Starship designs seem to be fairly arbitrary in Trek, except that almost everyone seems to use some kind of nacelle. I suppose there are few physical constraints on the designs past a certain tech level. That doesn't explain why Earth decided to mostly go with saucers, though.
"Enterprise" too advanced for 22nd Century
- Thread starter CaptainSpirk
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Why wouldn't it? Vehicle design is shaped by physics and engineering principles, form following function. Logically, most cultures' designs for a given type of vehicle should converge upon certain fundamentals. The ships of China's Ming Dynasty treasure fleets were much huger and more elaborate than the tiny caravels the Europeans used at the time, but they were both equally recognizable as sailing ships, because there are certain physical necessities a sailing ship needs to have. Now, maybe there can be two or more feasible designs for a particular type of craft -- catamaran vs. single-hull boats, fixed-wing vs. rotary-wing aircraft vs. airships -- but there would realistically be a finite number of configurations that would work for an FTL starship, and different civilizations would either converge upon them independently or adopt them from each other because they work.
The way I've explained the ringship in my Trek novels is that it was a prototype for a Vulcan-inspired warp drive that was developed in competition with Cochrane & Archer's nacelle-based drive program. I went with the explanation in the Ship of the Line calendar foldout that the ringship type of drive wasn't as maneuverable, so humans ended up preferring the nacelle approach.
I addressed that in my first Rise of the Federation book. Circular or spherical shapes are the most compact configurations of a given volume, minimizing the greatest distance that a person or a supply conduit has to cover to reach every part of the volume, which makes them more efficient. For combat-oriented ships, like the Vulcan and Andorian craft of the ENT era, a long, narrow configuration is good because it minimizes your forward profile and makes it harder for an enemy to hit you. But for exploration and multipurpose craft like Earth ships, or later Federation Starfleet ships, a wide, round configuration gives you more efficiency and versatility in using the interior space, which is good for that kind of ship.
In free fall, a sphere would probably be better than a saucer because it's the ultimate in compactness, requiring the least material to contain a given volume and thus enabling the ships to be lighter and more economical. But with artificial gravity, I suppose it makes sense to go with a flatter, but still circular, design, so that you don't have to climb as far to get to the top of the ship.
Okay, then why no secondary/engineering hull?
If they wanted the ship to be recognized as being a part of what came before.
You mean like the Miranda, Constellation, Akira, and other previously established starship classes without secondary hulls? It's well-known that the showrunners wanted an Akira-type design for whatever reason, and the design team had to fight to make it look as much like a TOS forerunner as it did. But it's not like there weren't decades of prior precedent for "flat" Starfleet ship classes. And Kelvin and Discovery have filled in even more such single-hulled ship classes that work well as intermediate stages between the NX and Intrepid classes of the 22nd century and the Miranda, Constellation, etc. of the late 23rd.
Certainly from the modern perspective many would agree with that. But in 2001, it could have been the ship.
The main reason rings are considered a Vulcanian design is becasue of Enterprise. But if the ringship had been the hero ship then ringships would have been human design. So it could have made perfect sense for the plot.
Yeah...I don't really buy that it being recognizable was necessary. I seriously doubt that, if the show was any good, people would have turned it off becasue the ship didn't have long cylinders with glowy bits.
Oh, of course, good point. Prior to ENT, that design was just considered an Earth "starliner." (It was actually concept art from a failed Roddenberry pilot proposal called Starship, one or two elements of which were eventually adapted into Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.) ENT's decision to make it a 22nd-century Vulcan design was an homage to the TMP Easter egg.
However, the problem with making the ringship the hero vessel in ENT is that it looks pretty small. There's a fairly compact habitat module in front and the rest is all engine and support struts, so it couldn't hold very many people. The Mark Rademaker version has an "enviropod" not much larger than a Lear jet fuselage, say, if that. So I don't think it could've held enough characters or sets to sustain a whole series.
You and I may think so, but the network evidently didn't, since they pushed for recognizable Trek elements like transporters over Berman & Braga's objections. UPN (or Paramount?) wasn't comfortable with too radical a departure from familiar Trek norms.
