How much does the Enterprise weigh?

[Crazy Eddie]

^^ Might be then what they call in naval terms "Standard load."

85.000 tons for an empty hull without fuel, water and stores does seem a little on the light side to me.

That's heavier than a fully loaded battleship. Believable to me.

She's quite a bit larger then even the largest battleship

Volume wise, Enterprise is not. They would actually be much closer to the same size.

So to go from only 85.000 tons dry to 190.000 tons fully loaded would mean 105.000 tons of stuff to carry

See my above post where I pointed out that a fixed wing aircraft can carry up to three times its empty weight in fuel and payload and still become airborne. A 40,000 ton Enterprise with 150,000 tons of fuel and cargo isn't hard to imagine for a space craft that has to travel interstellar distances for years at a time. That's actually why I think 85,000 tons is a bit on the HEAVY side for an unloaded vessel.

 

[Santaman]

^^ I absulotely agree about your point about fixed wing aircraft, but aren't they a tad hard to compare to the Enterprise?
I doubt half her mass will be kerosine also, aircraft flight time is measured in hours, not years, a 747 could actually carry the 430 people of the 1701 I give you that though.

IMO I really think you would need to treat her like a ship, not an aircraft.

 

[Gagarin]

Would warp engines be effected by the mass of the ship+load?
If there's a number we get like 60,000 tons, that means 120,000 tons to work with for provisions, fuel, cargo, mission payloads. Maybe 180,000 as a rating. Like we have with cars and trucks.
^^least qualified post/poster

 

[blssdwlf]

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x13hd/theconscienceofthekinghd192.jpg

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/3x16/The_Mark_of_Gideon_123.JPG

There are two episodes that might give an indication on how thick the hull is.

I'm guessing 2"-4" for outside shell, gap for conduits, structure, then about an inch for internal shell.

(If it were 4" Lead outer shell + 1" Lead inner shell that would come out to around 85,000 tons not including conduits and structure.)

 

[Captain Robert April]

I'm leaning towards making up any shortage on the tonnage figure by shluffing it off on the warp coils in the nacelles.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^^ I absulotely agree about your point about fixed wing aircraft, but aren't they a tad hard to compare to the Enterprise?

Easier than comparing it to a boat, considering the different design requirements (namely, the need to be airtight with a pressurized hull, the lack of need to withstanding bad weather and turbulent seas).

The critical difference is that Enterprise has no wings. It does, however, have engines and nacelle pylons so that makes a somewhat useable analog.

I doubt half her mass will be kerosine

Probably deuterium and antimatter instead. And again, probably a need to carry an awful lot of food and water for the crew.

also, aircraft flight time is measured in hours, not years

Hardly relevant since the only limiting factor of an aircraft's flight time is the fuel it carries in the first place. With mid-air refueling as an option, an aircraft could stay aloft for days at a time, assuming it had facilities on board to support the crew. After that, the only limit is routine maintenance and upkeep, which also ceases to be a problem if that aircraft also carries on board its own machine shop and parts stores. Put that aircraft in an environment where it's possible to shut off your engines and service them without having to land and what have you got?

IMO I really think you would need to treat her like a ship, not an aircraft.

Why? In the entire history of the show the Enterprise has never once been required to float on water. It HAS bee required to fly through the air a couple of times, though. And if we take TVH as precedent, starships work a hell of a lot better in the air than they do on water.

Moreover, considering the types of spacecraft that evolved into the Enterprise WERE, in fact, rockets and aircraft of various types, I don't see how any comparison to naval vessels would be anything but metaphorical. Zephram Cochrane's warp prototype was based on a missile, not a motorboat.

Would warp engines be effected by the mass of the ship+load?
If there's a number we get like 60,000 tons, that means 120,000 tons to work with for provisions, fuel, cargo, mission payloads. Maybe 180,000 as a rating. Like we have with cars and trucks.
^^least qualified post/poster

That's something to think about. It may indeed require somewhat more energy to propel a more massive starship through space even at warp power, like the loads carried by an electric circuit. Apparently extending the screens to cover Mudd's cruiser was enough to OVERLOAD them, so there's at least some precedent for the idea.

 

[blssdwlf]

^^ I absulotely agree about your point about fixed wing aircraft, but aren't they a tad hard to compare to the Enterprise?

Easier than comparing it to a boat, considering the different design requirements (namely, the need to be airtight with a pressurized hull, the lack of need to withstanding bad weather and turbulent seas).

Don't forget in TOS at least, space weather ("Court Martial", "Mirror, Mirror", "Where No Man Has Gone Before") in the form of Ion Storms, etc were a known threat so the Enterprise would have at least some "toughening" to handle turbulent space weather at both sublight and warp speeds.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^^ I absulotely agree about your point about fixed wing aircraft, but aren't they a tad hard to compare to the Enterprise?

