Need help with ship design.

[atpatp]

Hello, I am looking for a designer/artist who can help me design the starship featured in my fanfic. If you are interested, pm me, or post here. I would really appreciate the help.


Here is a description of the ship, for those who are interested.


Tranquility class deep space explorer, the USS Ravenlin, NCC 1777 D.


Build for ultra long range independent deep-space exploration. It was conceived as a solution to the problem of exploring past the quickly expanding boundaries of the main UFP Core.


Named Project Tranquility, it was to be the greatest exploration effort by the UFP, cut short by the Dominion War.


In total there were 180 of such ships, but, all but two were lost to enemy action during the Dominion war.


In 2374, Admiral Stanton, took the largely unfinished fleet, installed the ships with unproven highly experimental stealth technology and went of to fight the Dominion.


The result was complete loss of the Tranquility Fleet, save the two ships. USS Pillar of Hope and USS Ravenlin.


The ship is 890 meters long. With two large bays underneath the saucer section. One is 82 meters long and is located in-front of the lower sensor dome. Currently the captain's yacht is berthed there. The other is located behind the sensor dome and is 40 meters long.


The saucer section has two impulse drive engines, that have a subspace sustainer coils, and can push the saucer section at warp factor 2.5 for 90 days.


The bridge is modulator and can detach like the Enterprise E's captain yacht. The bridge is large and can travel at maximum warp of 5 for 60 days.


The bridge has a sanctuary, a small loft type room in front of it behind the main holographic view-screen The sanctuary has a large 180 degree vantage area and has a large transparent airlock in the front of the sanctuary, that leads to the outside of the ship. To enter the sanctuary one simply walks through the holographic view-screen.


The bridge has two ready rooms, one on the left and one on the right.

One leads to captain's office and the other leads to the commanders office. The bridge has a large conference room at the aft section, with a large 180 degree vantage area. The four turbo lifts arrive into the hall that separates the command area and the conference room. The bridge also has a two pad transported set into the hall. And a well stocked armory.


The airlock leads to a oval shaped deck laid in with teak and has regularly spaced benches for the crew.

The atmosphere is maintained by environmental generators and shields build into the deck.


There are two more “open vacuum” decks on USS Ravenlin, one is in the front on the “Ten Forward.” The other “open vacuum” deck is at the aft of the ship just above the large central shuttle bay.


Above the impulse drive engines there are shuttle bays for the smaller shuttles.

The starboard bay contains two captain's gigs. Both are highly modified class-2 shuttles, NX-001 and NX-002 and are generally used by the captain for various trips.


The ship has one more large shuttle bay on the aft section of the saucer that flows from the bridge and stores 8 runabouts.

The neck that connects the engineering has a massive passive sensor array, in keeping with the ship's stealth function.

The deflector dish is immediately below that sensor array and is roughly triangular shaped, with the triangle pointing down.

There are four forward facing torpedo tubes between the sensor array and the deflector dish. There are four more torpedo tubes in front of the sensor dome underneath the saucer section. There are two aft facing torpedo tubes that are underneath the large central shuttle bay and two more in the aft of the engineering section.


So 8 forwards and 4 aft.


The ship is highly streamlined for long duration high warp sustained flight. Warp factor 9.985 for 2 years.


It has a crew of 400 as most of the space is dedicated to sciences and exploration.

The ship also features one of the largest crew quarters than any other ship.

The class was one of the luxuriously appointed ships in star-fleet, due to the intended mission profiles exceeding 10 years.


Anyway if anyone is interested, please help, I wish to include the art in my story.

 

[sojourner]

You know a ship with NCC 1777 registry would indicate that it is probably around the same time frame ans the original Enterprise from the series. For a ship built as late as the dominion war it should have at least 5 digits in the registry. Maybe something like NCC 71771.

 

[Vinkula]

^ It has letter "D" after it Which is NCC-1777-D

 

[Maverisms]

^ It has letter "D" after it Which is NCC-1777-D

The Enterprise is supposed to be the "only" ship so recognized by Starfleet as to preserve her registry. While the DS9 production staff had intended the Defiant to earn the same honor, budget didn't allow it, resulting in the second Defiant having the exact same registry as the first due to stock footage reuse.

I'm really not so picky as to call this a sticking point, but I do think the better choice is to use a 5 digit registry appropriate to the time period, rather than appending a series letter designator to an earlier number.

