TOS Auxilliary Ship - USS Pandemus

[LordSarvain]

The discussion regarding shuttle carriers got me thinking and sketching some ideas. Well, I soon drifted away from a carrier and ended up with this, that I'm classifying as a repair ship. The big open bay will have doors eventually and that will be where most of the repair work would be completed. I figure that parts that are too big to fit would likely be repaired in place or the ship would have to be towed to a dockyard. The smaller cut out towards the front of the cylindrical section would be for breaking down debris that can be reconstituted into useful parts. As with all the stuff I post it's still under construction.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Holy hell that's cool.

I like your style.

 

[FredH]

While the name seems odd, that's an excellent design, combining a clear TOS design with a strong sense of functionality as a "real" spacecraft.

 

[Wingsley]

There's another possibility here...

What if the aft pod were a modular cargo container and the rest of the ship were a transport/tug, a la Ptolemy? This design would make loads of sense as a light warptug.

Thanks for sharing these images with us.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

What if the aft pod were a modular cargo container and the rest of the ship were a transport/tug, a la Ptolemy? This design would make loads of sense as a light warptug.

That's a really good idea. Though, he might have to put the impulse engines & bridge on the "tug" part. Then it could have multiple pods.

I wonder if having impulse engines on the back of, say, three pods would be structurally unstable.

LordSarvain, amazing work as always. You can make even the oddest ship look seriously good.

 

[Kaiser]

Looks like a very good 2240's-2250's Shuttle Carrier

 

[QuinnTV]

Interesting. I like this!

 

[YARN]

Great work!

 

[baxart]

What if the aft pod were a modular cargo container and the rest of the ship were a transport/tug, a la Ptolemy? This design would make loads of sense as a light warptug.

That's a really good idea. Though, he might have to put the impulse engines & bridge on the "tug" part. Then it could have multiple pods.

I wonder if having impulse engines on the back of, say, three pods would be structurally unstable.

LordSarvain, amazing work as always. You can make even the oddest ship look seriously good.

This is a very interesting idea. In my TOS stories and campaigns I use the Sahara class from Masao's Starfleet museum...
http://www.starfleet-museum.org/avenger-predator.htm

but this seems to fit better with the TAS robo-tug/TOSR's Antares.

I have to agree with Wingsley and Ar-Pharazo, the impulse engines should be part of the warp drive section, with the repair pod as it's own unit. Makes it more versatile, and gives you one engine room, rather than two.

I'm guessing that the starboard cut-out is there to accommodate the warp nacelle pylons of the ship to be repaired, (so she can snuggle in close) but if so, then shouldn't one be on each side for starboard or aft repairs? And the large bay door should also open to both sides, for the same reason.

I would also suggest making the crane mobile, possibly placing it on a track that runs around the pod, so that the crane could service above and below without moving the pod and/or ship.

And I love that Delta logo!! Love it!

 

[Forbin]

Wonderfully different!

 

[Wingsley]

An idea occurred to me when looking over the O.P. images...

Flipping the entire design upside-down, and it starts to look like the Woden (TOS "The Ultimate Computer") only with nacelles. That dorsal-fin really gives the Pandemus a submarine look.

In 2008, I started a thread in the Trek Tech forum about warptugs. You may find some of the designs there to be vaguely similar.

 

[Maurice]

Most fan designs leave me cold, but wow! I like this.

If the "pod" is designed to be swapable, then I agree about moving the impulse engines and bridge to be clearly part pf that ship. If not, I'd at least move the impulse engines to the top of the pod's tail end as they're really off the center of the ship's mass where they are.

 

[Unicron]

Very interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing how this one turns out.

 

[Christopher]

While the name seems odd...

I was curious about that myself, so I looked it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Pandemus_(ARL-18)

USS Pandemus (ARL-18) was one of 39 Achelous-class landing craft repair ships built for the United States Navy during World War II and was in commission from 1945 to 1946 and from 1951 to 1968. Named for Pandemus (a civic goddess in Egyptian and Greek mythology, perhaps of marriage, personifying earthly or common love), she has been the only U.S. Navy vessel to bear the name.

It's also the Latin word for public, general, or universal, from the Greek pandemos (which literally means "all the people") -- note its similarity to "pandemic," a disease affecting a large population. According to other sources I found, Pandemos wasn't a distinct goddess but an epithet for Aphrodite, reflecting the idea that as the goddess of marriage and earthly love, she was the basis for the kinship of the whole community. Although the epithet was later used to brand her as a goddess of prostitution -- as in a lover who belonged to everyone, I guess.

 

[LordSarvain]

Thanks for the comments everyone. Regarding the ships name, yep, Christopher figured it out.

As far as this ship being a transport or tug, that would work with some slight modification. I would move the impulse engines to the forward portion and then cut the aft portion of the hull down so that it just becomes a docking ring for a container. I don't think I would put more than one container on this ship though, I'd leave the container trains to the larger Ptolemy class. In this iteration however the pod is not swappable, it is one piece from fore to aft.

I probably should address some points that I should have brought up when I made the original post to avoid confusion.

The cutout on the starboard side is the location of the industrial dematerializer, where broken bits, pieces of hull, shards of transparent aluminum etc., are broken down so they can be reconstituted into useable parts or hull plating etc.

As far as the ship needing the same parts on both sides, the advantage of working in space is that there is no up or down so the starboard side can access all sides of another ship simply by moving around it. Not to mention some TOSified workbees that can just drag whatever needs fixing into the bay or repair it in place if its too big to fit.

And speaking of workbees, that's what the four smaller bay doors are for (2 on each side). There's really just two bays that go completely through.

The crane is not a crane, it's a refueling boom, I presume some lucky shot (or unlucky depending on where you're standing at the time) might rupture a tank and after repairs someone's gotta refill it, or at least give it enough to get to a full service station.

Oh and the bridge looking thing is actually a coordination center for the engineer in charge of the repairs. The ships bridge is buried in the forward portion of the ship.

Of course there was no way for anyone to know any of that without my pointing it out and I have a tendency to just drop pics on the table and let confusion reign lol.

A pitiful excuse of an update...

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Don't panic indeed

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ yeah, that's even better than Colonial Movers' WE MOVE ANYWHERE.

 

[Intelligence]

Excellent design, I can only agree. To me it also occurred that the warp drive section should receive more functionality. Unfortunately, the design of the aft container doesn't really allow for an impulse section. However, the place on top of the drive section or on the junction to the container, would make an excellent choice for a small crafts bay. It probably would not house standard shuttles but small one-man tugs.

 

[publiusr]

Subspace relay tender.

 

[LordSarvain]

Here's another one I'm rebuilding...