Real spacecraft in Picard "Fly Me to the Moon"

[shipfisher]

I've seen a depiction somewhere of the SS Botany Bay ascending in all it's dynamically imbalanced glory on that 6-pack of over-sized SRB's. It featured the ship generating an EM aeroshield that facilitated the otherwise totally unworkable launch configuration. A "lipstick on the pig" scenario at best, but we can have a bit of fun running with it. For one thing, the ship now has an atmospheric entry system of sorts at destination. I picture those 5 cargo segments peeling off the main body of the ship for propulsive landings (SpaceX suicide dive style with no chutes to worry about opening after centuries in space). The ship can accommodate up to 16 cargo pods/segments. I like to think there would have been an orbital rendezvous to take on some fuel tanks placed in the 11 available pod attachment points. You would think some of these tanks would still be in place when the ship was found to allow deceleration on arrival at a suitable planet - we'll chock that up to a possible malfunction that just kept the Botany Bay accelerating untill all tanks were jettisoned (also conveniently allowing it to get a little further out into deep space where a ship on an exploration mission, like the Enterprise, was more likely to find it).
Kahn and his seventy odd followers would then have been doomed without the intercession of the Enterprise and crew. That's gratitude for you...

 

[trekkist]

>none of which made any impression on America, I guess..

Not the way Voyager presents it.

More how normal LA looked given a war with whole populations wiped out.

Exactly. But by implication ("Seed"), the Eugenics Wars were Eurasian (lucky us).

>I've seen a depiction somewhere of the SS Botany Bay ascending in all it's dynamically imbalanced glory on that 6-pack of over-sized SRB's. It featured the ship generating an EM aeroshield

Yeah, I've seen that too...a clever (?) to rationalize an image ("conjectural," when presented in the Okudas' ST Chronology book) and the resultant "canonized" model and photo (former seen in Rain Robinson's 1996 office in V'ger's "Future's End" 2-parter).

After visiting the Smithsonian's Trek exhibit in...hey! 1992-93, the years of Khan's ascendancy! and seeing the Botany Bay in person, I wrote an (unpublished) fanzine about it and ST's late 20th century. I laid the thing out: 2 columns of text with inserted imagery, a foldout, more...as a saddle-stapled (magazine style) mockup (which I still have). BUT: wanting more than simple line drawing style blueprints (which I'd be doing soon...), I set it aside.

During a summer's Architectural Rendering class, I drafted the BB at approximately studio scale, my only references being freeze-framed videos and a few convention-bought photos the size of my palm (and of course my Smithsonian pix...but they had it hanging from the ceiling). Years later, having eyeballed the ship's size from its flying alongside the Enterprise (I didn't...and still don't...know the math to scale such images accurately), I I discovered I'd gotten her size right to a fraction of an inch ("Age and wisdom will sometimes rival youth and skill").

Back to Deep Canon. Who used the Botany Bay? The most powerful Eurasian tyrant. What was it? A modified DY-100 class, not designed nor intended for use as a sleeper ship. Who then would have built those? The Soviets. For what purpose?

Here I got...just a little funny in the head. As it happened, the first real information about the Soviet manned moon landing program was out by then. I therefore took their "Saturn-ski" booster, the N-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(r...d_at_the_Baikonur_Cosmodrome_in_late_1967.jpg

and imagined eight of its first and second stages wrapped about a hexagonal shroud slanting outward from a DY-100's 16 modules (above which a slab-sided cone rose to where the nosecone's curve begins). Inside that nosecone I put an Estes Mars Lander

https://www.apogeerockets.com/Rocket_Kits/Skill_Level_4_Kits/Mars_Lander

(distorted, but not "redesigned," to fit the space) which doubled as a single-stage reusable lander once its time as a 100-odd-seat crew escape capsule was over.

I then massed "my" DY-100 via volume calculation and weight-per-cubic of the Soviets' Salyut space stations.

Beneath the DY, inside the ring of N-1 boosters, lay a Sovietized version of Krafft Ehricke's Nexus SSTO design of 1964:

https://www.up-ship.com/eAPR/ev3n1.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_Nexus
https://up-ship.com/blog/?p=7786

which I figured (in the TOS timeline, in which nuke bombs had flown in '68) the Soviets could pull off by--was it the late 1980s I posited? I think so.

Finally, knowing the mass, thrust, and burn times of the N-1 stages and "my" Nexus-ski -- but not knowing calculus -- I rough-calculated the boosters' performance in five-second increments, changing the gross mass from the start of one period to the next, and using Velocity = acceleration x time to (roughly) derive the final velocity.

Which was that of interplanetary injection. I'd "designed" a 300-odd-foot long modular manned interplanetary spaceship...Deep Canon's DY-100.

 

[fireproof78]

Exactly. But by implication ("Seed"), the Eugenics Wars were Eurasian (lucky us).

Interesting definition of a world War then, Star Trek.

 

[shipfisher]

Your complex system design for getting the DY-100 into orbit is humbling trekkist. Much more impressive than taking a cheesy launch depiction that was probably the result of a resource-poor publication/production deadline and trying to give it legs. Mind you, that probably describes the process via which some things made it on screen, especially in TOS (SS Aurora that was a tholian ship model with nacelles tacked on - I'm talking about you)

 

[Tuskin38]

I've seen a depiction somewhere of the SS Botany Bay ascending in all it's dynamically imbalanced glory on that 6-pack of over-sized SRB's.

There was a model an episode of Voyager.

