*Spoilers* U.S.S. Franklin Design?

[F. King Daniel]

Sean Hargreaves has begun posting amazing USS Franklin concept art and pictures on his Facebook page.

He also confirmed that he didn't design it with a shuttlebay in mind. So its up to us to fit one in somewhere!

 

[Timo]

...Assuming we want one there. NX status might mean the ship was not equipped with all the operational goodies, and never was intended to. People would be shuttled aboard, conduct their warp 4 test flights, and be shuttled back to Earth, by craft that would never embark on the starship herself.

Not all warships today have helicopter decks, let alone hangar facilities. (And while a personnel transporter probably is more analogous to a ship's boat, shuttles are about 80% helicopter and 20% boat in plot terms!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

So its up to us to fit one in somewhere!

*childish giggling*

 

[Timo]

How about a space station? Is that indestructible enough for you?

Apparently less indestructible than a ship. Which is fine and well: indestructible comes in grades, as we learn when Krall's ships pierce Kirk's hull and not vice versa.

It was a silly moment, created just for wowing the audience, why not leave it at that?

Sounds silly to find fault in a scene that inherently has no fault. It's how Star Trek has always been.

It certainly looked incredible, but was just too ridiculous to take seriously, especially since the Franklin was badly damaged to begin with after you know, crash landing on an alien planet, crashing through a mountain, flying through a swarm of thousands of ships, and being a hundred years old...

Uh, why aren't you simply adding it as item #6 on your list? Why all the griping?

As for "crash land", the ship was intact. Buried in rock, but intact. One may wonder how that happened... Although one doesn't have to wonder, because, you know, ships in Trek do crash intact. As they should.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[gerbil]

Apparently less indestructible than a ship. Which is fine and well: indestructible comes in grades, as we learn when Krall's ships pierce Kirk's hull and not vice versa.



Sounds silly to find fault in a scene that inherently has no fault. It's how Star Trek has always been.



Uh, why aren't you simply adding it as item #6 on your list? Why all the griping?

As for "crash land", the ship was intact. Buried in rock, but intact. One may wonder how that happened... Although one doesn't have to wonder, because, you know, ships in Trek do crash intact. As they should.

Timo Saloniemi

Perhaps she didn't "crash" so much as she was forced down.

 

[publiusr]

Erm... maybe you should read what you wrote again.

If only the Enterprise-E were as sturdy as the 200 year older Franklin, it could have just cruised through the Scimitar instead of being (rightly) torn to shreds on contact.

They may have had similkar hull strength-SIF down, etc.

 

[Tuskin38]

Sean Hargreaves has begun posting amazing USS Franklin concept art and pictures on his Facebook page.

He also confirmed that he didn't design it with a shuttlebay in mind. So its up to us to fit one in somewhere!

Link? My google-fu is failing me

 

[F. King Daniel]

You have to be Facebook friends with him to see them. @RAMA reposted them in this thread: http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/pote...rise-a-look-like.279532/page-27#post-11686474

 

[Timo]

Perhaps she didn't "crash" so much as she was forced down.

That would be interesting to learn. The reason for the crash itself was pretty much left open (Scotty swears on the wormhole theory for how the Franklin got this far, but doesn't say this would explain the crashing). Furthermore, we never learn why Edison didn't just take off again and try to fly home (even across this impossible distance). Why were an alien girl and a future engineer deprived of his tools better at fixing the ship than Edison's own crew was?

Would the drones of the Ancients have been forcing down visiting ships even before Edison took command of them? If so, to what purpose, and why doesn't Edison mention such a purpose in his logs?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[gerbil]

That would be interesting to learn. The reason for the crash itself was pretty much left open (Scotty swears on the wormhole theory for how the Franklin got this far, but doesn't say this would explain the crashing). Furthermore, we never learn why Edison didn't just take off again and try to fly home (even across this impossible distance). Why were an alien girl and a future engineer deprived of his tools better at fixing the ship than Edison's own crew was?

Would the drones of the Ancients have been forcing down visiting ships even before Edison took command of them? If so, to what purpose, and why doesn't Edison mention such a purpose in his logs?

