TOS Carrier

[Cmdr_Blop]

I'm not a fan of asymmetrical Trek ships at all, but I thought I'd comment on the number of shuttle doors, as Forbin has already touched on.

IMO, fans always fall into the trap of horridly overdoing two things on TOS fan designs... either thoughtlessly just slappin' down uber-amounts of windows onto ships, with no actual thought given to the deck or room spaces within, or giving a ship too many shuttlebays. Both are matters of scale.

A shuttlecraft is a small vehicle compared to a starship, that is true. But it's not THAT small. You need to take into account the size of each shuttle in relaion to what you have to work with, the area needed for the equipment in each shuttlebay, how many shuttles are in each bay, and the area needed for stowage of the shuttle when not ready for launch, which means deciding if you need deck elevators, storage bays, etc.

That being said, a ship like this should realistically have maybe three shuttlebays at the most, IF you want a properly-scaled ship that doesn't look crammed full of stuff or fanwanky. But, that's just my own two cents.

 

[Klaus]

OK, here's another take incorporating some of the suggestions, including fewer shuttlebay doors and using the Miranda-esque hull from my clippership project....

 

[sojourner]

^not a bad layout, though I don't really like the shape of the pods.

Still too many doors as well. I would go with either doors on the sides or doors at the front/back, but not both.

 

[Klaus]

^^I do plan to work on those once the overall setup is finalized, they're mainly placeholders for now...

 

[Patrickivan]

I like all the doors. A through deck approach may work well in an atmosphere, but in the vacuum of space, maybe not the best idea. Especially if there's an issue with a main door gettting blown out. Then you lose access to the whole deck.

With all your small compartmentalized decks, you get better safety bang for your buck.

As for the shape, well, whatever suits your fancy. I'd KIS with a more cylindrical shape, but yours still looks neat to me.

And you know- I can see this turning into the Constellation Class. The Constellation always screamed carrier to me, with that giant no nonesense saucer layout. Ya- I can really see this in the universe being the inspiration for the Constellation Class.

 

[Wingsley]

OK, here's another take incorporating some of the suggestions, including fewer shuttlebay doors and using the Miranda-esque hull from my clippership project....

The latest design is very interesting.

You might want to consider the big pylon leading topside from the saucer to the nacelles being of a shape similar to the "neck" ("interconnecting dorsal" pylon) used on Constitution-class starships.

If it were my design, I'd make the wings to the nacelles thinner (up-down-wise) and extend their length out a little bit.

All in all, some very provocative ideas in this thread... and neat designs. Have you ever thought of (1: making the hangar-pods longer, or perhaps making their head-on cross-section a little more ovoid, and (2: equipping this ship with even more hangar-pods? I can see possibilities for multiple pods (3,4... maybe even 6 or more... maybe even training them). In fact, maybe the idea of a TOS-era carrier would dovetail nicely with my idea of a heavily armored transport-warptug. (My hybrid take on FJ's Ptolemy or Forbin's Sultana and Columbus.)

 

[Klaus]

ty very much for the feedback... here's an effort at redesigning the pods and putting them back away from the hull a bit, making the connectors with both them and the upper section more like the Connie's neck...

 

[sojourner]

LOL... no.

 

[MadMan1701A]

I don't know... I am really missing that asymmetrical one that you started out with. Those huge pods don't really gel with the rest of it.

 

[Klaus]

I may try the unbalanced approach again, but I agree that those are too big as is. So here's a redone one combining the new lower hull shape, reduced in size, with the previous configuration...

 

[Wingsley]

I love it! The only thing I would change are those chunky little winglets the nacelles are mounted on. Make their struts more like the shape of a Connies. (longer, thinner, situate the engines at little further outboard)

 

[Wingsley]

A thought occurred to me: maybe you could take this concept in new directions by replacing the saucer with one of your original (less oblong) big pods, put these oblong pods below and the nacelles directly attached above, Connie-style.

 

[KNH]

I've been following this development for a bit, and I got some food for thought for you, Klaus. you're naturally welcome to discard and disregard if you feel it's moving too far from your concept and ideas. I've...

- Flipped the ship over so the nacelles are on bottom
- Turned the pods by about 120 degrees and connected them to the saucer with a structure mirroring the nacelle setup

Supercrude sketch:

 

[Klaus]

ty for all the suggestions...

Wingsley's comment about ditching the saucer gave me pause... as much as we all love the Connie look, in this case it might be argued that I was trying to make an aircraft carrier look too much like a battleship, as it were. So here's a different take on it:

And for a change of pace, the comments that the design looked like a step on the road toward the TNG Constellation-class inspired this more-direct linkage, a long-range scout/exploration/perimeter defense design:

 

[Maurice]

If I might make an observation...

One thing Syd Mead is particularly good at is grokking what's characteristic about a real-world device and then isolating a few of those elements and using them in his "futurist" renderings in a way that makes his imaginary object evoke the real-world one without literally copying too much of it. Sark's "carrier" in TRON is a good example. Mead took the flat deck and flipped it onto the side on the ship instead of the top, then stuck a conning tower coming out of the center of this sideways deck, also jutting out sideways. The result is something which doesn't look much like an actual carrier and yet on some level still evokes it.

I'm not suggesting you make something that looks like this, but there might be elements of a real world carrier you could likewise adapt to make your design smell like the real deal, so to speak.
​

 

[sojourner]

^Actually Sark's "Carrier" does have a flat top and the command structure is right where it should be to evoke a sea going carrier - on the starboard side midship.

The blue coloring further evokes a see going ship with the darker "water line".

The problem is the design ques of a real world navel carrier conflict with the style of federation ships. Form follows function for naval carriers. Trying to apply the same functional forms -runway slabs and offset command structures to maximize those runways- don't work in trek.

To come up with a good carrier design for the federation you have to work out how it will operate first and build from there. The major issue is how will the "fighters" (drones/PF's/whatever) will be launched and recovered. Next you have to at least imagine the thing was built on some kind of budget. Otherwise you can just draw any kind of "teh Uber awesome" thing and call it done. Show restraint and imagine what the "engineers" might want to build compared to what they can afford to build.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

To come up with a good carrier design for the federation you have to work out how it will operate first and build from there. The major issue is how will the "fighters" (drones/PF's/whatever) will be launched and recovered.

I agree that this is a very important consideration.

Also, it wouldn't hurt to have a theory (even a debatable and contested one) on the strategy and tactics of Federation fighters/drones/etc., as well as an explicit description of the important missions the carrier is expected to perform. What is the fighter/drone composition of the carrier (or what limits can it vary between)?

 

[Klaus]

I did give it some thought - since there's no need for the equivalent of a flight deck I think that individual bays make sense due to pressurization and survivability factors. It seems to me this kind of configuration would work no matter what the mix of fighter/bombers/drones would be... the ship needs to launch, recover, and resupply them. The differences per mission in this case would be in what is carried inside, not in what it looks like on the outside. It could work for both military and humanitarian applications, such as rescue missions in systems where transporters won't work due to [insert technobabble] radiation, etc.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I think the saucer-less design is definitely a step in the right direction, shedding mass that is completely unnecessary to serve as a dedicated carrier.

In this context, I'll repeat a proposal I made upthread, and augment it.

• Why can't the carrier pods be standardized so that an FJ tug could tow one or two of them?
• And therefore, then, why can't a "carrier" be essentially a saucer-less tug capable of towing more than two such pods (four or six at a time maybe, or more)?

That way, the carrier has a lot of versatility.

 

[KNH]

^so you're technically suggesting a Ptolemy without the saucer tugging a module full of fighters?