On the one hand, with the sheer number of Hulls Starfleet seems to have built, the Voyages of Kirk's Enterprise have to have some rivals in terms of fame (thus what they tried with the Defiant). On the other hand, everyone and their mothers has, at some point, designed a NCC-0000-X.

 

[The Axeman]

Registry aside, I have issues with so many different types of small craft. You have Captains yachts, gigs, shuttles and even though your saucer separates you also have a bridge that separates and becomes a ship on its own. Why does an ultra long range explorer need all that? Likewise the 'open air' sections, they sound more dangerous than a holodeck or window.

Should it not have amazing drive systems, great long-range sensors to map and scan large areas, and maybe a normal complement of normal shuttles for the odd occasion when they might be useful? Storage for long missions would have priority over open air viewing platforms, I would think.

Shuttles in the series are only used occasionally, and only so that they can isolate characters to do nasty things to them that they cant on the main ship. You are vulnerable in a shuttle in ways you are not in a huge, powerful starship, which is why they dont use them unless they need to. We never saw the Captains yacht used in any episode anywhere, because really there's no need for it.

Likewise the flying bridge ship idea, what is that for? Why separate the main staff and controls from the rest of the ship on a regular basis? You have a separating saucer anyway for emergencies? Again, even saucer sep got dumped from the series because there's little use for it except in catastrophic emergency and because it slowed story telling to a crawl. I'd advise a rethink on the design. Your ship sounds like a ginormous undermanned pleasure boat with a variety of pimped shuttles and parasite ships which serve no real purpose, rather than a dedicated long range mapping & survey vessel from a quasi-military organisation.

 

[Mage]

Some of the ideas for this ship, like keeping up such a high warpfactor for 2 years non-stop, a bridge that can detach and fly at warp, two big ships docked on it, two experimental shuttles that the captain can use for various trips... it sounds very over the top.

You claim there were 180 of these uberships build before 2374, yet it uses all sorts of technology that the Federation doesn't have. Saying it was all hightech classified stuff is easy, but then they would have build only one as a test ship, not a 180.

It's all a bit to much really, and doesn't really sound like a 24th century explorer-type starship that Starfleet would build.

 

[atpatp]

I guess there should be a long discussion on the nature of the Federation.


But first, I would like to say that this might not be the right thread for this. If there is a proper place for it, then it should be moved there.


The nature of the federation. Lets take a Sovereign class ship. What sort of a civilization would build such a ship.


Lets ignore the why for now and concentrate on the how.


First, what kind of on infrastructure needs to be in place before such a ship could be build?


Second, what kind of civilization can support such on infrastructure, and how big would it have to be.


Third, a disclaimer, if we only go by the onscreen information then we are liable to miss a tremendous amount of information. So if you don’t agree with me, perhaps you should expand your mind past you TV’s boundaries. After all the ships did not just appear out of thin air.


And fourth, most of the technologies used by star-fleet are not explained to the viewer, but are taken for granted by the people in the trek-verse. Why would they be explaining how something functions every-time it is used?


Lets take a look at the lowly phaser, lets just concentrate on the power output of a phaser. The average weight of a male in US is 86 kilograms.


86 kilograms = 86000 grams


One gram of arbitrary mass has a lot of energy as per the mass-energy equivalence.


So the energy equivalent of one gram of mass is equivalent to:

89.9 terajoules 25.0 million kilowatt-hours (≈25 GW·h) 21.5 billion kilocalories (≈21Tcal) 85.2 billion BTUs
or
21.5 kilotons of TNT-equivalent energy (≈21kt)
or
568,000 US gallons of automotive gasoline

568,000 US gallons times the 86000 grams=48,848,000,000 billion gallons of gasoline.

And yet, the phaser disperses so much energy with nothing more than single burst of nadions. No charred decks, for that matter how is the ship still intact? How is the phaser able to disintegrate the cooking pot and yet leave its contents untouched? Why hasn’t the phaser been adopted for power generation?

Where does the energy go? Neutrinos?

Anyway this is just one example of the possible implication of the technology that has been ignored by star-fleet. Or has it? What if the nadion phase technology is in wide spread use the federation? And weapons are just one of the uses of the technology?

This is just one example of how advanced the Federation science is, keep that in mind.

What is the GDP of the federation? Tax rate? Federal Budget?


Well the Federation is a post scarcity civilization, so does any of the above apply? We know that earth is a utopia, so what kind of socioeconomic system does earth use? Capitalism? What role if any would Capitalism play in a utopia? If earth no longer uses money, is capitalism still needed. For that matter, why would a Utopia need Socialism, Communism, or Capitalism?


