The necks and pylons as radiators?

[Nightfall to-Ennien]

Now, I was just posting in the Art forum where another poster was arguing against the changes believed made on the Enterprise in the upcoming Trek film. One of the arguments was regarding the 'fins' that are located about where the 'intercoolers' on the nacelles are on the original Constitution class as we know it. Now, in space, the ship is in as near a vacuum as exists. This makes losing heat very difficult, as you are stuck with only radiative cooling. In the thread I made the argument that the fins, which in fact do have a fairly large amount of surface area, make for good, perhaps excellent radiative surfaces.
Now, when you look at the nacelle pylons and interconnecting dorsal of the original Enterprise, they each have at least half as much surface area as the nacelles and secondary hull respectively, while having very little practically usable room inside them. Is it possible that perhaps these areas may have been designed in at least partially as radiator elements?

 

[MarianLH]

If they are, then how does a Cardassian Galor deal with waste heat? Or any of the many other ships that don't share the same layout?


Marian

 

[Nightfall to-Ennien]

Actually, if you look at the Galor class, it is not particularly efficient in it's use of mass either. Those big "Cobra hood" wings they have, with the bussard collectors on them, for example, are most decidedly not the most efficient shape for packing interior space, but they certainly have a lot of surface area for dissipation of energy...

Also, you may notice that the ships that DO have more mass versus surface area also often have more glowy bits on them, and what is light but a radiated energy? I am not trying to ascribe those design intentions to the original designers of the ships in the real world like, say, Matt Jefferies or Andrew Probert, rather to the in-universe designers, although it would be interesting to learn if, for example, Mr. Probert did, as he does post to these boards.

Actually now that I think of it, theoretically, that may have been one of the reasons, as I am sure there are never such major changes made for one reason only, that the Federation, which was known to, at one point, at least, have used spherical primary hulls, now uses their characteristic saucer primary hulls. Saucers have most of the packaging efficiency benefits of a sphere, but with a greater amount of surface area per interior space.

 

[Timo]

We do know that starships have excellent passive heat dissipation characteristics: they get cold when they lose power, as in "The Last Outpost". Now, that might actually downplay the importance of radiator surfaces in the pylons, as those would be likely to be active elements that require power to operate. Perhaps future materials technology allows for superconduction of heat to radiative surfaces without the need for power, though?

But frankly, there are so many ways in which starships seemingly break the laws of thermodynamics that we could argue they pack their waste heat in the impulse jet or store it in gravitic fields or whatever.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shaw]

Now, I was just posting in the Art forum where another poster was arguing against the changes believed made on the Enterprise in the upcoming Trek film. One of the arguments was regarding the 'fins' that are located about where the 'intercoolers' on the nacelles are on the original Constitution class as we know it. Now, in space, the ship is in as near a vacuum as exists. This makes losing heat very difficult, as you are stuck with only radiative cooling. In the thread I made the argument that the fins, which in fact do have a fairly large amount of surface area, make for good, perhaps excellent radiative surfaces.

It is a misconception that a large flat surface would make a good radiator, specially if there is a lack of something like air flow to pull away the heat. The best design would be something with a lot of folds increasing the surface area while not requiring more space.

In the case of the original Enterprise, the elements on the nacelles work great for this because of there surfaces' features (they aren't smooth).

Now, when you look at the nacelle pylons and interconnecting dorsal of the original Enterprise, they each have at least half as much surface area as the nacelles and secondary hull respectively, while having very little practically usable room inside them.

What?

Have you spent any time actually looking at the interconnecting dorsal on the original Enterprise? There is quite a bit of useful space in that area. So I find it odd that people always assume that it must be thrown away. I found that that part of the ship actually has a ton of usable space!

​

Lets look at one deck... deck 9, which happens to be a deck with a lot of windows on the dorsal. You could put tons of different things there, including offices (like above) or even an Officer's Club (like below).

I'm not saying that there is one there, but there is more than enough room for one. And that is just one deck of the dorsal! There is tons of usable room inside when you look at it a little closer.

 

[Nightfall to-Ennien]

To all those who have posted here to correct me, I just wanted to say thank you, as I have discovered more than one thing thing. The first being exactly how large the interior of the interconnecting dorsal is, as I really hadn't realized. Secondly, I learned that I really shouldn't post on the tail end of three days straight awake, as exhaustion clearly does my memory of basic scientific facts I really should have recalled no favors. Further, I wanted to thank Shaw specifically for two things. First, thank you for portraying visually what, up to now, I have only seen in numbers and my own roughly-drawn extrapolation from surface details. Secondly, thank you for sticking by the Lady even when I veer off into fallacy. I have a tendency towards attempting to find middleground between opposing viewpoints. Part and parcel of my usual modus operandi of "Avoid conflict at all cost to myself", I suppose. Mea culpa.

