Being almost 15 meters longer then the D7 class battlecruiser which has a crew somewhere in the 400 range, what is it about the design of either the Hermes and Saladin class ships that they only accommodate 195 and 200 crew? James
I would suspect that Hermes- and Saladin-Class ships have more comfortable accommodation for the crew, as well as science labs, and all the tech that is usually in the drive section to fit into the saucer. Whilst D7's would try to fit as many warriors onboard as possible. Thats my thinking anyways.
^Maybe the Klingon ships have more crew because they're all troops or soldiers, while the Starfleet crews are just officers.
Also, length would have little to do with volume. A fair chunk of the Saladin's length is all warp nacelle. Sijilarly, much of a D7 is the neck between the forward pod and main hull, but at least that is habitable space. In any case, the D7 would seem to have more room for people overall, and as has already been mentioned I'd imagine there would be more soldiers aboard versus security on a Starfleet ship. Also, who's to say that it doesn't take more Klingons to screw in a lightbulb, as it were - their automation at the given era may not be nearly as comprehensive as Federation technology can manage. Look also at a Cardassian Galor class ship; it apparently has around 600 people aboard yet it is absolutely dwarfed by the Galaxy class starship, which only has 400 more people INCLUDING civilians on an average day. Mark
Ok, how about the Miranda class ships, they're smaller then the Hermes and Saladin class ships length wise, don't know about the draft though, yet the Miranda's accommodate 360 crew? Granted, the Miranda class ships do have more structure on the primary hull so that could explain the larger crew. James
Miranda's are volume wise pretty close to a refit constitution so 360 to 400 crewmembers isn't all that much an issue, same goes for a Sydney class, its only about 235 meters long but that single hull is enormous.
Volume-wise, it does appear that a Saladin has half the living spaces of a Constitution, engine nacelles omitted, while a Miranda saucer is larger than a Saladin one by half - all roughly matching the quoted (if only outside canon) crew numbers. So we could assume that all the classes are laid out pretty much the same, with similar requirements for the crew, and the difference in numbers directly reflects a difference in size and nothing else. On the other hand, FJ at least explicitly acknowledged that his various ships fell into different mission categories. A destroyer would probably be staffed differently from a cruiser, in various perfectly logical ways that remain fuzzy to us 21st century laymen. Then again, I've often thought of the Saladin class as the Trek counterpart to the USN Spruance: a ship built to a ridiculously excessive size for her inaugural mission, so that a projected future would see her loaded with more and different mission gear, budgets allowing. Thus, a cruiser saucer for the Saladin destroyer, just like the Spruance got a cruiser hull that was only loaded with hardware worthy the cruiser description in the later Ticonderoga incarnation. Standardizing on that big hull probably didn't do as much good for the USN as was the intent. They never built the other growth models, such as Harrier carriers, amphibious assault ships or bombards. Starfleet got more mileage out of the "standard saucer" if FJ and other fan designers are to be believed - and even in canon terms, if we consider the numerous DS9 kitbashes! Timo Saloniemi
^^ Spruance's do not have a cruiser hull, the last ship in the US navy build with a real cruiser hull was USS Long Beach, its the other way around, Tico's have a destroyer/frigate hull because they were based on the Spruance, not the other way around. You're right about the Spruance being redicilously large, they were indeed designed to have extra equipment fitted if it ever would be needed. (which never happened.) On the other hand, the Dutch Zeven Provincien class is about 6000 tons and we call them frigates, ironically in WW-II we had a light cruiser, HNLMS De Ruyter which was only 500 tons larger in displacement... I'm pretty sure that Salladin's saucer would also be used to hold more engineering spaces than a Connie saucer and probably all of the fuel so it might be that they're not even too oversized.
I'd agree with that. The Miranda's are shory and fat compared to the Connie's tall and slim structure . The aft section is almost as wide as the saucer and only a couple of decks shallower, so it has a lot of space with it. Then with the torpedo launchers in the rollbar, that also removes a bulky piece of hardware, freeing up more internal space. Its also to do with their roles and responsibilities. Explorers have larger numbers of scientists, support personnel and would need to be able to handle a wider variety of missions on their own, whilst scouts and destroyers would have more specialised crews to fit in with their respective duties, and would most likely operate in task forces. Klingon ships are designed for the glory of the empire, whether its seizing outposts, attacking ships, etc, so they'd need a large amount of cannon fodder.