Timo Saloniemi

The Enterprise crew weren't able to take off without significant risk WITH a full compliment.

And maybe Edison did mention it just cuz we didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there.

 

[Timo]

Certainly the logs we saw told only a tiny part of the story they should have told. Perhaps freeze-framing will eventually reveal further pseudo-facts... Although it'd be nice to leave it vague and open to the sort of speculation we love and the writers know to be unnecessary for telling the story.

Would the compliment be a factor in takeoff? Even with the (unknown number of) Enterprise survivors, Scotty supposedly had fewer people trained in the art of flying the Franklin than Edison did...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

The dialogue explained it, the Franklin was never physically made to work inside at atmosphere, terminal velocity was needed to engage the thrusters to gain them any lift, so the ship pointed remotely the right way to fire the impulse engines and blast off like we do now.

None of this fancy "fixed altitude" thrust the Enterprise has, that only requires reaching the desired height, and the ship floats there as long as the nacelles are on, belting off out of the atmosphere with her far more powerful impulse drive.

And Scotty said several of the Franklin's driver coils were missing from the impulse assembly. And she was working at 70% capacity, so a builup of speed wouldn't hurt.

 

[Timo]

The dialogue explained it

...Hopefully we get a transcript soon.

the Franklin was never physically made to work inside at atmosphere

But that's totally false - she went in intact, she came out intact, she had no problem flying around. That a character would claim so just makes the character look like a total fool.

If the character just says "these things were built in orbit, so we might have some problems here", then we have more leeway. But that leeway must be used to accommodate the fact that ships from that era, such as NX-01 and the Franklin, worked just fine in atmospheric flight and under gravity. Which is what we would expect of a ship that flies through space and mountains with equal ease anyway.

terminal velocity was needed to engage the thrusters to gain them any lift

Why would the thrusters need velocity, though? And it wasn't the thrusters that lifted the ship to space anyway, it was the impulse engines, supposedly. What was wrong with those? So this "explanation" just makes matters worse - we now have to dismiss it somehow.

so the ship pointed remotely the right way to fire the impulse engines and blast off like we do now.

She would have been pointed the right way when resting on that mountaintop. Just blast straight ahead and soon you are out of the atmosphere.

But while on the mountaintop, she was actually in the mountaintop, for unknown reasons (Avalanche? Materializing inside solid rock after exiting the wormhole?). And getting the engines out of the rock might have necessarily resulted in the nose dipping and the ship falling...

And Scotty said several of the Franklin's driver coils were missing from the impulse assembly.

Now that would sound pretty serious. But how would the big dip help there? It didn't gain them any altitude or speed - it decreased their altitude and speed from the original, giving a big minus sign in front of both!

And she was working at 70% capacity, so a builup of speed wouldn't hurt.

Not if she were going in the wrong direction. It would hurt and nothing but hurt then...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

Scotty says "these old ships were built in space, never meant to operate inside an atmosphere" implying the Franklin wouldn't behave the same way as the Enterprise, making a take off problematic from the start. He wouldn't have pointed that out unless it was a big enough issue about getting off the planet.

As to why they needed to have the ship already moving at terminal velocity before the thrusters would actually engage, that's all Sulu says. No technical explanation for why he can't push a button.

She's lying flat on the mountain shelf, they do fire an impulse burst (damaging everything behind them, heh) but she stays horizontal. They need the nose pointing up to basically take off like our shuttles/rockets do now, vertically-ish.

And they can only point her up using the thrusters, which have this weird startup mode that needs the ship to already be going fast.

Maybe Jaylah stole most of the fuel, or the pre-fire ignition components to build campfires, so they needed the skin heat of the hull moving at speed to cause them to fire?

 

[Timo]

Scotty says "these old ships were built in space, never meant to operate inside an atmosphere" implying the Franklin wouldn't behave the same way as the Enterprise

This would require the "old" NX-326 to somehow be different from the "new" NX-01, which never had atmospheric trouble either in practice or in dialogue. Which is fine and well, except..