The point is all of the socioeconomic systems restrict the growth of a civilization. Not only that but any
economic system restricts and slows down the growth of science, technology, both practical and theoretical. Imagine the impact on science and technology if money become irrelevant.


Anyway, keeping in mind the above, lets do some numbers.


Lets assume the Federation budget is 30 percent of its GDP.


The 2009 GDP of the world was 58 trillion in US Dollars.


Assuming a slow growth of one percent a year Earths GDP will be 2,373 trillion dollars.


So 30 percent of 2,373 trillion is 711 trillion dollars.


711 trillion dollars would be Earth's contribution to the UFP's federal budget.


The highest budget NASA ever had, percentage of the federal budget, was 4.41 percent in 1966.


So lets assume that star-fleet only get 4 percent of the Federations budget. In reality star-fleet being a paramilitary defensive organization, they would most likely consume the largest portion of of the budget as most armies currently do on earth.


But to prove my point I will stick with 4 percent as apposed to 50 percent.


For sakes argument lets say star-fleet's budget is 4 percent of UFP's Federal budget.


4 percent of 711 is 28 trillion dollars.


Most of the money would be used for ship building, due to Ships utter importance in the Federation.


The Federation has 180 members plus their colonies. But lets ignore the colonies and assume they do not pay taxes, lol.


180 worlds times 28 = 5,040 trillion dollars.


The Federation has 5,040 trillion dollars to build ships with every year! Every freaking year. Granted the Federation might not have had these kinds of numbers for its entire existence, but surely for at least several decades now!


Keep in mind that this assumes a fairly small growth in the economy.


With incredible manufacturing breakthroughs spanning over 300 years, the technological and the scientific know how of 180 worlds at the Federation's disposal, I am afraid to say that the Federation would be unstoppable.


So how much would the Enterprise cost? Sticking with what we know, can we make a plausible estimate?


The largest ship on earth, military, is the Nimitz class aircraft carrier, it is 333 meters long and weights 100,000 tons. The cost of a single carrier is 9 billion in 2009 dollars. 14 billion with R and D.


This is with no replicators, gamma welders, anti-grav platforms, just one country on earth, with primitive cranes and welders.


If we imagine the technological breakthrough from now until 2373 and use the numbers that we have so far, how many ships would star-fleet have?


The Enterprise is much larger, heavier and more advanced, but so is the manufacturing efficiency.


So is 100 billion dollars enough for a ship? I would argue that yes. It would be foolish to say that the federation's manufacturing technology is no better than the present's.


It would be downright stupid to say that the Federation doesn’t have cheap unlimited nanotechnological based manufacturing.


Even if one ship costs a trillion bucks each, star-fleet would have 5000 thousand ships in a year.


Unless you think that the Federation has the few ship building facilities that have been mentioned on screen? Well do you?


How about this, the Federation most likely has hundreds of ship building facilities. Tens of thousands of capital ships, millions of cargo ships, tankers, and such. Hundreds of thousands of runabout types of vessels, and billions of shuttles! Yes billions.


Thousands of antimatter manufacturing plants, most likely orbiting blue giants, producing millions of tons of antimatter annually. Yes, millions, of tons.


Thousands of plants manufacturing billions upon billions of 5th generation, clean, ultra save fusion reactors. A similar situation exists with food replicators. As there are most likely hundreds of billions of replicators in existence in the UFP and it's stellar neighbors.


Anyway, this is just my take on the nature of the federation.


180 uberships?


Pffft.

 

[Maverisms]

I see to issues with this logic. One is easy. The other will require a few paragraphs.

21 kt = 38862881.3 Big Macs
= 87441482.75 Starbucks Caramel Macchiatos
= .000488 Photorps

Wait, what?

Allow me to spell it out. The Photorp has a nominal warhead of 2kg, given the most liberal reading of its specifications. E=mc2 tells us that 2kg, converted to energy is equal to ~42.9 megatons TNT equivalent. By the logic you used here, a phaser set on vaporize liberates 42 times the yield of a single photorp when is disappears someone.

Given the fact that at no time in Trek have we seen a phaser used a weapon of mass destruction, I think we can safely say that the rapid nadion effect does not liberate the mass energy of its targets.

Federation GDP vs. Starfleet's budget

First, we know that the Federation is socialist utopia. Federation citizens don't need money, though I certain that they can convert some of their "rights" into money to trade with societies that do deal in cash. However, when dealing with budgets, one doesn't have to assume money. TANSTASFL as they say. At the basic level, the energy and effort needed to support the Federation has to come from somewhere and some of that has to go into starships.

