Old Starlog Magazine Fan Designed Ship

[ahkyahnan]

I'm trying to find an old fan design, and haven't been successful in my online searches. Thought maybe someone here could help.

It appeared in Starlog Magazine...issue #144 in 1989 from what I could gather on a different ship...in an article highlighting some fan submitted designs. It was a cargo/auxiliary type vessel with a spherical hull and its nacelles and all else hid behind.

If anybody remembers it and can direct me to an image...and hopefully the article/write-up that accompanied it...I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

Mark

 

[Christopher]

I have that issue, but I don't have the wherewithal to scan the page. It's on p. 29 of the issue, the "Fan Newtork" column. The ship design you're describing was submitted by Joe Statder of Florrisant, MO, who wanted to go for a design that "would look distinctly different from the 'ol [sic] 1701 and yet still reflect the same society and design perceptions of Starfleet."

The ship has a forward sphere meant to "act as a 'windbreak' for the warp effect," whatever that means. Behind that is a body shaped kind of like, ohh, a rounded lava lamp on its side or a long, skinny eggplant, with a row of four windows on the underside like the TMP Enterprise's arboretum windows. At the back, instead of two separate nacelles, is a "bifurcated engine block" containing two warp engines -- basically a couple of flat pseudo-nacelles with a connection between them, but still mounted on a pair of upward-curving pylons (that actually stick out to the sides like an Excelsior but then arch back in to support the engine block, for some reason).

 

[Cobalt Frost]

Here you go:

I don't know what kind of crack the guy was on when he thought that his ship reflected Starfleet design trends.. IMO the ship looks like some kind of space suppository, but to each his own.

 

[SonicRanger]

That is fairly ugly, especially compared to the vessels with similar shapes over at the Starfleet Museum.

 

[erifah]

"Flaming snarkfars"???

I LIKE that expression!

 

[Christopher]

It was interesting to look over that column again and realize that Starlog's letter page and fan columns kind of filled the role back then that sites like this one fill now.

 

[ahkyahnan]

Thanks very much everyone!! Knew I'd find a quick answer here.

Mark

 

[Vance]

Wow... whoever this guy is, really drove home the worst of the 'Trekkie' stereotypes in his article, didn't he? The pretension coupled with the nonsense-technobabble is hilarious.

 

[ahkyahnan]

Christopher said:
The ship has a forward sphere meant to "act as a 'windbreak' for the warp effect," whatever that means.

Hmm. This design is actually quite different from what I remembered all those years ago. For some reason I thought it was described as a cargo ship...must've been the term 'workhorse' maybe.

I guess the 'windbreak effect' likens a warp field to a submarine travelling underwater.

Do you think there's any credence to that idea at all? I mean for a general cargo ship, simplicity in design & operation is often the rule for a vessel intended to simply travel from Point A to Point B without a lot of maneuvering or a large crew. And not as much need for doohickeys & other apparatus extending from the hull.

Would a simple spherical hull...not this specific design mind you but generally speaking...provide any greater degree of efficiency, stability, stress reduction or anything else that might benefit a transport type vessel? Just curious.

I think a lot of hypothetical early Trek ships have often featured a spherical hull, under the assumption that it was easier to construct & operate until technology became available to allow more complex designs like the Enterprise and on. I'm wondering if there's really anything to this idea?

Thanks again.

Mark

 

[Unicron]

erifah said:
"Flaming snarkfars"???

I LIKE that expression!

I now have a new custom title.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I like Michael Alexander's design - have ever since I saw it in "Starlog."

 

[Christopher]

ahkyahnan said:
Do you think there's any credence to that idea at all? I mean for a general cargo ship, simplicity in design & operation is often the rule for a vessel intended to simply travel from Point A to Point B without a lot of maneuvering or a large crew. And not as much need for doohickeys & other apparatus extending from the hull.

Would a simple spherical hull...not this specific design mind you but generally speaking...provide any greater degree of efficiency, stability, stress reduction or anything else that might benefit a transport type vessel? Just curious.

