TOS Shuttles... Armed?

[Greg Cox]

My interpretation of screen canon is that Enterprise is only in the past of nuTrek - the result of changes stemming from the events of Star Trek: First Contact. So there is no conflict in TOS shuttles not having armaments - they are from the untampered-with timeline.

Interesting theory, but I don't think that's the official interpretation. I believe we're meant to treat ENT as part of the old Prime timeline of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY.

The new movies are their own thing.

I dunno, I'm even a bit more extreme thinking that the Trekverse is much more fractured as individual universes/continuities per series

I mean, what's the official interpretation for Kirk's death? Did he die according to "Generations" twice by getting zapped into the Nexus and then falling to his death or did he live past Scotty's accident on the Jenolan in "Relics"? Which timeline is Voyager on given how many times they've come back from the future to alter their trip home? And which timeline was Enterprise on given all the Temporal shenanigans or was it just a badly written holodeck story crafted by Riker for his own entertainment?

Meanwhile, another question: where did Kirk's Enterprise keep the other shuttles when they weren't on the hangar deck? Did we ever see both shuttles at the same time? And suppose an visiting dignitary arrives by his or her own shuttle? Are the Enterprise's shuttles somewhere else?

Given the dialogue there is a flight deck and a hangar deck. I did a mockup of that here (start at post 158):

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=119751&page=11

The shuttles would be parked below in the hangar deck. The ready launch one is the one they walk up to that gets lifted up on the elevator to the flight deck for launching.

^ Hmm. Interesting. Thanks.

 

[Timo]

...Given how wobbly some of the shuttle launches seem to be in TOS-R, it would make perfect sense to dedicate the whole visible flight deck to them for the duration of the launch or recovery, and to stow all other craft belowdecks, just like with aircraft carriers.

OTOH, just as with aircraft carriers, sometimes there would be a need to park impractical numbers of shuttles on the actual flight deck, perhaps for ferrying them rather than operating them, perhaps because the hangar cleaning lady wanted them out of the way for a while. So "Mudd's Passion" would be perfectly justified as well.

To be sure, there's a bit of a problem with having the "Doomsday Machine" action take place on these putative and as such plausible lower decks. That would mean Decker would be taking an unprepared shuttle, prepping it all by himself, lifting it on the elevator to the flight deck, and then performing an unapproved launch. Too time-consuming, too prone to alarms and interruptions.

Better IMHO to say that Decker was being taken down to a brig level somewhere near the hangars and the flight deck, fought his way to freedom, and then either entered the hangars or merely a corridor labeled as leading towards the hangars, but actually walked to the flight deck and stole a prepared shuttle from there. That'd allow us to place the corridor set from that episode at any arbitrary location, rather than have it compete too aggressively with the other sets you have accommodated in that area, blssdwlf.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

@Timo - For the Doomsday Machine I have a different location since the entryway that Decker runs through is different than what was shown in "The Immunity Syndrome" and "Journey to Babel". The deck he is on is in between the TIS/JTB deck and the flight deck. That way he runs through the entryway, climbs up to the flight deck to a prepped shuttle and out he goes

 

[Timo]

...And that certainly works. I was just wondering how far away from the actual hangar we could place this "HANGAR DECK" sign:

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x06hd/thedoomsdaymachinehd1165.jpg

After all, Decker is heading away from that sign, despite supposedly heading for the shuttles. So, if it's just a general notifier that this entire deck is a hangar deck (and thus helps those who climb the ladder that Decker supposedly climbed up or down get their bearings), then it could be half a ship's length away from Decker's destination - but it would be a bit odd that it failed to differentiate between the postulated two hangar-featuring decks.

If, OTOH, there's just one actual hangar deck below the flight deck level, the sign makes better sense, but there's probably too little room for having both the corridor sets on the same deck. Unless you have one set aft, right next to the hangar, and another (Decker's) farther forward.

So your solution certainly works better than the alternatives.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Greg Cox]

Hmm. I guess I need to watch "Doomsday Machine" again, and maybe "Journey to Babel."

 

[Timo]

Always a splendid idea!

(Just remember to watch the originals. The "remastering" team did some great work with the modernized effects of "Journey to Babel", including fixing the scene of Sarek disembarking from his shuttle so that the background looks like the flight deck, instead of being a featureless grey wall. If, OTOH, we go by Blssdwlf's theory that Sarek disembarked in a hangar after his shuttle descended there on the turntable-elevator, then the grey background makes excellent sense. Plus, it would arguably be preferable to repressurize only the hangar and not the flight deck; each and every shuttle embarkation and disembarkation scene thus might be argued to take place in the hangars, rather than up there on the flight deck.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

I wish the FX-Remaster team either went with Warped9's version where the background of the flight deck are the giant flight deck doors or left it completely alone for "Journey to Babel". Because the FX-Remaster version puts the hallway in a part of the Enterprise that just wouldn't fit

 

[Cary L. Brown]

...Given how wobbly some of the shuttle launches seem to be in TOS-R, it would make perfect sense to dedicate the whole visible flight deck to them for the duration of the launch or recovery, and to stow all other craft belowdecks, just like with aircraft carriers.

