Science Labs and Shuttlebays on Starships

[James Wright]

I know that TOS Enterprise had 14 science labs, it was stated in dialogue. The ship also carried a number of shuttlecraft, I believe the number was 7.
Now my question!
Why have small ships like the Hermes or Saladin class ships if science labs were particularly sparse and neither class had anything that resembled a shuttlebay?

James

 

[Timo]

Why not? It's not as if every warship today has a helicopter hangar or a well for landing craft. Different ships for different purposes, with a few aces-of-all-trades built for propaganda use...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

There are some plans out there that fix the lack of shuttlebays on the Saladin-Class, with one on either side of the forward ventral phaser banks. Since the ship has never been seen on screen then there is nothing to say that this layout isn't the actual design. It depends on what source you want to go with.

 

[James Wright]

The Freedom class of TNG era seems to be the only single nacelle designed starship with a shuttlebay. The few web sites that I was able to find say the Freedom class ships were designed to operate within Federation borders, mainly patrol and escort missions.

James

 

[CorporalCaptain]

There are some plans out there that fix the lack of shuttlebays on the Saladin-Class, with one on either side of the forward ventral phaser banks. Since the ship has never been seen on screen then there is nothing to say that this layout isn't the actual design. It depends on what source you want to go with.

Yep.

The Freedom class of TNG era seems to be the only single nacelle designed starship with a shuttlebay.

Maybe in canon, though i can't say for sure on that account (the information given below in the postscript notwithstanding), but certainly not in fanon.

See, for example, the USS Masao NCC-700.


P.S. Here's a couple of webpages discussing canonical references to the Franz Joseph designs themselves.

http://www.trekplace.com/article09.html

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/sftm.htm

It's arguable, but to me these canonical sightings are just as legitimate as a blink-and-you-miss it model in the starship graveyard.

 

[James Wright]

I guess my lead in question should have been,
Why have small ships like the Hermes and saladin class ships if they are not equiped to be explorer type vessels like the Constitution, Miranda or Obreth class starships?
We later see or hear of the latter two classes being cargo vessels.
Why not build and equip all Starfleet vessels to be explorers?
Even the Enterprise carried cargo when needed, it's just a mobile starbase capable of warp speed.
Shouldn't all ships in Starfleet be built, equipped and manned to be explorers?

James

 

[Crazy Eddie]

There are some plans out there that fix the lack of shuttlebays on the Saladin-Class, with one on either side of the forward ventral phaser banks. Since the ship has never been seen on screen then there is nothing to say that this layout isn't the actual design. It depends on what source you want to go with.

Also depends on whether or not you consider the Saladin to be canon.

I for one think that we finally saw the "real" appearance of the Saladin in the form of USS Kelvin. In which case, a lack of shuttle storage was most decidedly NOT one of its problems.

Broadly speaking, I don't really love the idea of tiny kitbash ships like Saladin and Hermes anyway. It seems logical to me that the Enterprise saucer is the size it is because it supports a particular mission role; a smaller, less capable ship would be PROPORTIONATELY smaller too, while having more or less the same basic design.

An echo of this would be the scaled starships of the 2th century. At the very small end we have the Nova class; mid-sized ships like Voyager or the Excelsior, then on the large end we have Ambassador and Galaxy-class ships. They have certain similarities, with the same (broadly speaking) overall shape. But it would be kind of silly, IMO, for someone to try and build a small-size ship by just bolting warp nacelles onto an Intrdepid-class' saucer, or build a large ship by stacking three or four Intrepid-class saucers on two secondary hulls and four warp nacelles.

 

[James Wright]

I'm talking about ships wihin TOS and the following movies, since seeing the new Star Trek films are set in a different time line, yes the USS Kelvin does address the shuttlebay question.
Thanks mentioning the Excelsior class,(I actually forgot about that one.)
I just thought of something, can anyone name a starship class in TNG era that doesn't have a shuttlebay?