A spherical hull would be efficient for any kind of vessel. The sphere is the most efficient shape for any container (no matter what the Borg say); it requires the least amount of material to contain a given volume, and has the shortest maximum distance between any two interior points (meaning corridors, cables, ducts, etc. can be shorter). It's also one of the best shapes for containing an atmosphere in vacuum, because it's the shape of a membrane in pure tension, so there are no points where the pressure (and risk of a rupture) is greater than at other points. The others are a torus -- a donut shape -- and a cylinder with hemispherical endcaps. Realistically, pretty much any large ship or habitat would be based on one or more of those shapes for the sake of maximizing efficiency and minimizing hull stresses due to internal pressure.

But in terms of propulsion, I don't see it making much difference. There's no air in space, so no streamlining issues; a cube will travel just as well as an arrow shape. By Alcubierre warp theory, a ship would be inside a bubble of spacetime moving FTL, and could have any shape within that bubble. It's often assumed in Trek that the shape of the ship has something to do with the geometry of its warp field, but ENT: "Divergence" showed us warp fields that looked like smooth bubbles a fair distance out from the hulls, so I'm not sure I buy the claim that vessel shape affects warp geometry, except in the grossest sense that the warpfield has to be big enough to contain the vessel.

 

[Mysterion]

Christopher said:
But in terms of propulsion, I don't see it making much difference. There's no air in space, so no streamlining issues; a cube will travel just as well as an arrow shape. By Alcubierre warp theory, a ship would be inside a bubble of spacetime moving FTL, and could have any shape within that bubble. It's often assumed in Trek that the shape of the ship has something to do with the geometry of its warp field, but ENT: "Divergence" showed us warp fields that looked like smooth bubbles a fair distance out from the hulls, so I'm not sure I buy the claim that vessel shape affects warp geometry, except in the grossest sense that the warpfield has to be big enough to contain the vessel.

So if your warp-field is a bubble, it makes sense to build your ship as a sphere to use as much of the space inside of that bubble as possible, plus the internal volume plusses.

 

[ahkyahnan]

Thanks again. That's kinda what I suspected but wanted to bounce it off someone.

Mark

 

[comsol]

Starship Polaris said:
I like Michael Alexander's design - have ever since I saw it in "Starlog."

Michael Alexander expanded on that design back in the old Galactic Engineer's Concordance fanzine. He also had a concept for a successor to the Galaxy Class, as well as a couple of Federation/Klingon hybrids and a 22nd century design.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Ah, yes - I remember that design. Eric "Jackill" Kristiansen did a variant of this in "Jackill's Star Fleet Reference Manual - Ships of the Fleet Volume III (1995)":

Solaris Class Cruiser

 

[ahkyahnan]

comsol said:Michael Alexander expanded on that design back in the old Galactic Engineer's Concordance fanzine.

Wow, I miss that fanzine/club. Used to submit stuff myself fairly regularly in its latter years. Was sad to see it go.

Has anyone ever heard from Roy Firestone or know how he's doing? Haven't talked to him since right after the GEC folded. Great guy.

Mark

 

[Dayton3]

Hey Mark.

Didn't you design that group of Starfleet carriers that were featured in the Logbook?

I had a couple of articles.

My short story

"Tomorrow Never Dies:The Possibilities"

And a couple of articles.

"The Ships of Wolf-359" and "Ships of First Contact"

 

[Mysterion]

Dayton3 said:

"The Ships of Wolf-359"

Have you put this on-line anywhere? Would love to read it.

 

[aridas sofia]

ahkyahnan said:

comsol said:Michael Alexander expanded on that design back in the old Galactic Engineer's Concordance fanzine.

Wow, I miss that fanzine/club. Used to submit stuff myself fairly regularly in its latter years. Was sad to see it go.

Has anyone ever heard from Roy Firestone or know how he's doing? Haven't talked to him since right after the GEC folded. Great guy.

Mark

With the Internet, the GEC or something similar would be much easier to do. In fact, that was one model I considered following for the FRS site, but got away from it because I thought there was greater interest in seeing material derived from the FRS and SotSF. I still was very interested in including fiction, tech articles, and graphics other than ship designs, however. Much as I understood were included in the GEC.