Problematic Warship

[UncleRice]

I created a race of beings for my fanfic that live out on the "north" edge of Menthar space. I needed to design space ships for them. I came up with a flattened and stretched bubble ship design based of PHI or 1.618. The height x PHI is the width. The width x PHI is the length. This exercise is necessary because I need to know where stuff in the ship is and what it can do. This is a Frigate 77.9m High, 126m Wide, and 204m Long.

The problem I'm having with the ship is that I'm finding enormous volumes of room for weapons. Even with a large
deflector dish, private cabins for the crew, the aft sensor on the middle deck, and modelling the torpedo launchers off from one of the diagrams I found I still had plenty of room for 56 launchers which is about 10x the number found on any Federation ship.

The torpedo issue is even worse. I found that even allowing for wide walkways, over sizing the torpedoes by about 5cm, and leaving a huge unused space around the perimeter, I still had room to store over 27,000 torpedoes. This is an order of magnitude higher than any federation ship.

I'm trying to not create an over powered ship, but 25 decks still completely unassigned, I'm having trouble coming up with a reason why a warship couldn't have this much fire power. Worse, this is a mid sized ship by Star Trek standards and I have an entire fleet to design. So what do you think?

 

[sojourner]

You've just discovered why the sphere is the most efficient use of space. While alot of ships in trek may be larger in dimension, most of them have very little actual internal space due to their shape.

Your systems should be taking up more internal space as well. Look at most deckplans and you'll see that the main deflector takes up huge amounts of internal space, also hanger bays, fuel tankage, storage, life support, computer cores in trek are very large. Your warp core looks a bit simplistic in space used.

Even with all that, I suspect you'll still have a lot of extra room to work with. Maybe come up with a more interesting design than an ovoid sphere?

 

[reanimatedfish]

Sojourner is right, spheroids are almost overly efficient in terms of internal storage space. It leaves metric tons of room.

You could try flattening the ovoid out, adding a few planes and shaving off a few thousand metric tons of internal storage here and there.

Stylize it a little more to add some extra waste here and there.

 

[Maverisms]

What sojourner said.

Trek has zero continuity in these things. Starfleet does not build warships, but their starships have combat power equal on class for class basis to threat forces, despite not having more powerful weapons or defensive systems. (Logically, Starfleet would have to be the most well armed of the bunch, in order to maintain parity with ships that were, ton for ton, more capable combatants--quality vs. quantity).

The Klingon Empire does build warships. They also seem to have come across the PhoTorp first, yet they suddenly lose all tech superiority to Starfleet. (Sadly, the multicultural advantage doesn't play. If the formation of the Federation lead to a flowering to weapons tech ideas that erased the Klingon advantage, why did they stop when the reached parity. The Federation is peaceful, sure but when your basic missile weapon is also a 30 megaton weapon of mass destruction, any claims of moral objections sound thin.)

If the Klingons build warships, and are warrior race, why is the most heavily armed ship in the alpha quadrant Reman? Shown weapons fits for Klingon and Romulan ships all lay withing parity of the Galaxy class, yet the Scimitar is armed with some 9 times the Galaxy's missile load/launchers (a generous estimate, admittedly. It is not made clear why The Scimitar has 27 torp bays and whether they feed a similar number of launchers).

For some reason, despite being evil, no one bothers to use old weapons of additional mass destruction, including the (Really cool and well thought out) Genesis Device (which could totaly fit in torpedo launcher) and the tactical I-just-crapped-my-pants power of the transphasic torpedo (which, unlike the quantum torp does have an insane warhead yeild compared to the photorp, no matter what they want to try and stick back in the bottle. Borg cubes survive multiple photorp hits before adapting, but a single transphasic destroyed a cube outright). We'll just pretend Starfleet isn't just peaceful but suffers from an underdog fetish.

Oh, And let's not begin to wonder why, despite being outgunned by everything, the NX class always seemed to hold it's own against the Klingons who were supposed to outgun it.

Right. If I keep making this point the thread will get bumped to tech. So, here's some tips:

Try flattening the sphere into something like lozenge or (dare I say) saucer.
OR Try moving the Warp coils inside the hull. If you are going to use the technically savvy spheroid, you might as well use the technically savvy "protect the engines with hull material and SIFs."
--While you are doing that, clear more space inside the hull by declaring that the warp drive suffers the Federation 50%+ line of sight limitation.
----Double down on the above by making the warp drive Annular, just repeat coil segments around the hull.
Give the crew racial claustrophobia and antisocial personality disorders.
Small craft. Small craft support systems. Cargo systems.
Very large holodecks
Heavy systems redundancy to support operations due to combat damage. (warp cores, computer cores, damage control fabrication centers)
Realize the this ship is not a frigate. Do LxWxH for each piece of the Galaxy, and multiply the result by 0.65 for a rough estimate of its volume. Compare this to the volume of your "frigate." What you have there is a battleship.

Good luck.

 

[UncleRice]

The parallel warp system I came up with wraps most of the way around the ship like a belt. I've decided to reassign this design to a different branch of my fiction and see what I can do along the lines of Space Battleship Yamato if it were built using Enterprise C technology.