 

[Timo]

Regarding the inner details of the narrow parts of our favorite starship, those deck plans evoke two kinds of feelings...

First, it seems a bit implausible that these already flimsy parts of the ship would hold together purely by the strength of their skin. One would expect some 80% of the interior to consist of heavy structural braces on such a location.

But second, the engine pylons are even flimsier than the neck, and they apparently still are the right choice for supporting the most massive parts of the starship. So those 23rd century materials must truly be impressively strong - thus making it trivially easy to hold the neck together by the strength of its skin. The multiple windows on the neck, and the possible portholes on the pylons as well, would seem to support this idea.

One wonders if the almost magical surface materials of a 23rd century starship aren't also impregnated with advanced functionalities. What looks like grey paint could be a hyperadvanced nanostructured surface that holds the ship in perfect thermal balance in all modes of operation - and a sensor system, a self-sealing hull finish, and an active defense element, not to mention its ability to illuminate the ship in interstellar space to an aesthetically pleasing level.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shaw]

Regarding the inner details of the narrow parts of our favorite starship, those deck plans evoke two kinds of feelings...

First, it seems a bit implausible that these already flimsy parts of the ship would hold together purely by the strength of their skin. One would expect some 80% of the interior to consist of heavy structural braces on such a location.

Well, besides the fact that the front and rear transfer trunks would be the primary load baring elements, and they get their strength from their tubular shape, the increased amount of floors and walls reenforces the structure by creating a honeycomb-like inner structure that would make sure that those trunks would remain rigid relative to each other. And that is not taking into account the fact that the outer hull would also have the same tubular characteristics as the inner two trunks.

Further, what forces are you envisioning? This is a space craft that (if it did land) would only land once... and even then, only the primary hull (which is reenforced by it's own internal structure). There would be mainly forward/backward sheer, but by the time you reach some amount of force that would majorly distort the shape of the ship, the crew would be dead anyways.

When I was in school we had contests to work out geometric ways of reducing materials and increasing rigidity in small structures. I take that type of stuff into account even though I know that most people generally have little idea that such things might matter. In all actuality, I think I over did it in redundancy (from a structural point of view), but I felt that the second transfer trunk between the secondary and primary hull was important for other reasons above and beyond structural issues.

One of the biggest mistakes I think people make when looking at the Enterprise is assuming that the secondary hull would be holding up the primary hull via the dorsal. But think about it... when at warp, there should be almost no stress on the ship at all, and when at impulse, the primary hull is pulling the secondary hull and warp engines along via the dorsal (creating the greatest structural forces on the dorsal in normal use).

 

[Timo]

I think you are underestimating the forces a bit: in a roll maneuver like the ones we regularly saw in TOS, there would be immense sideways stresses on the neck, regardless of which half of the ship (saucer or cigar) was doing the twisting. Ordinary steel would probably bend badly no matter how it was crafted into that neck. Pitch and yaw would be almost equally bad. (Indeed, if the ship didn't have gravity control, those maneuvers would simply pulp the crew, despite looking so "innocent" on the surface.)

OTOH, the implied forces of impulse acceleration would be beyond all known materials anyway, regardless of how it was configured. To perform the feats of interplanetary navigation we witness, the ship would have to pull thousands of gees on the impulse engines. Some sort of forcefield magic would probably protect the ship from that, leaving the structure to mainly resist the stresses of thruster maneuvering during those times when the magic field is powered down. And with sufficiently many thrusters firing in concert, one could reduce the role of structural stress points are spread the stresses more or less evenly.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Verteron]

Also, you may notice that the ships that DO have more mass versus surface area also often have more glowy bits on them, and what is light but a radiated energy? I am not trying to ascribe those design intentions to the original designers of the ships in the real world like, say, Matt Jefferies or Andrew Probert, rather to the in-universe designers, although it would be interesting to learn if, for example, Mr. Probert did, as he does post to these boards.

The "technobabble" in-universe explanation regarding the shapes of starships is that of subspace field dynamics, i.e. there are certain shapes of hulls that are easier to wrap a field around to enable faster more efficient warp speeds.

The creative explanation is that the Enterprise was simply designed to look interesting, and most of the other starships designed subsequently have taken its original elements and run with this (obviously Federation ships are generally saucers-and-engineering-two-nacelles, but even alien ships are more often than not multisegmented hulls and two nacelles, or nacelle-like structures).

Obviously if heat dissipation was an issue, the ships would either be Spheres (for maximum internal volume to surface area ratio) or Cubes/Cuboids (for building simplicity). The Borg obviously have the efficiency thing nailed down!