James

 

[Timo]

Apart from the still hard-working Oberth, there are the kitbashes of Wolf 359. No shuttlebay can be discerned in the Cheyenne, New Orleans or Springfield classes, either because the 'bashing has reduced the scale of the Galaxy components too much, extra bits have obscured the bays, or the 'bash features only those parts of Galaxy that had no suitable openings.

Since all those ships are still the size of Kirk's TOS ride, we might be tempted to insert at least small bays there - anything that could look like an opening if we squinted would do. Or then we could accept that Starfleet doesn't feel it needs shuttles on every ship, and that vessels basically identical to Kirk's in size and shape, like New Orleans, can be dedicated to completely different mission profiles.

Then there's the giant Niagara, which "in reality" may or may not have had a shuttlebay where the Borg blew a big hole.

As for Saladin, I like to see USN Spruance there - a massively oversized hull chosen because of the well foreseen need for future installation of newer, better and/or additional gear. There'd be critics saying "too lightly armed", "why not call her a cruiser" or "bloody waste of good steel - it's not a scaled-down Iowa with torpedo tubes as every destroyer ought to be", but as with Spruance, they wouldn't be the ones deciding.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Darkwing]

Also depends on whether or not you consider the Saladin to be canon.

Broadly speaking, I don't really love the idea of tiny kitbash ships like Saladin and Hermes anyway. It seems logical to me that the Enterprise saucer is the size it is because it supports a particular mission role; a smaller, less capable ship would be PROPORTIONATELY smaller too, while having more or less the same basic design.

An echo of this would be the scaled starships of the 2th century. At the very small end we have the Nova class; mid-sized ships like Voyager or the Excelsior, then on the large end we have Ambassador and Galaxy-class ships. They have certain similarities, with the same (broadly speaking) overall shape. But it would be kind of silly, IMO, for someone to try and build a small-size ship by just bolting warp nacelles onto an Intrdepid-class' saucer, or build a large ship by stacking three or four Intrepid-class saucers on two secondary hulls and four warp nacelles.

Actually, I think it makes sense. The Constitution is the culmination of Project starship, designing the workhorse military cruiser / explorer / all-around best ship possible with bleeding edge tech, and modular design.
So the Hermes and Saladin use Constitution saucers and nacelles as spare parts that get used as smaller starships until needed to repair a Connie. A generation later, the refit happens, designs have diversified, tech has advanced, but there's no grand unifying theory of design for this generation, so even if some scouts and destroyers ended up actually being used for parts, it wasn't often enough to justify continuing the practice for future designs. IOW, there are better scouts and destroyers than those two, but they were designed for their job, rather than shoehorned into the jobs they could do.
Turning it around, they built 12 Galaxy class hulls, per the TNGTM, but only fully assembled 6, storing the other 6 in mothball yards in case they needed to replace a Galaxy class on short notice. If the Starfleet of the 2220s - 2240s hadn't used the spare parts as makeshift smaller ships, perhaps the 24th century Council would not have approved the necessary resources to build all 12 up-front like that to provide for a future need. If they hadn't seen that kitbash ships weren't as useful as purpose-designed ships previously, due to an earlier administration's short-sightedness, they might have only approved the 6 commissioned.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

On the copious Jackill fan kitbashes, many of them sport a single "pocket hangar" mounted on the saucer dorsal on the starboard side, for ships which don't have the traditional full-size shuttlebay. I was weird to see them all havin gsuch an asymmetrical feature, but it does skirt them around the notion that Starfleet wouldn't be SO dumb as to have hundreds of starships out there with nary an atmospheric shuttle aboard, let alone a landing pad for the same.

