrogen to be found.
That's the first half of the answer...
The second half is related to a concept I first started talking about roughly three years back, and that I go on about regularly around here. That concept, of course, is "FTL impulse." (I think you've been involved in a few of those conversations, haven't you?)
Well... either way, here's a refresher:
Basically, while "impulse" is a newtonian system, it is not a "pure newtonian" system. Instead, it relies on the creation of a "static subspace field" to serve as a practical propulsion system. Not only does this allow "impulse" to operate as a (limited) FTL propulsion system (since the localized "in-subspace-bubble" speed of light isn't the same as that seen in "real" space/time) but it also alters the "projected mass" of the ship, relative to that same "real space/time" and thus requires significantly less actual thrust to achieve any "real space/time" velocity.
This works just as well, as an explanation, for explaining how impulse works as a sublight system as it works to explain how impulse can work as a limited FTL system.
Why would you not normally use impulse above "C?" Well, simply stated, I'd say that "warp drive" is more efficient for that purpose (and is non-newtonian to boot... meaning no need to deal with acceleration issues!)
Similar, it seems entirely plausible (and TMP seems to bear this out) that you can use the "using a warped subspace field to 'surf' on space-time" concept at speeds below C as well as above C. (Recall the terminology of "warp point five" and so forth in TMP.)
So, I don't see a "cut-off" at "C" for either "warp drive" or "subspace-assisted impulse drive." Instead, I see a "diminishing returns" scenario - warp is far, far less efficient than impulse at sub-C speeds, while "ftl impulse" is far less efficient than warp at speeds much above about, say, 1.5c or so (and remember, I assume that "ftl impulse" starts to become subject to relativistic problems about roughly 75c).
Anyway, that's my take on things. Make sense?
Perfectly, thanks. I'm still a little dubious as to the ability to collect enough hydrogen along the way for the ship's power/propellant needs, but if I were to be that critical of every aspect of Treknology I'd never get anywhere. Glad to see you're not going strictly Newtonian, at any rate.
Onward!
Onward!
Back to Work...
Well, I've spent a few days sort of thinking about how I wanted to do further warp-engine-nacelle work, and I've largely made up my mind now. Plus, my enthusiasm for the project (which sorta waned a bit after getting back from my little trip) is starting to come back.
SO, without further ado...
Shot at 2009-07-11
What I've done here is made, temporarily, the inner and outer surfaces of my nacelle skin transparent, allowing me to work on the "guts" more easily without having to constantly section the parts.
The main, new things present here are the main reactor core (running the length of the nacelle - and NOT where the reaction actually takes place, but rather one of the paths through which the reaction product energy flows, so more along the lines of a "plasma transfer conduit" to you TNG-era fans), the antimatter containment area (the rectangular "box" at the aft region) and of course the field panels on the inside of the nacelle "channels" (the channels were the last thing I've posted here).
Instead of describing what I'm trying to do in these regions, before I do it, I'm just going to wait 'til I get each system installed, then tell you what you're looking at. Suffice it to say that this isn't a TNG-era "warp coils" type engine at all. In fact, the field is generated from the spherical element at the aft end of the nacelle, though it is carried forward by some other elements which may seem a little "TNG-ish" to some folks. And remember, the nacelles are also the primary power source as far as I'm concerned (which was Jefferies' original intent). What I'm in the process of building is actually an improved version of something you might have seen in one episode of the animated series.
I'll have more updates coming shortly.
Well, I've spent a few days sort of thinking about how I wanted to do further warp-engine-nacelle work, and I've largely made up my mind now. Plus, my enthusiasm for the project (which sorta waned a bit after getting back from my little trip) is starting to come back.
SO, without further ado...
Shot at 2009-07-11
What I've done here is made, temporarily, the inner and outer surfaces of my nacelle skin transparent, allowing me to work on the "guts" more easily without having to constantly section the parts.
The main, new things present here are the main reactor core (running the length of the nacelle - and NOT where the reaction actually takes place, but rather one of the paths through which the reaction product energy flows, so more along the lines of a "plasma transfer conduit" to you TNG-era fans), the antimatter containment area (the rectangular "box" at the aft region) and of course the field panels on the inside of the nacelle "channels" (the channels were the last thing I've posted here).
Instead of describing what I'm trying to do in these regions, before I do it, I'm just going to wait 'til I get each system installed, then tell you what you're looking at. Suffice it to say that this isn't a TNG-era "warp coils" type engine at all. In fact, the field is generated from the spherical element at the aft end of the nacelle, though it is carried forward by some other elements which may seem a little "TNG-ish" to some folks. And remember, the nacelles are also the primary power source as far as I'm concerned (which was Jefferies' original intent). What I'm in the process of building is actually an improved version of something you might have seen in one episode of the animated series.
I'll have more updates coming shortly.
- Status