OTOH, just as with aircraft carriers, sometimes there would be a need to park impractical numbers of shuttles on the actual flight deck, perhaps for ferrying them rather than operating them, perhaps because the hangar cleaning lady wanted them out of the way for a while. So "Mudd's Passion" would be perfectly justified as well.

To be sure, there's a bit of a problem with having the "Doomsday Machine" action take place on these putative and as such plausible lower decks. That would mean Decker would be taking an unprepared shuttle, prepping it all by himself, lifting it on the elevator to the flight deck, and then performing an unapproved launch. Too time-consuming, too prone to alarms and interruptions.

Better IMHO to say that Decker was being taken down to a brig level somewhere near the hangars and the flight deck, fought his way to freedom, and then either entered the hangars or merely a corridor labeled as leading towards the hangars, but actually walked to the flight deck and stole a prepared shuttle from there. That'd allow us to place the corridor set from that episode at any arbitrary location, rather than have it compete too aggressively with the other sets you have accommodated in that area, blssdwlf.

Timo Saloniemi

Well, let's think about standard military protocols here...

If you look at, for instance, an aircraft carrier, most of the embarked craft are in "shut down" status, belowdecks, but there is always at least one flight on what's called "ready five" status... able to be launched within five minutes.

Now, we know that as soon as the Enterprise sighted the nearly destroyed Constellation, Kirk ordered "Red Alert."

So... it seems plausible that, since you don't know exactly what's happening in an alert-status situation, at least one shuttle would be prepped and ready for any potential use in what's effectively "ready five" status, fueled and running, merely in standby mode.

Now, the real issue isn't how Decker could have gotten to a readied shuttle... it's how the shuttle landing bay systems allowed him to leave. It seems unlikely the shuttle has a "garage door opener" in the glove compartment...

So... either Decker slipped into the control bay, knocked out the crewmen on duty, and set the system to run automatically (on a time delay) or he used his rank to give an order to some lowly crewmen who were "just following orders" and let him go before Kirk could countermand Decker's order.

That's the real issue. Getting a "ready" shuttle seems trivial to me.

 

[Forbin]

^Logical. I imagine a command such as "Computer, this is commodore Matthew Decker [maybe accompanied by some command code]. Open hangar doors."

 

[Cmdr_Blop]

^

Yeah, I don't think an Ensign or Midshipman would have had the balls to question the order of a Commodore or risked asking for confirmation from Spock right in front of Decker.

 

[Greg Cox]

Okay, mind if I pick folks' brains some more? About how many people could you safely cram into a TOS shuttle if, say, you were evacuating a doomed lunar colony?

For that matter, approximately how many refugees could you cram onto Kirk's Enterprise before you exceeded its life-support capacity.

Not that I'm actually having to worry about this right now or anything . . . .

 

[blssdwlf]

Okay, mind if I pick folks' brains some more? About how many people could you safely cram into a TOS shuttle if, say, you were evacuating a doomed lunar colony?

For that matter, approximately how many refugees could you cram onto Kirk's Enterprise before you exceeded its life-support capacity.

Not that I'm actually having to worry about this right now or anything . . . .

Alright, I'll take a shot

The shuttle from the Galileo 7 looks like you could have 15 people standing with some breathing room behind the pilot's seat in the passenger compartment + 1 more in the seat next to the pilot's. If you wanted to pack them in like a subway train, you could double the number.

I'm not sure about life support capacity, but she's got food for 430 people for 5 years If Kirk didn't mind packing them in the hallways, living quarters, rec rooms, briefing rooms, etc and also putting people in the hangar deck then there is volume for *alot* of people. Maybe a thousand or more for a short period.

 

[Greg Cox]

Okay, mind if I pick folks' brains some more? About how many people could you safely cram into a TOS shuttle if, say, you were evacuating a doomed lunar colony?

For that matter, approximately how many refugees could you cram onto Kirk's Enterprise before you exceeded its life-support capacity.

Not that I'm actually having to worry about this right now or anything . . . .