The problem is some of that has to go into other things as well. The annual defense budget of the United States is enough to build between 100 and 120 Nimitz class carriers a year.

A year. (That's 4.5 Billion each in 2007 dollars. So says Wikipedia. According to Dollar Times's inflation calculator that's 4.69 billion in 2009 dollars. I'll just assume your 9 billion figure includes the air wing.)

Using the low estimate and assuming construction at full capacity from the moment USS Nimitz was laid down, we could have built 3900 of them, with another 400 under construction.

We built 10.

Because most of the United States' astronomical defense budget goes to pay and support the troops. Then come upkeep and service of equipment in use, then comes expenditure of materiel that can't be reused. With all of these things (not to mention administration and facilities, new equipment is a serious commitment against limited funds.

But how much does a starship cost. A logical cost benefit analysis would suggest that you cram as much benefit as you can with a cost you can afford. The problem with trying to calculate that is we don't know what it costs to patrol the UFP and carry out Starfleet's exploration mandate. Ultimately, economics is, at the very least, a difficult way to figure it out.

There is an easier way.

In 2370 Starfleet commissioned a ship. That ship was laid down in 2366, but we can't use that date for our calculations, because we need to compare it to another ship with a known commissioning date. Unfortunately they don't always tell us when a ship started construction.

So, we'll make a WAG and assume that the critical date is the date of commission. Why does this help?

We know the registry numbers of these ships. While it would be foolish, and unsupported to claim that these numbers tell us exactly how many hulls were built, we can say safely, that they represent the lion’s share of Starfleet hulls. Because we know that most hulls carry the same prefix code, and those that don't use a code interchangeable with the first (NCC vs. NX; See NX-2000 and NCC-2000).

The ships in question are, of course, NX-74205 USS Defiant and NCC-75633 USS Sao Paulo

74205 was commissioned in 2370, as noted. 75433 was commissioned in 2375. Between the two, there are 1428 hull numbers, which suggests a Federation build rate of 285.6 hulls per year. It is not clear how many of these are runabouts.

Of course, there's a problem here. If one uses the assumed commissioning date of NCC-1701 and does the same math one comes to a construction rate of 568.7 hulls per year. Again, there's no indication of how many are small craft.

But then one has to account for the time between NCC-1701 and NCC-2000. This was about 40 years. So in that time span Starfleet seems to have built only 299 hulls. About 7 per year.

Logically, the numbers given can't really show the number of ships built, but that's okay, because they do place an upper limit. By 2373, Starfleet had built more than 74000 but likely less than 75000 hulls (including Runabouts).

(It's worth noting that the Federation ballooned from a relative handful to "a thousand" members worlds between Kirk and Picard, so a rapid increase in hull construction is plausible.)

The question one has to ask is "how many 900 meter war gods could be built out of these production runs?" I'm going to go out on limb here and say, "Not many."


Certainly not 180 of them. Given Starfleet's clear fondness for proven designs (See the vast array of Excelsiors and Oberths) and the Kit bash crash construction implied by the DS9 visuals, I find it difficult to believe Starfleet would waste vastly more than 10% (I'd estimate anywhere from 25 to 30% due to the sheer size of the ships...remember, 890 meters implies Galaxy class or larger volume) of its construction capacity on design so problematic that 98.89% of the hulls were destroyed in service.

Keep in mind, to support this, Starfleet would have to see this kind of loss rate in all of rush job ships built, and there's no evidence to suggest this was the case. (That or Admiral Stanton would have to be utterly incompetent).

I'm not suggesting that you are WRONG. What I'm saying is that your story line is grabbing suspension of disbelief by the scruff of the neck, dragging it into a dark alley and violating it in unspeakable ways while asking us to watch without comment.

This design is over the top. Add to that the fact that it is yet another severely over gunned warship from the people who spend most of their time trying to convince everyone they aren't war-like. You asked for help. Part of helping is being willing say, "I think you went too far."

Or, to end on more Trek-like note; just because you can do a thing, it does not follow that you must do that thing.

 

[The Axeman]

Regardless of your take on Federation banking and our limited minds, certain design conventions are sound in any time period. You design militaristic ships with lots of weapons & armour, and science ships with lots of sensors and labs. Freighters are not well armed, they carry stuff and its someone else's job to protect them should they need it. You have designed a ship far larger than the Federation flagship which you say will be built in unprecedented numbers, carries a range of custom shuttles it doesn't need, has battle sections it doesn't need and lovely open-air viewing galleries for chilling. You're throwing in lots of extraneous stuff because you want it, not because the ship would actually have or need it.

