New Enterprise: One-off or progenitor of a class?

[Shark]

Going through the effort to create a new ship design and then only build one makes no sense to me.

There are many real-world examples; look no further than the Navy's first Nuclear submarine, the U.S.S.Nautilus, which was a one-off. Then there's the U.S.S.Seawolf, a unique design of which there was only one.

Or the old nuclear carrier Enterprise, currently being disassembled. She's also considered a one-off, sharing less than 50% of her design with the newer Nimitz class ships. (most notably, her reactor system)

Ah, interesting; I wasn't aware of that.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What, "Limitations"?

Hull design, for one. The lack of a reinforced sail meant Nautilus could not safely break through pack ice in the North Atlantic or the Arctic oceans (where attack subs were expected to operate during the cold war) and the more traditional hull shape meant Nautilus' highest velocities could only be achieved while surfaced. Later designs also reduced from 8 to 6 and then to 4 the number of torpedo tubes, redesigned the attack center, and incorporated new sonar technologies Nautilus simply couldn't equip because it was shaped the wrong way. Also, the two-screw design of the Nautilus made the ship difficult to control at high speeds.

It was a good ship, to be sure, but almost nothing about it was optimized for use as a nuclear submarine. They might have called it "U.S.S. Learning Curve."

You don't "prototype" naval vessels...

Timo Saloniemi

Well yes, actually you do, as in the aforementioned U.S.S. Nautilus.

Nautilus wasn't a prototype, though. It was an actual active naval vessel that incorporated a lot of new technologies. The limitations mentioned above are a consequence of the fact that nobody had ever used those technologies together and thus had no idea how well they would work in practice.

USS Midway had similar issues when it first entered service, and the Navy's many attempts to correct its problems either made them worse or replaced them with NEW problems. A similar thing happened when the Essex class carriers introduced angled flight decks for jet aircraft; it took them four tries to come up with a configuration for the hangar elevators that didn't convert the carriers into floating death traps (and later they had to redesign the elevators altogether when USS Forrestall burst into flames).

Basically: you DON'T prototype naval vessels, you just redesign the next ship based on what went wrong with the current version.

 

[Timo]

Exactly. Had the Navy gotten these vessels right the first time around, series production might have followed, or then not, depending on many factors. But there never was a deliberate intent to have series production not happen, and certainly no intent to use these ultimate one-offs as mere proof-of-concept vessels, testbeds, or anything delivering less than full operational service.

Contrast to aircraft production, where prototypes extremely rarely see operational service, and proof-of-concept aircraft or testbeds never do. (Save for individual examples from the crumbling Third Reich, perhaps.) And that's with full and deliberate intent.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shark]

What, "Limitations"?

Hull design, for one. The lack of a reinforced sail meant Nautilus could not safely break through pack ice in the North Atlantic or the Arctic oceans (where attack subs were expected to operate during the cold war) and the more traditional hull shape meant Nautilus' highest velocities could only be achieved while surfaced. Later designs also reduced from 8 to 6 and then to 4 the number of torpedo tubes, redesigned the attack center, and incorporated new sonar technologies Nautilus simply couldn't equip because it was shaped the wrong way. Also, the two-screw design of the Nautilus made the ship difficult to control at high speeds.

It was a good ship, to be sure, but almost nothing about it was optimized for use as a nuclear submarine. They might have called it "U.S.S. Learning Curve."

You don't "prototype" naval vessels...

Timo Saloniemi

Well yes, actually you do, as in the aforementioned U.S.S. Nautilus.

Nautilus wasn't a prototype, though. It was an actual active naval vessel that incorporated a lot of new technologies. The limitations mentioned above are a consequence of the fact that nobody had ever used those technologies together and thus had no idea how well they would work in practice.

USS Midway had similar issues when it first entered service, and the Navy's many attempts to correct its problems either made them worse or replaced them with NEW problems. A similar thing happened when the Essex class carriers introduced angled flight decks for jet aircraft; it took them four tries to come up with a configuration for the hangar elevators that didn't convert the carriers into floating death traps (and later they had to redesign the elevators altogether when USS Forrestall burst into flames).

Basically: you DON'T prototype naval vessels, you just redesign the next ship based on what went wrong with the current version.

Christ, you guys are pedantic. A little google and suddenly this guys an expert. "Limited" boats don't serve for decades. And every thing could be considered a learning curve, that's how we make progress! That's what drives everything, that's what creates "design lineages" and evolution of design! Of course not every design is going to be perfect, none of them are, they're all considered limited in some way or another, even the newest ships or boats; that's what drives technological progression! Progress requires learning. Learning requires time, effort and, most importantly, failure. Or, limitations to be overcome. To put it in a way that you guys can understand...

"We learn by doing"

-Kirk

And yes, the damned ship was a prototype. The first of it's kind makes it that.

If they "got it right" the first time there'd be no progress, would there! Everything would be static and unchanging, lacking progress. It's easy to ignorantly judge something a failure in hindsight due to some incessant egotism that requires every idiot on the Internet to always be "right".

Now, what the fuck was the point of this thread?

 

[Kemaiku]

Going by that logic, there are at least 3 prototype Nimitz class aircraft carriers.

No two of them are identical, each one had changes made as the last was built, culminating in there being two subtypes of the class now because of the amount of internal and external modifications during construction.

The idea of one singular ship designed to be the first in a whole series is just not the done thing in real life.