Alright, I'll take a shot

The shuttle from the Galileo 7 looks like you could have 15 people standing with some breathing room behind the pilot's seat in the passenger compartment + 1 more in the seat next to the pilot's. If you wanted to pack them in like a subway train, you could double the number.

I'm not sure about life support capacity, but she's got food for 430 people for 5 years If Kirk didn't mind packing them in the hallways, living quarters, rec rooms, briefing rooms, etc and also putting people in the hangar deck then there is volume for *alot* of people. Maybe a thousand or more for a short period.

"Journey to Babel" implies that they've taken on at least 130 extra people for the conference. And they don't seem to be showing any strain . . ..

 

[USS Triumphant]

Okay, I'm going to pull some numbers out of my butt, and you can adjust these percentages and the math as you see fit if you like my basic reasoning:

The Enterprise-D from Yesterday's Enterprise appeared to have been designed with the same guidelines in mind as the Galaxy class in the regular timeline, but then redirected late in development to be used as a warship instead of an explorer. Assuming this means she is basically a Galaxy class as we know them, just with certain systems (weapons, shields, and such) uprated and frills removed, that "6,000 troops" (I'm assuming in addition to crew) she was supposed to be able to carry implies to me that the regular Ent-D could carry an additional 3,000 people (I'm assuming that they couldn't have more than doubled the capacity, even by uprating systems, in that alternate timeline) or a total of about 4 times her normal crew.

I'm going to further assume that TOS life support was about 60% as efficient as its TNG equivalent. (Using a tech development baseline entirely and probably stupidly on something I saw somewhere that said that warp factors were to the 3rd power c in TOS and 5th power c in TNG - 3/5 = 60%). So I'm guessing a Connie's life support could handle about 240% of her normal full crew, or about 1112 people. -430 crew = 682 extra people. Shuttles, I would think, would be either slightly less or slightly more efficent than the bigger starship systems, so I'd put them as being able to carry either 2 or 3 times their regular max crew, depending on which way you wanted to go with size/efficiency.

 

[Greg Cox]

^ Interesting. I may have to play around with my numbers.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Okay, mind if I pick folks' brains some more? About how many people could you safely cram into a TOS shuttle if, say, you were evacuating a doomed lunar colony?

For that matter, approximately how many refugees could you cram onto Kirk's Enterprise before you exceeded its life-support capacity.

Not that I'm actually having to worry about this right now or anything . . . .

Alright, I'll take a shot

The shuttle from the Galileo 7 looks like you could have 15 people standing with some breathing room behind the pilot's seat in the passenger compartment + 1 more in the seat next to the pilot's. If you wanted to pack them in like a subway train, you could double the number.

I'm not sure about life support capacity, but she's got food for 430 people for 5 years If Kirk didn't mind packing them in the hallways, living quarters, rec rooms, briefing rooms, etc and also putting people in the hangar deck then there is volume for *alot* of people. Maybe a thousand or more for a short period.

I think that's unlikely.

While there might be SUPPLIES for that many, as you say... there are other, more pressing issues. Such issues as capacity of the life-support system, primarily. (Mass might be an issue, though a lesser one.)

Basically, you design your life-support system to handle its expected load, plus a "safety factor." Overdesigning is inefficient. For something like this, I presume you'd design the system to support the entire load, plus 20% or so, with 25% damage to the system capacity.

That extra 20% population would take you to 516 persons. And the assumption that this is at 75% function means that, at 100% status, the ship would be able to support, on an ongoing basis, just about 688 persons (depending on body mass, oxygen consumption rate, etc).

Now, a shuttlecraft is a much different issue. The ship is small already, and cramped with a full complement of 7. At BEST you might add two additional persons (in "unsafe" mode, standing around hunched over during bumpy manuevers...) So... a shuttle with a pilot and copilot can really only carry five evacuees.

Furthermore, shuttles take a LOT longer to transit than transporters do, and probably require at least a brief "turn-around time" after each trip as well.

Evacuation using shuttles would be pretty much a waste of effort, unless you had no transporter function at all. And if you did have to use shuttles, you could bring up something like twenty to thirty personnel an hour, assuming smooth shuttle operations in uninterrupted, ideal conditions. (note- this assumes a Constitution class, with four shuttles...)

 

[blssdwlf]

While there might be SUPPLIES for that many, as you say... there are other, more pressing issues. Such issues as capacity of the life-support system, primarily. (Mass might be an issue, though a lesser one.)

Basically, you design your life-support system to handle its expected load, plus a "safety factor." Overdesigning is inefficient. For something like this, I presume you'd design the system to support the entire load, plus 20% or so, with 25% damage to the system capacity.