I also liked an early suggestion that why here were so many kitbashes featuring Constitution-type saucers in the 1980s, is that there were dozens of them left over from the decommissioning of the old Ptolemy-class tugs, when the so-called "Class I" starship family (including the TOS Constitution, Saladin, et, al) were all retired in favor of newer hull designs inspired by the upgrade of the Enterprise and her sisters. This theorem establishes that all Class I saucers were built nearly identical regardless of actual use, meaning that even the lowly Ptolemy class had tons of space devoted to labs, VIP quarters and crew consumables storage even if they'd never be used as such (I'd hazard to say that they'd had all the wiring and rough-ins and general rooms assigned as able to be made into labs and so on, even if they ended up as empty rooms for general cargo). When the ASDB needed a new prototype ship, they hauled an old Ptolemy saucer out of mothballs, since most of them had hardly any wear and tear on their bones compared to other ships of the time, performing a TMP-style upgrade to the thing while making a new ship out of the spaceframe. This was from a fanon "officers manual" from the early 90s, I think.

Mark

 

[Unicron]

Well, the Jackill's chronology has all of the FJ series being refitted to TMP era stats, and then later replaced by Excelsior type successor classes. So the Ptolemies and other tugs from the TM were uprated to the Moncrief class, and then gradually phased out for the Anaxagoras class. For myself, I like the idea that the Excelsior family vessels might have been entering service in numbers around the turn of the 24th century, when the USS Excelsior had proven to be a stable technology platform despite the transwarp drive not working as expected.

 

[Ithekro]

Considering we see a lot of Excelsiors and a few derivatives by the Dominion War 90 years after the U.S.S. Excesior herself was being tested in Spacedock, it seems reasonable that they took over a bit..

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Actually, I think it makes sense. The Constitution is the culmination of Project starship, designing the workhorse military cruiser / explorer / all-around best ship possible with bleeding edge tech, and modular design.
So the Hermes and Saladin use Constitution saucers and nacelles as spare parts that get used as smaller starships until needed to repair a Connie.

That would be to assume that no other starships OTHER than the Constitution class existed before the Constitution was put into service. That is not a logical assumption. That also assumes some sort of standardized mass production of the Constitution class' many components to achieve an economy of scale; that is ALSO not a logical assumption, considering they only built thirteen of them.

The predecessors of the Constitution class, for that matter, would have been built with completely different components and designs, so there's no call for the assumption that designs "diversified" at some point in the future. They would have been there from the beginning (and obviously WERE, judging by Enterprise) so the standardization of Constitution-style kitbashes wouldn't have been all that useful.

You might have a lot of ships with similar shapes and styles as the Constitution class but with smaller saucers/nacelles/engineering hulls. So if we ever saw the canon (as opposed to fanon) Saladin class -- assuming the Kelvin isn't already the exemplar for this, and that is a BIG assumption -- it would probably look like simply a smaller, more compact version of the Enterprise: a saucer, two nacelles and a secondary hull, but being only 150 meters long and having only 14 decks.

If they hadn't seen that kitbash ships weren't as useful as purpose-designed ships previously, due to an earlier administration's short-sightedness, they might have only approved the 6 commissioned.

They obviously DID, since we saw far more than that in service in DS9.

Also, the "kitbash" component of the TNG era isn't pronounced enough to make your point; there are DOZENS of starship designs in that series run, many larger or smaller and with different mission roles. You could say the Nebula class is a derivative of the Galaxy, but it doesn't use precisely the same components.

More to the point: the whole reason for ships like Saladin and Hermes is because trek fanon has a lot more idea-guys than it has decent artists. We're very good, as a group, at coming up with ideas for what MIGHT exist, but we're very bad at coming up with compelling visuals for what that something might look like. As with canon itself, the ideas and the visuals don't usually match all that closely.

 

[Darkwing]

That would be to assume that no other starships OTHER than the Constitution class existed before the Constitution was put into service. That is not a logical assumption. That also assumes some sort of standardized mass production of the Constitution class' many components to achieve an economy of scale; that is ALSO not a logical assumption, considering they only built thirteen of them.

No, that does not follow. The Constitution was not just the next class, it was the next big jump in tech, so ready spare parts makes sense. And we don't know that they only made 13, especially since the hull numbers run from what? 1647 to 1764 on-screen in TOS alone? 12 or 13 Connies outfitted for 5-year missions, maybe, but not necessarily only that many Connies ever made.