Bezeled warped cylinders and plate shapes? No thanks!

 

[Verteron]

OTOH, the implied forces of impulse acceleration would be beyond all known materials anyway, regardless of how it was configured. To perform the feats of interplanetary navigation we witness, the ship would have to pull thousands of gees on the impulse engines. Some sort of forcefield magic would probably protect the ship from that, leaving the structure to mainly resist the stresses of thruster maneuvering during those times when the magic field is powered down. And with sufficiently many thrusters firing in concert, one could reduce the role of structural stress points are spread the stresses more or less evenly.

And of course, people like Rick Sternbach and Andrew Probert have suggested immensely strong "structural integrity" fields, which work exactly as you suggest.

Given a ship is essentially done for with its shields down, and done for structurally with its SIF field disabled, perhaps load-bearing members are less of a concern than they are when building the Enterprise's current-day brethren, aircraft carriers and jet airliners.

As for thin nacelle pylons, it strikes me that warp speed may not generate any forces on the pylons or the hull at all, being a "magic field" based propulsion method rather than newtonian, however your comments on Impulse speed are, of course, correct.

 

[MarianLH]

And of course, people like Rick Sternbach and Andrew Probert have suggested immensely strong "structural integrity" fields, which work exactly as you suggest.

Given a ship is essentially done for with its shields down, and done for structurally with its SIF field disabled, perhaps load-bearing members are less of a concern than they are when building the Enterprise's current-day brethren, aircraft carriers and jet airliners.

To a certain extent, maybe, but you have to plan for times when the power is offline. An unpowered starship would need sufficient structural strength to keep from falling apart whenever some alien whatoosis drains the batteries. Or just when the ship's in drydock, or visiting that big space carwash from TNG "Starship Mine".

As for thin nacelle pylons, it strikes me that warp speed may not generate any forces on the pylons or the hull at all, being a "magic field" based propulsion method rather than newtonian, however your comments on Impulse speed are, of course, correct.

Unless some sort of subspace field is used for impulse propulsion as well. The thing can't be just a reaction engine.


Marian

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Now, I was just posting in the Art forum where another poster was arguing against the changes believed made on the Enterprise in the upcoming Trek film. One of the arguments was regarding the 'fins' that are located about where the 'intercoolers' on the nacelles are on the original Constitution class as we know it. Now, in space, the ship is in as near a vacuum as exists. This makes losing heat very difficult, as you are stuck with only radiative cooling. In the thread I made the argument that the fins, which in fact do have a fairly large amount of surface area, make for good, perhaps excellent radiative surfaces.
Now, when you look at the nacelle pylons and interconnecting dorsal of the original Enterprise, they each have at least half as much surface area as the nacelles and secondary hull respectively, while having very little practically usable room inside them. Is it possible that perhaps these areas may have been designed in at least partially as radiator elements?

Hi Nightfall...

The trick about radiator elements is that you need to have the absolute minimum material between the exterior surface of the radiating element and the cooling fluid being routed underneath it. So, putting tubing up next to the inside of the surface of the hull isn't going to give you as effective of a cooling solution as having that tubing directly exposed to space.

This doesn't invalidate the idea of having cooling plumbing arranged right against the inside surface of the hull skin, of course... while slightly less effective, it would allow the use of a lot more surface area. However, if that's the case... you again lose any reason for having the FINS. You could do the same thing just as effectively, and honestly (if you get into the physics of it) MORE effectively, by simply leaving the nacelle completely cylindrical. There's no mechanical advantage to even partially "shading" the projected area in that fashion, is there?

Once again, you're back to the whole bit about the fins being there for appearance's sake rather than for mechanical purposes. Which is what bugs me about them.

NOW... to your point about using the neck and pylons as radiators... I agree wholeheartedly, and that also was part of the concept, both for the TOS ship and the TMP ship. Not the neck, so much, but DEFINITELY the engine nacelle support pylons.

In TOS, we see the following elements which appear to be radiator-type cooling devices:

1) The little boxes on either side at the aft end of the nacelles.
2) The intercooler loops at 45 degrees from C/L on the nacelles.
3) The primary cooler loop (later dubbed the "control reactor loop" by FJ) on the inboard surface of the nacelles.
4) The grillwork on the inside surfaces of the pylons... which happen to be reasonably well-placed as radiator surface, but which really should have been duplicated on the exterior surfaces as well!

We also see some grillwork on the inside surface of the nacelle, but that's so poorly set up for cooling purposes that it must have some other function, I think.

Now, for TMP:

We have a similar grill to what was on the TOS ship, but lit, on the inboard surface. NOT a "radiator," again, IMHO. But we DO have the following:

1) Radiator surfaces on the exterior faces of the nacelles.
2) Radiator surfaces on the interior and exterior faces of the pylons (but this time, the larger area is on the OUTSIDE, which makes more sense!)