And this image in the non-canon Star Trek Chronology

 

[shipfisher]

>
Who used the Botany Bay? The most powerful Eurasian tyrant. What was it? A modified DY-100 class, not designed nor intended for use as a sleeper ship. Who then would have built those? The Soviets. For what purpose?

Here I got...just a little funny in the head. As it happened, the first real information about the Soviet manned moon landing program was out by then. I therefore took their "Saturn-ski" booster, the N-1 and imagined eight of its first and second stages wrapped about a hexagonal shroud slanting outward from a DY-100's 16 modules (above which a slab-sided cone rose to where the nosecone's curve begins).

With Sergei Korolev having passed on, there was no one left in the soviet engineering ranks to solve the problem of all 30 1st stage engines vibrating the N1 to failure on all (4?) launch attempts. It would probably have required the augmented intellect of Kahn himself to work a fix for keeping an assembly of 8 N1 1st stages RUD free on the way up.

Astronaut Michael Collins said that even the Saturn V, with only 5 big, honking F1 engines, was a rough enough ride to make any procedure requiring a clear view of the control panel, including in-flight abort, almost impossible. So thank you Mr. Von Braun for all of them staying together as required. If they had stuck with his advice, there would have been no human-rated launch systems incorporating solid fuel boosters, so no Challenger disaster as such. Remove the SRBs and pretty much all vehicle designs with foam covered fuel tanks adjacent to orbiters go away, so no Columbia disaster. Maybe they got that right in the Trek timeline(s).

 

[trekkist]

>With Sergei Korolev having passed on, there was no one left in the soviet engineering ranks to solve the problem of all 30 1st stage engines vibrating the N1 to failure...

Yeah, I dunno. Glushko succeeded Korolev...what if Chelomei had instead, and been ordered to set aside his "mega-Proton" plans and perfect the thing? (i.e., don't give anything up; make it better, generation by generation...the same way they've done with the R-7, the Vostok "bus," Soyuz and Almaz-cum-any Russian ISS module).

As I understand it (mind you, I've only downloaded, not read, Chartok's 4-volume history), what the N-1 chiefly lacked was first & second stage ground test stands (as built for the Saturn V's S-IC and S-II).

>Remove the SRBs and pretty much all vehicle designs with foam covered fuel tanks adjacent to orbiters go away, so no Columbia disaster. Maybe they got that right in the Trek timeline(s).

Deep Canon says they did. Proofs:

1)"Voyager Six" isn't just one of additional probes to the two actually built...it's the expansion of a program created (in reality) to replace the too-expensive original Grand Tour design, TOPS (Thermoelectric Outer Planet Spacecraft), immortalized by Clarke & Bonestell in 1972's Beyond Jupiter: The Worlds of Tomorrow.

2)And yet, the selfsame film shows an image of the space shuttle orbiter Enterprise. WTF? A tripled (at least) fleet of Voyagers, and a designed-by-[Congressional*] committee shuttle? Illogical! Illogical!!

* who told NASA, "$10 billion development's too high; we'll cut you $5. 'Cheaper to build, more expensive to fly?' Lots of us will be out of office by then."

3)But y'know, it isn't. One of the last gasps of the Apollo geezers in re: shuttle design was a near-stock orbiter and external tank perched atop a winged, recoverable S-IC stage (in some versions, piloted), the stack sitting atop a relatively unmodified Apollo pad:

(seen in glorious CGI action at:

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(though in this IMHO less-attractive version:

https://airandspace.si.edu/collecti...lyback-booster-concept-1192/nasm_A19740733000

https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/figure6.8.gif

Instead we got/will get these:

https://twitter.com/spacexmr/status/1411598090319151105

and of course these:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLoun...rship_size_comparison_space_shuttle_saturn_v/

...and just to put into perspective what the US/world lost in retiring the Saturn V in favor of the shuttle fleet:

But hell, at least shuttle left us with Atlantis looking like this at Johnson Space Center. Whoopeee!!

 

[trekkist]

(meanwhile, the Commies sent the first DY-100 to a world whose colonists--warning! headcanon!--wrote the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies (of which I've created a draft) and invented the "credit"--just prior being conquered by Khan)

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Fundamental_Declarations_of_the_Martian_colonies

 

[IMC Headquarters]

Is anyone else impressed by the Mercury Capsule lookalike?

I wonder if they built it from scratch or if it's a generic prop that you can rent for TV/movie productions.

Very much impressed indeed!!!

 

[arch101]

Like the Nomad display. Fits with the earlier Jackson Roykirk reference.

 

[trekkist]

I'm betting the Mercury was a rental. There's at least one company that specializes in that.

Re: Nomad,

Vs.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CcHb9umOMJ-/
Does anyone else find Picard's alteration to this long-established, multiply-canonized design odd?

 

[fireproof78]

Does anyone else find Picard's alteration to this long-established, multiply-canonized design odd?

I can't see it, but I'm still going to hazard a guess that I do not find it odd.

 

[trekkist]

>Much more impressive than taking a cheesy launch depiction that was probably the result of a resource-poor publication/production deadline and trying to give it legs.

I cut some slack to the Okudas and/or Sternbach on this one. A 16-module DY-100 in a shroud wouldn't be recognizable at a glance save to the very most technically-erudite viewer, and the SRB-boosted DY had already appeared as a "conjectural" illustration in the Okuda's Trek Timeline book(s). I just close my eyes and think of the "real" thing...

 

[Lakenheath 72]

With Dave Blass releasing more images of the exhibition, I learned that the Shango would be the first manned ship to pass through the asteroid belt. This would push the Earth-to-Saturn mission to sometime after 2024.