The predecessors of the Constitution class, for that matter, would have been built with completely different components and designs, so there's no call for the assumption that designs "diversified" at some point in the future. They would have been there from the beginning (and obviously WERE, judging by Enterprise) so the standardization of Constitution-style kitbashes wouldn't have been all that useful.

I think the designs were more diverse before Connie, more based on the new tech for the Connie era, and then diversified again after. And Enterprise is a different timeline, anyway.

You might have a lot of ships with similar shapes and styles as the Constitution class but with smaller saucers/nacelles/engineering hulls. So if we ever saw the canon (as opposed to fanon) Saladin class -- assuming the Kelvin isn't already the exemplar for this, and that is a BIG assumption -- it would probably look like simply a smaller, more compact version of the Enterprise: a saucer, two nacelles and a secondary hull, but being only 150 meters long and having only 14 decks.

The Saladin was canon until Roddenberry found out he would have to pay to use it, then he whipped up his rules for warp drive to decanonize it. A miniature Connie is less logical than the FJ design.

Also, the "kitbash" component of the TNG era isn't pronounced enough to make your point; there are DOZENS of starship designs in that series run, many larger or smaller and with different mission roles. You could say the Nebula class is a derivative of the Galaxy, but it doesn't use precisely the same components.

No, I said that they tried the idea during the Connie era, then didn't see the need so much later. The fleet was big enough that 6 Galaxys in pieces at a depot was seen as a better back up than having a few dozen scouts and destroyers made up of spare parts flying around doing a subpar job in comparison to the purpose-designed scouts and destroyers. IOW, Starfleet tried something once, then learned from it later.

More to the point: the whole reason for ships like Saladin and Hermes is because trek fanon has a lot more idea-guys than it has decent artists. We're very good, as a group, at coming up with ideas for what MIGHT exist, but we're very bad at coming up with compelling visuals for what that something might look like. As with canon itself, the ideas and the visuals don't usually match all that closely.

The FJTM ships were pretty compelling at the time, and we didn't have a lot of alternative ideas to compare them to.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No, that does not follow. The Constitution was not just the next class, it was the next big jump in tech

According to WHAT? As far as we know from canon, the Constitution was just another ship, nothing all that special about it. The relative technical capabilities of the Enterprise are never given in comparison to any other starships, only to civilian craft (superior) and enemy ships (equal or slightly better).

Moreover, Enterprise's technology is apparently standard enough that they can salvage computer components from civilian stations like Delta Vega, so it's probably not cutting edge technology even by THEIR standards.

I think the designs were more diverse before Connie, more based on the new tech for the Connie era, and then diversified again after.

Nothing other than the FJ kitbashes suggests this is even SLIGHTLY the case. And given the low registry numbers of the Oberth class ships, plus the numbers of Miranda-class starships (e.g. Reliant and Saratoga), it probably isn't. And now there's USS Shenzhou and Discovery having registry numbers similar to the similarly-sized Constellation, this is demonstrably not the case.

The Saladin was canon

No, it was not.

A miniature Connie is less logical than the FJ design.

I don't see how, considering the Nova class of the 24th century is essentially a miniature Intrepid. We do not, on the other hand, see any intrepid class starships flying around with just a decapitated saucer and a warp nacelle stuck on the bottom. Because that would be (and look) stupid.

No, I said that they tried the idea during the Connie era, then didn't see the need so much later. The fleet was big enough that 6 Galaxys in pieces at a depot...

Is not what they ended up with. They ACTUALLY BUILT all of those Galaxy class ships, they DID NOT leave them in pieces.

The FJTM ships were pretty compelling at the time, and we didn't have a lot of alternative ideas to compare them to.

And now they're not, because we do.

 

[Ithekro]

If we went by today's US Navy, the idea would be the standardize as much as possible. One or at most two classes for a particular classification of ship. But back when Star Trek came out, there were maybe a dozen classes of designs for any one classification of ship in the Navy. Several left over from World War Two, some built in the decade that followed to make used of missile technologies, and than some brand new designs using new engines to replace the entire 1940s and 1950s era fleet ships.