We also have some "fins" on the engine nacelles... which really make no sense as far as I'm concerned. Those features, and all the other "art deco styling"... could go from that nacelle design and I'd certainly never miss it. As far as I'm concerned, "fins" only have a reason to exist if they're on vehicles designed for atmospheric operation, and then they must be designed to meet certain very specific criteria (primarily, they must be located to the aft, in order to give the ship a forward-facing stable orientation, and must be only large enough to ensure that stability!)

SO... I happen to agree that the pylons are the most logical point for the cooling system for the ship's basic systems to be located. Additional "point-functionality" loops would be created immediately adjacent to whatever hardware they were intended to operate with.

I could live, easily, with the total removal of those exterior loops (especially since that could be taken to imply that they were added later as a retrofit to give the ship a small improvement in performance without totally rebuilding her!) I just can't accept "purely decorative" features replacing these functional ones.

Make sense?

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Unless some sort of subspace field is used for impulse propulsion as well. The thing can't be just a reaction engine.

That's a topic that has come up every so often on here, and I've been party to several extensive discussions over this, during which I've come up with my own solution involving that plus some of the other elements referred to in TOS which made it absolutely clear that Impulse Drive could provide FTL propulsion, as well as elements shown in TNG and DS9 which made it clear just what you can do by projecting a static subspace "bubble" around the ship... and tying it into the classic Jose Tyler line from "The Cage" as well.

The short form is this. The impulse engines themselves are simply big fusion engines, operating on a conventional Newtonian system (F=ma). They, by themselves, can only operate at levels pretty well below the speed of light.

Warp drive operates by creating a subspace bubble around the ship and "rippling" it or "warping" it, in order to create a purely non-newtonian propulsion system, where the universe's structure is stressed by the presence of an assymmetrical subspace bubble and tries to "correct itself" by pushing that bubble through space/time at FTL speeds.

I posit that "warp drive" was probably discovered by accident when the prior propulsion system, which involved a STATIC subspace bubble, failed in an "interesting" fashion.

Jose Tyler referred to this when he talked about how much faster Enterprise was than prior ships, about how the "time barrier" had been broken. Clearly, the "Talos Survivors" had FTL propulsion, but not WARP DRIVE.

In TNG (more than once) and in the pilot to DS9, we see that a static subspace bubble can reduce the effective mass of an object (as seen from outside the bubble) tremendously. And in TOS, we're told that the Romulans fought the war using "simple impulse," we see an impulse-only shuttlecraft pursuing a starship at relatively low warp (WF3 as I recall?) in "The Menagerie" and we see the Enterprise making its way to Delta Vega without functional WARP DRIVE in "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

My idea is this. Project a static subspace bubble around your ship. Inside that bubble, relative to the outside "real" universe, the speed of light is much higher and your ship's mass is far lower. So, by using "simple impulse" inside of that bubble, you can accelerate at fantastic rates and can actually travel faster than the "real" speed of light (as seen by the outside universe). But only to a point... which I semi-arbitrarily chose to be 75C (or about WF 4.2 on the TOS scale).

It's the only way that I've found that makes EVERYTHING fit together. And I've never found anything that contradicts any element of that.

In WNMHGB, the ship lost it's "warp drive" capability, only because it had lost the ability to MANIPULATE the subspace field... but it could still create a static bubble, and could still use the impulse engines. So they were able to make it to Delta Vega instead of dying of old age or starvation in deep space!

 

[Mysterion]

How 'bout the ribbing of the neck on the Excelsior class ships? I've always suspected that of being some sort of heat-radiator type of arrangement. Mostly because I couldn't think of any other reason for it.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

How 'bout the ribbing of the neck on the Excelsior class ships? I've always suspected that of being some sort of heat-radiator type of arrangement. Mostly because I couldn't think of any other reason for it.

I agree there as well. It makes sense, especially, when you consider that the vertical engine shaft passes through that region... so that's not a bad place to set up a system to reject massive amounts of waste heat from the first "transwarp-capable" warp cores, which were probably very powerful but not terribly refined.

 

[Mysterion]

How 'bout the ribbing of the neck on the Excelsior class ships? I've always suspected that of being some sort of heat-radiator type of arrangement. Mostly because I couldn't think of any other reason for it.

I agree there as well. It makes sense, especially, when you consider that the vertical engine shaft passes through that region... so that's not a bad place to set up a system to reject massive amounts of waste heat from the first "transwarp-capable" warp cores, which were probably very powerful but not terribly refined.

Pretty much my thinking as well. Great minds, etc.