Because those designs lack the secondary hull, crucial bits of machinery, storage, and infrastructure would have to be placed in the saucer. Where there was a rec hall and row of cabins, now there was a step-down power transformer from the power converters so they can use the energy from the reactor. Etc.
...Assuming such crucial bits did exist. Perhaps the only vital, engineering-related things a Constitution has in her secondary hull are of the sort that are superfluous for a Saladin? Perhaps everything universally vital is already contained in the nacelle(s) and the neck? That'd make it a bit silly to call the secondary hull the "engineering hull", as engineering would not be all that prominent a function of that hull after all. "Cargo hull" or "shuttle hangar hull" might be more appropriate, then. But it could still be argued that all the engineering stuff in a cruiser's secondary hull is there solely in order to give the cruiser a performance edge over the destroyers, and is not needed in lesser starships. Timo Saloniemi
I'd assume on a Constitution-Class, designed to operate on five-year missions, she would have a large supply of matter and antimatter onboard to power her warp drive, as well as the need for greater quantities of consumables and supplies on long-term missions, so a large secondary hull is necessary to accommodate that as well as the warp reactor. On Saladins and Hermes, they wouldn't be venturing that far into the unknown, or if so it wouldn't be for very long, so they would operate more from base to base, refuelling and restocking when necessary. I do think that the neck between the saucer and the nacelle would be used to store fuel, but everything else needed would have to be squeezed in somewhere. I personally like the idea of the design (or at least the Saladin-Class) having shuttlecraft, it makes sense seeing how unreliable the transporters can be at times
FJ included big vents on the sides of the neck for both these ships, implying that a lot of the engineering guts were in there and that structure wasn't used in the same way as on a Constitution-class ship. I assume these vents were meant to call back to the vents on the inboard face of Enterprise's pylons. --Alex
Agreed. and on a minor note, those vents on FJ's D/S were only on one side of the "neck" not on both sides, as many fan art versions have them.
^^^ Interesting, I hadn't noticed that before. Double-checking the TM, looks like he wasn't consistent. On TO:01:01:32 he shows the starboard side with no neck grills and then on TO:01:04:00 he has the port side, also sans grills, but on the ship's schematics on TO:01:04:12 and TO:01:04:14 we see the port sides of the Hermes and Saladin both having the grills. I suppose he put them on the schematics assuming they were symmetrical, but didn't draw them on the other images because either he forgot what he did on those other ones or else he drew the others later and added them then. In either case, I think er can chalk that one up to a goof-up, but if you have something more definitive, I'd love to see it. I could have easily over-looked something myself! --Alex
The somewhat annoying thing about the neck is that this seemingly least habitable part of the ship actually has the most portholes! Very little room there for any machinery, let alone tankage, if all those square glowy things laid in neat rows indeed are transparent space-ogling devices for the crew. If we choose to interpret the squares as non-portholes, we might just as well decide that none of the glowing areas on the hull of the starship are actually intended to be looked through, and all of them may be assorted vents or radiators instead. But we know that portholes do exist (even if their default mode is "closed by shutters", as seen in "Mark of Gideon)... Timo Saloniemi
The only way the myriad of portholes on the engineering hull and pylon really makes sense at all is if most of them are in fact something else! Sensor beam emitters, deflector shield reinforcement points, even attitude thrusters would all be fine candidates. Maybe a couple could be viewing ports, but more than that is definitely overkill, IMO.
Alright, you can have 3 viewing ports Seriously though, there are a LOT of "windows" in the engineering spaces of the Enterprise. Or is the "secondary" hull (it was never explicitly called the engineering hull in TOS) actually more of a recreation hull? It would explain why it was so easily removed for designs like the Hermes and Saladin...
Well, the rooms with windows are up against the hull - offices? Work rooms? Labs? - whereas the engineering spaces - the "works" of the ship - are further inside the ship.