Easier than comparing it to a boat, considering the different design requirements (namely, the need to be airtight with a pressurized hull, the lack of need to withstanding bad weather and turbulent seas).

Don't forget in TOS at least, space weather ("Court Martial", "Mirror, Mirror", "Where No Man Has Gone Before") in the form of Ion Storms, etc were a known threat so the Enterprise would have at least some "toughening" to handle turbulent space weather at both sublight and warp speeds.

That's what forcefields are for, no?

Besides, considering the densities of masses and energy in deep space, it's doubtful that ion storms actually involve anything more substantial than electrical flux of charged particles delivered by a planet or star's magnetic field (think of the Jupiter-Io flux tube: a channel of extremely high voltage carried through a mist of ionized sulfer as dense as a rabbit fart). An electrical force knocking the ship around like a bottlecap in a solenoid would produce a lot of troubling effects, but it wouldn't produce alot of turbulent force, counteracting torque and motion as you'd find in an ocean where thousands of pounds of physical liquid are slamming into the hull in random directions every second. Hence the issue with naval vessels always needing to support their own weight: if you hit a cruiser with a torpedo and break the keel, the structural integrity of the hull fails and the ship falls apart and sinks. Starships have no definable "keel" structure; even if you cause catastrophic damage in ways that will render the entire ship inoperable, the ship will still retain its structure, since it has no load to carry other than the inertial force produced by its own engines.

Besides which, starships don't NORMALLY fly through ion storms, in fact they seem to go for several years without ever encountering one. Fleet engineers appear to be much more concerned with asteroids and physical obstructions, and for THAT they have various types of deflectors on board.

 

[blssdwlf]

^^ Unless you count the storms portrayed in TOS as different than what one would expect in "real world" situations.

"Court Martial" - Ion storm detected on weather scan. Kirk takes the Enterprise in and encounters "pressure, variant stress, force seven, the works." "Ship's damage is considerable."

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Valiant swept out about a half light year of the galaxy.

"Mirror, Mirror" - Spock: "Standard ion type, Captain, but quite violent and unpredictable."

and then you've got the alien created ones like from "Plato's Stepchildren" causing

Scott: "Ten scale turbulence right now. Emergency gyros and stabilisers at maximum"...

 

[Captain Robert April]

Probably the closest comparison would be to submarines, so we're still taking naval vessels.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^^ Unless you count the storms portrayed in TOS as different than what one would expect in "real world" situations.

But they weren't really "portrayed." Just "described." It's not much of a leap to suggest they operate in a similar but vastly more powerful manner than the Jupiter-Io flux tube: a few million ampres of electrical current would produce a fairly impressive jolt against an electrically conductive forcefield.

"Court Martial" - Ion storm detected on weather scan. Kirk takes the Enterprise in and encounters "pressure, variant stress, force seven, the works." "Ship's damage is considerable."

Thus hinting at a vessel that isn't particularly accustomed to taking turbulent stress from alot of different directions for a prolonged period of time. Structural integrity fields probably to thank for her survival.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Valiant swept out about a half light year of the galaxy.

Valiant, a warp-driven space craft launched within a decade after Zephram Cochrane's first flight. Unless the ship was a submarine hoisted into orbit by antigravs and launched into space, chances are slim it was much more solid than a MODERN space craft.

And we have still a further datapoint for this: the Ares-IV spacecraft swept up in a graviton ellipse. This is a spacecraft that is VISIBLE comparable to 21st century NASA orbiters, and yet it not only survives the encounter, it remains mostly operational afterwards.

Proof that even in the Trekiverse, a space ship doesn't need to be made of depleted-uranium I-beams from Newport News in order to survive cosmic anomalies.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Probably the closest comparison would be to submarines, so we're still taking naval vessels.

No, because submarines have to stand up to immense external pressure GREATER than that of surface ships and have to be sealed against other forms of attack like salinity and temperature inversions. Only the margin for engineering error is comparable, but literally nothing else; the two environments couldn't be any more different.

In point of fact I'm not sure why anyone would want to compare a futuristic spacecraft to anything other than... well, a REAL spacecraft. Because metaphors and analogies aside, at the end of the day, the Enterprise IS a spacecraft, not a submarine.

 

[blssdwlf]

^^ Unless you count the storms portrayed in TOS as different than what one would expect in "real world" situations.

But they weren't really "portrayed." Just "described." It's not much of a leap to suggest they operate in a similar but vastly more powerful manner than the Jupiter-Io flux tube: a few million ampres of electrical current would produce a fairly impressive jolt against an electrically conductive forcefield.