Yeah, that was the issue I encountered when sizing my version of the ship. If you scale it up to make the habitable section large enough and then it soon dwarfs the Constitution class in visual appearance. If you scale it down to make the visual presence smaller, then the habitable section becomes tiny. If I remember right, the upper cylinder of my habitable section is 6.5 meters in diameter. I don't know that crew numbers would be that big of a limiting factor. I suppose it depends on the story format. The Enterprise I'm designing has about 75 crew. Firefly had a crew of nine and they did technically sustain the show for the entire run of the series.
Yes, but Star Trek shows traditionally center on ensemble crews aboard fair-sized starships with multiple sets. A Trek series set on a tiny space bus with a small crew, with only a few compact, submarine-like sets, would've been a pretty radical departure and would've limited story possibilities in a number of ways. It could be interesting, but I think it would've been a greater departure than the network would've been willing to go for. After all, they shot down Berman & Braga's original proposal to do a show where the ship wasn't even launched until the end of the first season.
No, I meant the previous hero-ships that had both saucer and nacelles.
You said "recognized as being a part of what came before." Your exact words. Do you actually think Star Trek fans are so stupid that they can't remember the existence of ships other than the hero ships?
It was a beautiful design IMO, I'm not sure if the producers should've used that particular design of Daedalus but I would've like a design which lead to that design. Seeing a progression to where it will eventually look like. Ekk! I'll just ignore what the lying producers say; like the ones from DSC, that terrible series was not from TOS universe.
I'm pretty sure CBS have copyright on the saucer/nacelles configuration of the Enterprise so they'd want to stick with that established design language.
Tuskin38 was referring to casual fans, who I do think the hero ships (4 of them) with saucers, secondary hulls and twin nacelles would be the most remembered.
It does have something of a bulldog look to it, which I like for that reason.
Even to casual fans, the resemblance between NX-01 and NCC-1701 is quite obvious even without an engineering hull. The saucer and nacelles are more than enough to make it recognizable as a Star Trek ship rather than Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica or whatever. And if that weren't enough, the fact that the show was actually called Enterprise was kind of a dead giveaway, especially once they finally added Star Trek in front.
All I can think of with that video of the Deadalus is "Open the pod bay doors HAL" ...... It's a cute ship but makes me think of the Discovery with that huge ball on the front, or a microphone with warp nacelles.
Debatable, a big piece was the bosses not wanting to take any chances (a overall problem with the show itself). Probably why there was so much terminology (phase pistols) that carried from what was used before.
If they keep the Vulcans being in space before Humans and having rings, then no, If they further had the Andorian ships with rings that would have definitely made rings not a Human inventions, but something Humans got from others. If only the idea.
YMMV..
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I think people actually LIKE ugly ships, sometimes. The X-wing, the Falcon, Y-wings.. ugly as hell. Serenity is not going to win any beauty awards, either. One reason I like the Daedalus is because it looks like it was designed in a hurry based on easy manufacturing and enginering. Sphere's are the easiest-to-understand pressure vessel. There's a reason Gagarin went up in one.
NX-01 doesn't bother me. It actually looks like something the Warp 5 complex has been tweaking and nurturing to life for decades. It's more sculpted than built.
Daedalus is what you start cranking out on assembly lines once the NX design is proven. The Sisko was a ship designer. He had a Daedalus model.
side thingy: from an rp me and a few friends run: an early Lilly Sloane/Zephram Cochrane era design: the Warp Soyuz. Simple Soyuz TM spacecraft with an early nacelle system, for small exploratory trips in the inner solar system. Looks oddly enough like a Daedalus
NX-01 doesn't bother me. It actually looks like something the Warp 5 complex has been tweaking and nurturing to life for decades. It's more sculpted than built.
Daedalus is what you start cranking out on assembly lines once the NX design is proven. The Sisko was a ship designer. He had a Daedalus model.
side thingy: from an rp me and a few friends run: an early Lilly Sloane/Zephram Cochrane era design: the Warp Soyuz. Simple Soyuz TM spacecraft with an early nacelle system, for small exploratory trips in the inner solar system. Looks oddly enough like a Daedalus
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It looks like it was designed by engineers without consideration for appearance, I feel the NX01 was intended to be a showpiece, basically "advertising Humanity" and therefor was design with pretty in mind along with practicalities.