[EDIT] Have you ever seen a Klingon Nerd? of course not, that's why they do such a lousy job of advancing. [/EDIT]

 

[Maverisms]

Actually, there have been a couple of Klingon nerds, in TNG and ENT. Klingons do science. Their warrior ethos doesn't stop them being civilized. It just means, every one of them is willing and able to fight. Leaving aside the question of how Klingon got into space to begin with, as it is canon that they've been this way since antiquity.

It also means the writers only had a few ideas involving Klingons who did something beyond fight.

I'd say it is too bad you're giving up on the ship design, at least as a Trek ship. I think the concept had promise and that your problem was one of scale rather than of design. You set out build a frigate and you gave it much more size than it needed.

 

[Venardhi]

Actually, there have been a couple of Klingon nerds, in TNG and ENT. Klingons do science. Their warrior ethos doesn't stop them being civilized. It just means, every one of them is willing and able to fight. Leaving aside the question of how Klingon got into space to begin with, as it is canon that they've been this way since antiquity.

It also means the writers only had a few ideas involving Klingons who did something beyond fight.

I'd say it is too bad you're giving up on the ship design, at least as a Trek ship. I think the concept had promise and that your problem was one of scale rather than of design. You set out build a frigate and you gave it much more size than it needed.

They were once enslaved, threw off their oppressors and stole their technology. It is all there in their mythology.

 

[Maverisms]

Nope. That's SFB Universe, not Canon. Their myth is slaying their own gods. You could interpret that to fit that explanation but it would only be a personal interpretation.

Beyond that, that objection misses the point. The point isn't Trek is bad. I love Trek. The point is that Trek does not hold up under scrutiny. It is technically inconsistent. Most SciFi is. All of it will fall apart if you dig deeply enough. All fiction will usually crumble under too fine an examination.

As a result of this, it makes sense to avoid using hard numbers to design your ships. Instead you use rational assumption based on the most common stats of canon designs. Starships carry a few hundred photorps, at best. So your starship also only has a few hundred. Case closed. It doesn't matter how many will fit, because no one does that in Trek.

 

[Venardhi]

Obviously intended subtext is obvious.

 

[Maverisms]

Obvious intended subtext is not canon. If it worked that way there's be no arguments vis-a-vis canon as everyone would understand the obvious intended subtext.

Canon means what it says until the writers change the meaning. Until Trek explicitly states a thing, it isn't true. (Sometimes not even then.)

But if you must defend this idea (I've been trying to avoid it, this is fan art, not tech) If the Klingons threw off oppressors, they would still need scientists in order to maintain parity with the rapidly advancing Federation tech base. With out them, they not only lose their weapons tech advantage by TOS but are Far behind by TMP and utterly outclassed by the so called lost years.

But it didn't happen that way. Every techbased threat, save the Borg, is at parity with the Federation all the time, everywhere. Sometimes they play at it being different but for the most part this true. Exceptions are typically one episode wonders (ENT's repair station, The Planet Killer) or parity is rapidly achieved (Kazon, Dominion), suggesting their tech bases weren't far off.

So it doesn't matter where the Klingon's got their tech. That fails to explain why all tech bases seem to be created equal. And from an artist's point of view the answer to the problem isn't relevant. The key thing is to maintain consistency with the canon (or, failing that, be an awesome artist). When your "small" ship has orders of magnitude more fire power than anything in canon, it doesn't matter if your calculations are correct. You are breaking the fourth wall, pointing out the Emperor's lack of clothing.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Canonical issues aside, I would argue that a cube is the a more efficient use of space than anything round.

I remember when the Ford Taurus first came out in the late 80's, particularly the station wagon variant. It was what some had labeled a breakthrough in vehicular design (I wouldn't, but that's beside the point). Problem was, compared to a more boxy station wagon of apparently equivalent interior space, you couldn't store as much cargo, as the roof tapered down in the back more than the older boxy variants of equal roof height. You actually lose volume (and surface area) on curves. Good idea if you're concerned about aero-dynamicism. Since we're talking about space ships, working around/through air is obviously irrelevant.

The Borg got it right - a species that thrives on efficiency would use cubic primitives for that very reason.

 

[sojourner]

The sphere is more efficient on a volume to surface area ratio.

 

[BK613]

^^
Which is not the same as the most efficient use of space...for its occupants. :-)

 

[Maverisms]

Occupants don't matter.

No really. I'm not just being flippant. Space vehicle construction must account for the materials used to build the hull and the mass of those materials.

Trade off time. You must enclose X volume of space with the least use of materials. The best answer is always a sphere. The occupancy problem occurs when people try to fit square living into round holes. Much like the common objection to geodesic dome homes--that curved walls and flat furniture don't mix--is solved by customizing the space, moving storage to the outer walls and such. Occupants must adjust to the space.

The Borg Cube is the most efficient way to fill an arbitrary space with Borg ships, but it isn't the best way to enclose a space craft.

 

[publiusr]

Well, I do seem to remember the HerQ' as mentioned on-screen, which seems to fit into the SFB mythos...