1) Both supposedly were built in space, so there's no difference there.
2) Both look largely the same, or at least not dissimilar to ship that are known to be atmosphere compatible.
3) Other "old" ships in ENT decidedly look as if they were built to operate inside an atmosphere.

But NX-326 could be an exception to 3, the differences in 2 could be internal, and I guess 1 could be excused by saying that "built in space" was completely unrelated to "never meant to operate".

As to why they needed to have the ship already moving at terminal velocity before the thrusters would actually engage, that's all Sulu says.

Does he? Perhaps he says "we have to do something that drops us from this rock first, and then it takes so long to get the thrusters working that we have reached terminal velocity and almost crashed to the bottom of this ravine", just not in so many words? That would eliminate the weird relationship between velocity and thruster function.

They need the nose pointing up to basically take off like our shuttles/rockets do now, vertically-ish.

What for, though? Going horizontally ought to do the trick just as well. It's not as if escape velocity would be even a fraction of the velocity the ship later needs to reach Yorktown or do battle, so there should be no desire to minimize escape velocity or the time needed to achieve it by going straight up.

Maybe Jaylah stole most of the fuel, or the pre-fire ignition components to build campfires, so they needed the skin heat of the hull moving at speed to cause them to fire?

Heh, I'm definitely going by that until the exact dialogue comes in!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

All I know is, Scotty thought the Franklin in particular wouldn't fair well. The NX-01 might have deliberately had sub-orbital dynamics built in to remove that oversight only a few years later. She had dual impulse engines and partly exposed nacelle grilles, that could also help.

And Sulu insisted they needed to drop her off a cliff, everyone else looked at him like he was mad, Scotty didn't exactly argue but he went along with it having inspected the ships systems.

I think had the ship been brand new and sitting on something flat, they could have left without much fuss. But the deteriorated state of the ship and who knows what being missing or broken meant having to pitch up and push the engines as hard as possible to just break free.

 

[SalvorHardin]

It wasn't always known as Franklin

Franklin when it was called the Pioneer, in an early script where it had to
lift off vertically. Note at that time the engines and arms were flipped down.......

The Pioneer, before it became the Franklin, in a early script buried in the sand. A different design here somewhat......

And some more art:

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But that's totally false - she went in intact, she came out intact, she had no problem flying around. That a character would claim so just makes the character look like a total fool.

NX-Alpha wasn't meant to fly around in an atmosphere either. In order to launch it they had to fling it into the air on a giant catapult. The Phoenix, also, wasn't meant to fly in an atmosphere and had to be lofted by an ICBM before it could fly.

Why would the thrusters need velocity, though?

I don't think they did. I think they were using the aerodynamics of the ship to generate a little lift and basically GLIDE it onto the right trajectory. It probably wouldn't work for real, but that was the idea they were going with.

 

[Timo]

Alas, it didn't look as if the ship was doing any gliding. She just plummeted until Sulu managed to get the ventral rockets firing, after which she stopped, turned, and then shot near-vertically into space.

If taking off were the problem, then Scotty would have been wrong in saying the ship wasn't gonna cope with atmospheres because she was built in space. That part she coped nicely with!

It might have been better if it were just an issue of getting all systems started, and Step 1 was getting the ship out of the rock, while Step 32 was vital for takeoff, but Sulu suddenly found to his surprise that executing Step 1 sent the ship off the cliff already...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[WarpFactorZ]

It might have been better if it were just an issue of getting all systems started, and Step 1 was getting the ship out of the rock, while Step 32 was vital for takeoff, but Sulu suddenly found to his surprise that executing Step 1 sent the ship off the cliff already...

I agree. The whole "Franklin needs to reach terminal velocity" thing was essentially technobabble. I like the above idea that they started falling well before they wanted to.

It would have also given a good opportunity for a TSFS nod:

FRANKLIN PLUMMETS TOWARD THE ROCK BELOW.

KIRK: [Shouting into com] NOW, MR. SCOTT!

SCOTT: [In engineering] Sir?

KIRK: The thrusters, Mr. Scott!

SCOTT: Aye, sir! I'm working on it!