Today you might get several dozen ships of one class were typically you'd get maybe a half dozen ships of a class before there was a revision and another class came out. The exception to this was some of the wartime classes that were pumped out in large number because they needed large numbers. But today we have basically a post-Cold War fleet that is mass produced slowly with incremental improvement rather than getting new bids for ship design contracts.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If we went by today's US Navy...

Can we please NOT?

But today we have basically a post-Cold War fleet that is mass produced slowly with incremental improvement rather than getting new bids for ship design contracts.

WE do. Almost everybody else in the world has moved on to high-versatility multirole platforms that serve more as a low-intensity maritime security force than an actual war-fighting military. Almost the entire anti-ship combat role has been taken over by either submarines or aircraft or some combination thereof (those who do not operate aircraft carriers use the former exclusively) so surface combatants in most navies are designed for coastal patrol, shore bombardment or escort duty. Alot of the newer ones are even designed with stealth characteristics to make them harder to target by an aggressor.

It's also worth pointing out that the Federation isn't a single country on a single planet in a single solar system patrolling a pair of oceans, and North America/Earth's way of building a fleet isn't the only way a fleet can or would be built. If the United Nations, for example, supplanted NATO as the main vehicle for joint military operations, you would once again have dozens upon dozens of different types of destroyers, frigates and corvettes operating along with Japanese helicopter carriers, Russian "aviation cruisers," American supercarriers, amphibious warfare shops, littoral combat ships, nuclear attack submarines, all escorted by patrols of German and French diesel and fuel-cell powered attack submarines. And Starfleet is a completely different beast even then.[/QUOTE]

 

[Tenacity]

Why have small ships like the Hermes and saladin class ships if they are not equiped to be explorer type vessels

Because one is a destroyer and the other is a (battle?) scout, what science facilities they have are to enable those functions.

 

[Darkwing]

According to WHAT? As far as we know from canon, the Constitution was just another ship, nothing all that special about it. The relative technical capabilities of the Enterprise are never given in comparison to any other starships, only to civilian craft (superior) and enemy ships (equal or slightly better).

Maybe you got that impression. But a starship captain was a very different thing from a spaceship captain, as Merrick said.

Moreover, Enterprise's technology is apparently standard enough that they can salvage computer components from civilian stations like Delta Vega, so it's probably not cutting edge technology even by THEIR standards.

If your ship is that badly trashed, you'll try things like that. That doesn't mean that they were backwards, only that they thought they could kludge it together well enough to get back.

Nothing other than the FJ kitbashes suggests this is even SLIGHTLY the case. And given the low registry numbers of the Oberth class ships, plus the numbers of Miranda-class starships (e.g. Reliant and Saratoga), it probably isn't. And now there's USS Shenzhou and Discovery having registry numbers similar to the similarly-sized Constellation, this is demonstrably not the case.

And a whole of fanon and decanonized sources, not just the one.

No, it was not.

Roddenberry was touting FASA and FJ as legitimately part of Trek when he made money off them. Then he found out he had to pay if he wanted to use their derivative works, and got vindictive.

I don't see how, considering the Nova class of the 24th century is essentially a miniature Intrepid. We do not, on the other hand, see any intrepid class starships flying around with just a decapitated saucer and a warp nacelle stuck on the bottom. Because that would be (and look) stupid.

It'd look derivative of FJ is all. That, and Roddenberry's rules of warp drive designed to bash FJ militate against it.

Is not what they ended up with. They ACTUALLY BUILT all of those Galaxy class ships, they DID NOT leave them in pieces.

I didn't say they never used the Galaxy hulls they left unfinished. They commissioned 6 fully assembled ones, and stashed 6 unassembled ones when the program finished building.

And now they're not, because we do.

Strangely, a lot of fans still think FJ designs are compelling, even compared to all the stuff we have now.