The Federation may include many worlds, but it does not have limitless resources and millions of ships. You can bet that most of the worlds are simple colony worlds, with small populations and production facilities feeding back to the home worlds of each species. The amount the member species would want to spend on a humungous military will be tempered by how many wars they are involved in, and how much GDP you are willing to spend on your military and still keep everything else moving. It's usually a small percentage of the total.

Military ships also tend to be complex, the pinnacle of ship construction technology, so I dont see them building thousands of them quickly. Yes the Federation have power and knowledge, but they build to the limits of that knowledge and so ships still take a lot of time & resources to build. If you want to build a load of ships quickly, you have to make them small & simple with existing tech that is readily available so you can crank them out. In particular if you're making low priority stuff like survey vessels, you dont turn over your whole economy into making hundreds of huge ones for no good reason. It's also unlikely that most yards would have the skills, labour experience or equipment to handle large military vessels when all they build are small transports usually. You cannot replicate starships at the push of a button, if you had that sort of power and knowledge you wouldn't need starships.

You asked for help and we're trying to do that by pointing out your ship is more fanboy fiction than science fiction. It's too large to be built in huge numbers without a very good reason driving the Federation to seek out new worlds very quickly. It has elements that were discarded in the series because they were never used and other elements which are not required. Write out what the ship will be required to do, and then design a ship to do that job efficiently.

 

[Trelane]

I'd have to agree with everyone. If you want "Project: Tranquility" & the U.S.S. Ravenlin to seem feasible, I'd re-write the "task group" to be a series of salvaged Museum Fleet / Frankenstein Fleet workhorses that aren't pretty or especially luxurious in terms of diplomatic rating for their personnel quarters, etc. But they're up to maybe the technology level of the U.S.S. Rhode Island (Nova-Class refit).

I'd go with two or three ships of these types: NX-Class, Neptune-Class, and other ENT-era to TNG-era smaller scale ships such as Raven-Class transports. Think of things like that. Ships that aren't so huge and complicated.

The somewhat "uber" ships you're describing have ~a lot~ of moving parts. And, if you're going to be out of reach of the Corps of Engineers and regular re-supply routes, you're going to need to keep things simple but still effective. I wouldn't take enormous vessels into unfamiliar territory. You don't want a society with possible subspace telescopes picking up a huge, nearly planet-sized city-ship heading straight for them.

You want vessels that would give a warp-faring society genuine reason to believe we really do "come in peace".

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/2374/intrepidvariant1.png

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/7757/intrepidprototype.png

 

[JJohnson]

I could offer this as an alternative version of your ship.

As a Deep Space Explorer, I can agree to a large vessel, but would also bring a larger crew complement, so here's a few ideas:

USS Ravenlin, NCC-71777, Tranquility Class
Function: long range deep-space exploration
Length: 620 meters
Shuttlebays: 3 (main on saucer, secondaries on engineering hull, dorsal and ventral)
Captain's Yacht: lower-side of saucer, similar configuration to Sovereign class
Impulse Engines: 3; 2 saucer, 1 engineering. Subspace warp sustainer coils allow the saucer to escape while maintaining a warp field for up to 8 hours over constant de-acceleration.
Bridge: modular, similar configuration to Sovereign class. In front of the bridge is an observation deck accessible from the deck 1 corridor. To either side, ready rooms, and aft is the conference room. The bridge is served by 4 turbolifts. Deck 2 directly underneath the conference room has an airlock.
Saucer: Deck 10 is the forward-most deck and maintains a crew lounge.
Shuttles: The ship maintains two runabouts along with the standard complement of shuttles for the time period.
Interconnecting Dorsal: maintains a large passive sensor array for continual information accumulation while traveling.
Engineering Hull: deflector dish is roughly a rounded triangle in shape. It is flanked by two banks of two torpedo tubes, and two aft tubes on either side of the aft engineering dorsal shuttlebay.

Speed: Warp 9.95 for 18 hours.
Crew: 620
Quarters are similar to Galaxy / Sovereign style, given the long duration flights of the ship.



How does this version of the ship sound?

 

[sojourner]

Here's a question. Why the unrealistic sounding number of 180 ships being built if all but 2 were destroyed anyway?