"Court Martial" showed flashbacks not just "described".

"Court Martial" - Ion storm detected on weather scan. Kirk takes the Enterprise in and encounters "pressure, variant stress, force seven, the works." "Ship's damage is considerable."

Thus hinting at a vessel that isn't particularly accustomed to taking turbulent stress from alot of different directions for a prolonged period of time. Structural integrity fields probably to thank for her survival.

Or if you watch the episode, the ship wasn't designed to take something up to "force seven" for very long. Since the Enterprise might be called upon rescue operations, I wouldn't discount it having some level of strengthening.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - Valiant swept out about a half light year of the galaxy.

Valiant, a warp-driven space craft launched within a decade after Zephram Cochrane's first flight.

As far as we know, the Valiant was an FTL-Impulse ship since it tried and failed with it's impulse engines to fight the storm.

The stuff portrayed after the 6th movie I don't think are very applicable for the TOS Enterprise, IMHO.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^^ Unless you count the storms portrayed in TOS as different than what one would expect in "real world" situations.

But they weren't really "portrayed." Just "described." It's not much of a leap to suggest they operate in a similar but vastly more powerful manner than the Jupiter-Io flux tube: a few million ampres of electrical current would produce a fairly impressive jolt against an electrically conductive forcefield.

"Court Martial" showed flashbacks not just "described".

Specifically, it showed RECORDINGS. It did not show the actual ion storm, only its effects on the ship from the bridge point of view.

Or if you watch the episode, the ship wasn't designed to take something up to "force seven" for very long. Since the Enterprise might be called upon rescue operations, I wouldn't discount it having some level of strengthening.

Neither would I, but I do believe that strengthening is in the form of forcefield technology and other technical wizardry. Makes no sense to haul around an extra 2000 tons of structural bracing you're only going to need twice a year when a smaller electronic device can do the same job.

As far as we know, the Valiant was an FTL-Impulse ship since it tried and failed with it's impulse engines to fight the storm.

True... I suppose it could just as easily have been one of the DY-500 class space cruisers for all we know.

The stuff portrayed after the 6th movie I don't think are very applicable for the TOS Enterprise, IMHO.

Well not so much Generations, but I'm half convinced at this point that First Contact itself depicts an alternate timeline created by the interference of the Borg in Montana. I'm starting to feel that way about Voyager and Enterprise too.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Probably the closest comparison would be to submarines, so we're still taking naval vessels.

No, because submarines have to stand up to immense external pressure GREATER than that of surface ships and have to be sealed against other forms of attack like salinity and temperature inversions. Only the margin for engineering error is comparable, but literally nothing else; the two environments couldn't be any more different.

That's quibbling over details. We're talking about a vessel that operates in an alien environment, has to maintain life support for a sizeable crew, and operate away from its home base for an extended period of time. The only real difference is that a starship can't surface and pop a hatch if the life support systems fail.

In point of fact I'm not sure why anyone would want to compare a futuristic spacecraft to anything other than... well, a REAL spacecraft. Because metaphors and analogies aside, at the end of the day, the Enterprise IS a spacecraft, not a submarine.

Our present spacecraft would only be comparable to shuttecraft in Star Trek. Now, if we ever get around to building a ship to go to Mars, we might have a decent comparison, but 'till then...

 

[Wingsley]

^ CRA makes some good points here. Starships and submarines both operate in extreme environments where the crew must be sheltered. Both kinds of vessels must be built (and provisioned and equipped) to operate in sustained isolation, a discreet distance from the home port. And keep in mind that since the bridge is not an open deck on either kind of vessel, the crew must steer each vessel through sensory inputs; no porthole or windshield to look out of.

The starships of STAR TREK and the submarines of today also share a common organizational heritage: they are naval vessels. Today's spacecraft tend to lean more strongly toward an aircraft/air force model.

 

[Ronald Held]

Although it was not mentioned, structural integrity fields and inertial dampening fields could make the hull thickness much less one might expect.

 

[Warped9]

I think the analogy between submarines and starships in how they operate isn't a bad one. You're cut off from going outside (without specialized equipment) unless the ship surfaces or with a starship unless you beam or shuttle down to a planet. And both types of vehicles operate mostly by instrumentation.

 

[Wingsley]

There's another dimension to the starship/submarine analogy. Modern nuclear subs have very specialized crews. The on-board nuclear engineers are all NCOs, as I understand it. Maybe all those jumpsuited crewmen like Watkins ("That Which Survives") are super-technical uber-specialists.

 

[Warped9]

And a hull breach is something both types of vehicles have to be constructed to prevent.