Star Ships

[aridas sofia]

Just as a quick point of reference, here is the ship the TAS Bonaventure was named to honor. While I like the Greg Jein model, I tried to come up with something a little different, and more in keeping with the evolution of warp drive I'm portraying. Still needs a few finishing touches.

From 2065:

I've been playing with this design, and while it works as a late 21st century concept, it lacks the baroque, exposed, skeletal look I'm thinking is necessary. Particularly in light of the line of warp experiments I've drawn up that date from the 2030s to the mid-2060s -- this is just too smooth.

So, I think this one will be reassigned to other uses and Bonaventure I will yet again be going back to the drawing board.

 

[tyr_13]

I agree, it's too 'clean' looking. The layout itself could be salvaged with little modification, such as a good deal of exposed components.

 

[aridas sofia]

The good thing about clean, and the problem with exposed components, is how they fit with what I'm trying to do. Namely, I'm trying to flesh out what Bonaventure and some predecessor (that for the sake of argument we'll call Phoenix) and an immediate follower (Valiant) would have looked like if they'd been designed using Matt Jefferies' other early designs as a starting point. Not that anything is wrong with what Okuda, Jein or Sternbach did. I'm on record as liking the "canon" early Bonaventure and Valiant. But they don't remind me of something from TOS, and that's what I'm striving for.

So, for styling I have the DY-100, a few sketches of other "DY-100 like" ships, Leif Erikson, the XCV-330 Enterprise and a few related designs to search for clues. For function, I have the singularity-at-each-end-and-a-ring-in-between model that I've gleaned from the speculation and research into how a warp drive might work.

It's hard to make Bonaventure too greebled when the DY from 70 years before is so smooth. Sure, you can say it's vastly new technology that follows different rules, but still there is a certain "look" to work with and if I'm doing what I'm doing, we've got what we've got. I could look at it as a curse, but I actually see it as a blessing. I just haven't figured out how to solve the problem yet.

 

[aridas sofia]

I just haven't figured out how to solve the problem yet.

...until now.

Per my reckoning, the Bonaventure we saw in TAS was the first starship equipped with circumferential warp drive, and was lost on a test cruise in 2202. That ship was named after the other famous Bonaventure, from 2065. This is Earth's first true star ship, capable of independent warp drive.

Here is that earlier Bonaventure, which I'm finally happy with after three tries. This one takes lots of cues from Jefferies' DY and ringship designs, as well as a few Kraft Ehricke designs from the 1950s. In other words, it's got the right stuff for something I'd have expected to see on TOS.

http://home.comcast.net/~aridas/Bonaventure-2065-final.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~aridas/bonaventure-2065-section.jpg

 

[Mysterion]

Nice precursor to your Ariadne clas ships.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I have no problem with the idea of multiple "Bonaventures" having existed, each of which was a ship demonstrating a major "leap" in propulsion technology. Just as there have been multiple "Enterprise's" and each was the "pride of the operational fleet" in its day.

Sort of a matter of tradition, I guess...

SO... maybe the "Jein" ship really existed, AND your version existed, AND the TAS (whether my take on it or something else) exists as well...

Of course, then, the ideal would have been to have tested Transwarp on yet another "Bonaventure," rather than on the Excelsior. But that's politics for ya...

 

[MarianLH]

That's awesome.


Marian

 

[Irishman]

Nice tribute to Podkletnov, there

 

[aridas sofia]

Just as a quick point of reference, here is the ship the TAS Bonaventure was named to honor. While I like the Greg Jein model, I tried to come up with something a little different, and more in keeping with the evolution of warp drive I'm portraying. Still needs a few finishing touches.

From 2065:

I've been playing with this design, and while it works as a late 21st century concept, it lacks the baroque, exposed, skeletal look I'm thinking is necessary. Particularly in light of the line of warp experiments I've drawn up that date from the 2030s to the mid-2060s -- this is just too smooth.

So, I think this one will be reassigned to other uses and Bonaventure I will yet again be going back to the drawing board.