Why not state that Project Tranquility was started shortly before outbreak of the Dominion war. The project was canceled to make way for the war effort with only 4 ships out of the planned 180 being built. Only the Ravenlin and her sister ship The Pillar of Hope survived.

The numbers will be much more realistic to the Star Trek setting where it's common for ships to be built in numbers of 20 - 30, but we have never seen anything close to 180.

 

[JES]

Yeah, agreed. Sorry, but it has to be toned down.

Maybe we should start with the history refined by JJohnson.

And only ships that have proven to be reliable enough are built in numbers going over 100, and that is always never at once. They accumulate over time, and more get built as they are needed. For example, as the Red Admiral explained, in the DS9 Episode "Sacrifice of the Angels", Sisko orders Galaxy Wings 91 and 93 to engage Cardassian warships. Exactly what a Galaxy Wing consists of is speculative, but it does seem to hint that there were at least 93 Galaxy class vessels in existence up to that time, or that at least 93 of them were built. Though it is still speculative.

And keep in mind that the U.S.S. Galaxy herself was launched in 2357, while the Dominion War lasts from, I think 2373 to 2376, and I do know that it was still going on in 2375 when the Prometheus was stolen. This means that at the time of "Sacrifice of the Angels", the Galaxy class had been in service for around 15 years. And they would have most likely been built in high numbers during the Dominion War because by now, the Galaxy was considered a reliable design, and Starfleet needed something to counter the Dominion Battle Cruisers and Battleships.

The Tranquility class, even if we assumed that the first example was commissioned in 2370 and judged to be completely spaceworthy, would have only been around for 4 years by 2374. Due to her size, it is likely that only one, maybe two production runs would have been approved, and those production runs might only consist of 2 or 3 at a time, or maybe 5 or 6 at the most, and that depends on how successful the Tranquility's trial runs were compared to other similar designs. And when the Dominion War began, the ships that had not yet been constructed would have either been canceled to make way for warships, or joined the ships already under construction to be modified to better take the role of battleships like the Galaxy class vessels of that time.

After that, how well those would perform in battle would determine if Starfleet would allocate any more resources to construct any more examples.

 

[Trelane]

Any updates? Have you considered using a prior concept design that hasn't seen a lot of attention in rpg's/fics?

 

[Solarbaby]

Here's a question. Why the unrealistic sounding number of 180 ships being built if all but 2 were destroyed anyway?

Why not state that Project Tranquility was started shortly before outbreak of the Dominion war. The project was canceled to make way for the war effort with only 4 ships out of the planned 180 being built. Only the Ravenlin and her sister ship The Pillar of Hope survived.

The numbers will be much more realistic to the Star Trek setting where it's common for ships to be built in numbers of 20 - 30, but we have never seen anything close to 180.

Great idea! This is very similar to a fan fiction I am writing. 40 ships built and only 2 survived a dominion ambush

 

[Clawhammer]

I could offer this as an alternative version of your ship.

As a Deep Space Explorer, I can agree to a large vessel, but would also bring a larger crew complement, so here's a few ideas:

USS Ravenlin, NCC-71777, Tranquility Class
Function: long range deep-space exploration
Length: 620 meters
Shuttlebays: 3 (main on saucer, secondaries on engineering hull, dorsal and ventral)
Captain's Yacht: lower-side of saucer, similar configuration to Sovereign class
Impulse Engines: 3; 2 saucer, 1 engineering. Subspace warp sustainer coils allow the saucer to escape while maintaining a warp field for up to 8 hours over constant de-acceleration.
Bridge: modular, similar configuration to Sovereign class. In front of the bridge is an observation deck accessible from the deck 1 corridor. To either side, ready rooms, and aft is the conference room. The bridge is served by 4 turbolifts. Deck 2 directly underneath the conference room has an airlock.
Saucer: Deck 10 is the forward-most deck and maintains a crew lounge.
Shuttles: The ship maintains two runabouts along with the standard complement of shuttles for the time period.
Interconnecting Dorsal: maintains a large passive sensor array for continual information accumulation while traveling.
Engineering Hull: deflector dish is roughly a rounded triangle in shape. It is flanked by two banks of two torpedo tubes, and two aft tubes on either side of the aft engineering dorsal shuttlebay.

Speed: Warp 9.95 for 18 hours.
Crew: 620
Quarters are similar to Galaxy / Sovereign style, given the long duration flights of the ship.



How does this version of the ship sound?

*Winner!

 

[Irishman]

Hmm, great analysis here of the economics of shipbuilding. It really makes you wonder about all those times the Enterprise was the only ship in the quadrant. :P