It's just a tradition for the first ship to give it's name to any that follow, but they could well be different from each other as well, with something new added or removed from the others.

 

[Mudd]

In Star Trek tv shows, there are other ships that look just like Enterprise.

In Star Trek movies, the only ships that look just like Enterprise are Enterprises to replace destroyed Enterprises.

 

[HIjol]

Exactly prototypically So

And, without the benefit of Googie, and admitting that I am no expert;

Aside from the fact that Starships cost fictional money and fictional construction entities to build, and Navy vessels are just the opposite,

Wouldn't the projected needs of the mission or the medium (deep space, frozen water, uncharted territory, friendly/unfriendly space/waters) dictate design and appearance. And different people in charge preferring different aesthete? It is entirely possibly for a ship to be a "one-off", but isn't the definition of a Prototype something one builds to show what is possible or very probable, but maybe lacks some technological aspect here or needs a tweak of science there to actually come to fruition and be buildable beyond Prototype?

 

[Kemaiku]

We've been told the Galaxy class has about 3 decks that have only the basic bulkheads and floors, free to be changed into whatever they need on the 7 year (20 year in some early drafts) mission.

That and we've seen Geordi make changes to the warp core, and in a season one episode, we find out he's not the only one, each ships engineering crew drastically modify whatever parts of the ship they want mid-mission.

The hull frame is the only commonality, inside they can be worked on as the crew see fit.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Christ, you guys are pedantic. A little google and suddenly this guys an expert.

Well, that and half dozen books I have sitting in my home library on U.S. Naval history, one of which (somewhat outdated) primarily focusses on the development of SSN/SSBNs and has an entire chapter on USS Nautilus.

Also, that's not what "pedantic" means.

"Limited" boats don't serve for decades.

ALL ships are limited to some degree or another. Navies operate those vessels to the fullest extent of those limitations until they are replaced with more capable designs. This, by the way, is the reason most European countries do not use nuclear submarines; such vessels are obviously limited compared to U.S. and Russian SSNs, but they more than suffice for the jobs they're asked to do.

And yes, the damned ship was a prototype. The first of it's kind makes it that.

That's not what "prototype" means.

 

[Timo]

Prototyping in naval warfare really is a delightful example of catch-22. If you want to series produce a warship (generally an attrition unit, say, as with the pre-WWII batches of eight destroyers plus leader for the RN, or the comparable but larger USN batches), you don't stop to build a prototype, then test it, then implement any improvements you have dreamed up as the result, because that'd mean losing all the advantages of series production. And if you want to build a big unit that won't get more than a handful of sisters in the best case (anything from cruiser up), you don't proceed beyond prototype stage - you learn the lessons, and then build something all-new, because the goalposts have already moved in the time it took you to build and properly test something that big.

However, there does exist an example of prototyping naval vessels: the ongoing Littoral Combat Ship program. And that's a really unique approach, and one that appears to have backfired massively, as the prototypes were not trivially cheap to build, did turn out to be rather complete flops, and won't yield much in the way of practical benefits for the follow-up programs that will utilize a larger hull of different characteristics for a completely different mission profile...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

However, there does exist an example of prototyping naval vessels: the ongoing Littoral Combat Ship program. And that's a really unique approach, and one that appears to have backfired massively, as the prototypes were not trivially cheap to build, did turn out to be rather complete flops, and won't yield much in the way of practical benefits for the follow-up programs that will utilize a larger hull of different characteristics for a completely different mission profile...

In fact, they're the exception that proves the rule: one of the reasons the LCS project was so expensive -- and so far behind schedule -- was that the first two ships were built to slightly different safety standards than the production models. This resulted in a massive miscommunication in the entire project: the construction contractors were under the impression that they were building a SHIP, while the defense contractors who designed them assumed they would be built as prototypes.

The result is that the cost projections of the first two LCS vessels were WAY off, and the basic assumptions about their structural designs were so fundamentally flawed that the navy contractors almost had to redesign them on the fly just to make them seaworthy.

At a certain level of engineering, "prototypes" cease to be useful. In space craft design they don't even bother with it; they have, instead, non-functional craft called "test articles" that integrate certain technologies in order to test them together before final integration. Some of those technologies are themselves prototypes (the Superdracos of the recent SpaceX pad abort test were basically this) but the first fully assembled and flight-ready spacecraft to put those technologies to use isn't a "prototype," but the first in a series.

This sort of reflects the problems we see in TMP and even in TSFS, where we see fully functional starships being put to space with engines that were "untested at warp power." It's probably too difficult to get meaningful data from a warp drive under laboratory conditions (it's not like you can run the nacelles at warp speed in a giant wind tunnel or something) so the only way to know if they work is to attach them to a starship and fire them up.

 

[Timo]

It might also be that warp engines are individuals, much like gunbarrels of yore were: the process of "casting" the coils could be a surprisingly close analogy to gunbarrel manufacture, and quality control in production could only get you so far when postproduction analysis techniques remain primitive.

If the development of all-new warp engines involved a lot of full or half scale experimentation, there'd be lots of large testbeds around. Is that where the hodgepodge fleet of Wolf 359 came from? But why would all such testbeds be provided with guns and other operational gear?

In any case, the movies do show evolution of an individual vessel in just a few years. But without any characteristics of prototyping: the Enterprise gets modded and re-modded like any expensive naval asset, but apparently not for the benefit of further construction...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

Triton was a one off
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Triton_(SSRN-586)

She could have been saved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emergency_Command_Post_Afloat