Which is what I did. Like I wrote above, I like the Jein model, but I didn't want to borrow from it directly. So I borrowed a few details from several mistaken interpretations of it to get some of the "baroque, exposed, skeletal look" I wanted.

This is now NCCP-S1103, the S.S. Tankenka. What happens to get from the sub design of Bonaventure to what we have here? The idea behind the ships I've come up with for the 2060-2160 period is a "ship within a ship" -- a primary and secondary hull covered by an outer hull that would be there to enhance protection from space debris and other dangers, and to enhance the ships' warp dynamic attributes. Later innovations make the exoskeleton a hinderance, and ships like Daedalus are the result.

But before the innovation of the exoskeleton, there is Bonaventure and the Phoenix (and earlier) prototypes. They reflect the DY architecture of the pre-warp era.

Well, at least my Phoenix will reflect the DY architecture of the pre-warp era.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

But before the innovation of the exoskeleton, there is Bonaventure and the Phoenix (and earlier) prototypes. They reflect the DY architecture of the pre-warp era.

Well, at least my Phoenix will reflect the DY architecture of the pre-warp era.

So, does that mean you're going to "revise" the Pheonix as portrayed in "First Contact" into something more in fitting with your style, or is this some OTHER "Pheonix?"

 

[aridas sofia]

So, does that mean you're going to "revise" the Pheonix as portrayed in "First Contact" into something more in fitting with your style, or is this some OTHER "Pheonix?"

Anyone that frequented the FRS forums might remember that I described an evolution of warp drive built upon the two early designs Matt Jefferies gave us -- the DY-100 and the ringship Enterprise. I admit that I dislike the Phoenix of ST-FC, in part because its use of wee warp nacelles made any evolution that involved the Jefferies designs at best strained and problematic. As I've said, the ringship led me to see warp coils at first as big, cumbersome things that could only be made smaller as available power increased. I assumed that in the time of TOS, dilithium was used for several roles in power modulation, but that in warp propulsion its critical role was to refract and tune (or "dimension") an antigravity negative energy stream. It made a ribbon of negative energy just the right thickness to warp space in the desired way. Before dilithium, some other element was probably used. Perhaps "rubindium" crystals like those found in the transponders in "Patterns of Force". At the beginning however, the means for doing this job were much more crude, thus the need for the huge coils (i.e. rings).

At the very beginning they'd be so big they'd be stationary, -- "superimpellor gates" -- and the test missiles would not have rings at all. They would have the gravity components -- the microsingularities fore and aft -- and fly through the ring whereupon a warp bubble would flash into existence and whisk the test missile off to wherever it could get before the bubble decayed.

In my mind, such a Phoenix would be more akin to Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo -- part of an international program with Cochrane filling the von Braun role. There would be an unmanned "Vanguard/Sputnik stage, (that I call Hyperion) and a manned Vostok/Mercury stage -- Phoenix. These would lead to the Bonaventure, Tankenka and Valiant stages of the program.

Just like all these early ships, my Phoenix has nacelles, but they are M/AM rockets -- the early impulse drive. I do, after all, understand the need for nacelles to make the thing look "Trek".

These need more work, but here is a glimpse of how they might look --

And a silhouette size comparison with the big superimpellor gate --

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I like it...

My only quibble would be that if these impulse m/am-rocket nacelles are really that, I think that they need a bit more robustness in their mountings.

Maybe just fore- and af-facing "stringers" going diagonally from the "pylon" structures to the adjacent hull sections? Long rods, or even just CABLES, tieing things together and keeping everything taught and in tension at all times.

"Guy wires"... everything is guy wires...

 

[aridas sofia]

This is the way I saw the primitive pylons. Gimballed joints tied together with bracing. The gimbals would work in concert with the rocket nozzle, which can also orient itself, to minimize vibration and achieve the optimum thrust vector for the situation the craft was in.

 

[aridas sofia]

That'll be it for awhile.

 

[Irishman]

Oh so very tasty!