That extra 20% population would take you to 516 persons. And the assumption that this is at 75% function means that, at 100% status, the ship would be able to support, on an ongoing basis, just about 688 persons (depending on body mass, oxygen consumption rate, etc).

You're making the assumption that 430 is the designed for expected load with a 20% safety factor. We've seen the crew load fluctuate under Kirk between 400 and 500 ("A Taste of Armageddon") and a few times when extra passengers are brought on (150 in "This side of Paradise", 116 in "Journey to Babel").

What if the Enterprise is tasked to rescue the crew of a sister ship? That's 400-500 more people to Enterprise's crew which would bump the total load to between 800-1000. Since we know taking on survivors and transporting them to safety is one of the tasks the Enterprise performs I think it would be safe to say that the ship can temporarily transport at the minimum the crew of another starship or even more.

Now, a shuttlecraft is a much different issue. The ship is small already, and cramped with a full complement of 7.

This doesn't look cramped.

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x16hd/thegalileosevenhd034.jpg

or if the page is 403'd

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/thumbnails.php?album=17&page=2 (bottom left screencap)

Take the seats out and put some handrails or put benches (or really narrow airliner seats) in and you could fit 15 back there

At BEST you might add two additional persons (in "unsafe" mode, standing around hunched over during bumpy manuevers...) So... a shuttle with a pilot and copilot can really only carry five evacuees.

The big unknown is what the max lift-off load is. We can see that the shuttle can comfortably carry 7. Whether it can lift off with an additional 2,000 pounds (10 more people) we don't know either way... although I lean towards yes it can...

 

[Forbin]

Not that it relates directly, but many years ago a 747 packed over 1,000 people aboard in a no-seats configuration during an evacuation in, I think, India.

I'd imagine if the TOS E was emergency-evaccing a population, and if the flight time was only going to be a few days, you could line the corridors, cargo holds and hangar with refugees and cram a couple of thousand people in. They wouldn't be comfortable, and there'd be food and bathroom problems, but I don't see why not.

 

[Greg Cox]

Not that it relates directly, but many years ago a 747 packed over 1,000 people aboard in a no-seats configuration during an evacuation in, I think, India.

I'd imagine if the TOS E was emergency-evaccing a population, and if the flight time was only going to be a few days, you could line the corridors, cargo holds and hangar with refugees and cram a couple of thousand people in. They wouldn't be comfortable, and there'd be food and bathroom problems, but I don't see why not.

Ah, but this being TOS, any isolated colony or outpost is probably weeks or months from the nearest starbase or Class-M planet. This was the final frontier, remember. It was full of remote colonies that hadn't been visited in months or years.

So help is unlikely to be only a few days away.

 

[Timo]

I'm also in the camp that the shuttles can pack as many people as one gets by dividing the internal volume by the average volume of a person... A life support system that can supposedly keep a reasonable number of occupants alive in vacuum for a week could be cranked up to keep alive fifty squeezed-in people for the half an hour it takes to get them to orbit.

So I agree that the maximum liftoff load is the limiting factor. Reasonably, a shuttle ought to be able to lift a mountain if it can perform interplanetary accelerations - but by dramatic necessity, the shuttle is little different from a seagoing ship's helicopter, and explicitly suffers from excess load problems in its introductory episode. I guess the best possible drama could be milked from the idea that the shuttle hits mass limits ever-so-slightly before it hits volume limits; that way, a layman hoping for salvation gets confused and angered when there's obvious room for him but the loadmaster wards him off at phaserpoint and tells him to wait for the next ride.

Whether a starship maxes out on some area before she maxes out on load volume is a different issue. Her propulsive capabilities are so impressive to begin with that taking aboard a full load of Tungsten Men plus towing their asteroid cities on tractor beams should really make no difference at all. Life support limitations are a very good argument here, but I'd also figure that an evac run taking a few days at most could be catered for by cracking out a few cubes of "solid breathing air", throwaway chemical packs that keep the air fresh for the required time, and by applying similar temporary measures (impossible to sustain beyond a few days) on thermal management issues etc.

It wouldn't appear dramatically satisfactory if a starship couldn't be jam-packed to at least Gideonian density in a life-or-death emergency. Indeed, we might see the ship deploy big balloons holding a few thousand extra evacuees and towing those externally if need be, as long as warp evac weren't necessary.

What is the difference between safety and danger here? Getting people to orbit should suffice in many natural disasters, and keeping them alive there, perhaps for months or years, might be possible without having to accommodate them all aboard the starship. The first few days would be the critical ones, as during them Starfleet could probably rig emergency measures that kept the evacuees alive (if only barely) for the necessary weeks until further help arrived from multiple directions.

Timo Saloniemi