U.S.S. Budapest MSD

[Praetor]

Here's the Norway-class U.S.S. Budapest's MSD for inclusion in the next release of LCARS 24 for nitpicks and suggestions. Since the Norway CGI model is lost forever and we only have a couple of pictures, some screencaps, and various fan interpretations to go by, there's a lot of room for varied interpretations. The length originates from the DS9 Technical Manual.

The only picture of the actual model (from the TNG movies sketchbook) that I know of:


Here's the side drawing as presented in the TM and the Encyclopedia:


Some orthos, which appear relatively correct at least as far as texture:


And model kits - while their detail is easily in question, it does provide a better basis than accepting that the Norway has features inexplicably the same as the Defiant for no good reason other than texture re-use:





And some relevant screencaps from First Contact:


Now here's the MSD itself. While it's clear in the screencaps there is no glowing deflector present on the ship, if you look at the actual CGI model higher up, the dent itself does appear to be there even if the glow does not. Maybe the Budapest's deflector was offline at the time?

 

[T J]

Excellent post! I love stuff like this. It can be maddening that the creators of these kind of ships omitted details because they were meant to be background filler. Don't they know this is the stuff, the, meat and potato's, if you will, of sci-fi!

Great stuff you have there Praetor.

 

[Praetor]

Thanks! LCARS 24 deserves most of the credit since the LCARS 24 program is his baby and I'm just a contributor, but I did come up with the original drawing and systems placement that he then tweaked to fit the LCARS 24 style and formatting, like with my Miranda. I'm just glad to be able to help.

 

[Gepard]

Wow. Those model kit shots actually almost make me like this design.

 

[Plecostomus]

Why does a ship this small need a captain's yacht?

 

[Praetor]

Wow. Those model kit shots actually almost make me like this design.

LOL, yeah me too. Honestly, I've never been that crazy over it but it was needed for the LCARS 24 project and have grown to like it over the design process.

As for the yacht, it's more akin to the Equinox's waverider or Voyager's aeroshuttle in design function, and Equinox is a smaller ship. Also, some have suggested that some Norways are diplomatic vessels so the yacht could help in that role if so.

 

[Bill Morris]

Why does a ship this small need a captain's yacht?

I don't know. Praetor's original layout called for one, and I just grabbed the one from my Nebula MSD. But he later suggested changing it to something like the Aerowing or Waverider shuttle. How about a Delta Flyer?!!

But the detailed description at the Advanced Starship Design Bureau, in Section 9.3, describes a captain's yacht, but not exactly like the one I put in there and placed in accordance with Andy Probert's painting, giving it what I thought was a reasonable size for the Norway class.

Dimensions: Length: 30m; Width: 18.5m; Height: 5m

Here's the link.

http://techspecs.acalltoduty.com/norway.html

It also suggests that I extend the shuttlebay back into the cargo area. That I can live with.

Praetor also asked about landing struts. Forward ones I can see, but since the nacelles are so heavy, and there's no room for their mechanisms in the section that holds each nacelle to the pylon, I hestiate. I show them on four other vessels, but logic is telling me it will tip over if all four of them are mounted in the hull (and that it wasn't built on the ground in Iowa).

 

[BolianAuthor]

I agree that the model shots almost make this ship appealing. The Norway SHOULD have been the Defiant-Class... it looks a bit more Federation-y, and it's small and agile as a fast attack ship.

 

[Plecostomus]

Why does a ship this small need a captain's yacht?

I don't know. Praetor's original layout called for one, and I just grabbed the one from my Nebula MSD. But he later suggested changing it to something like the Aerowing or Waverider shuttle. How about a Delta Flyer?!!

There's an idea. I recall one of the Perimeter Action Ship designs from one of the Manuals Of Days Long Departed had a shuttle more or less permanently docked to a docking-port between the struts. That *was* the shuttle for the entire ship.

Perhaps this design has one decent sized shuttle where the Yacht is, the the shuttle-bay contains a couple of small shuttle-pods. That'll give you room to expand the cargo-bay if you so desire.

I belong to the "not every ship has every feature" school of design. I can envision a ship built entirely without a landing bay but contains a docked shuttle, or a novel deflector arrangement that doesn't rely on a big deflector-dish arrangement.

 

[Praetor]

Why does a ship this small need a captain's yacht?

I don't know. Praetor's original layout called for one, and I just grabbed the one from my Nebula MSD. But he later suggested changing it to something like the Aerowing or Waverider shuttle. How about a Delta Flyer?!!

But the detailed description at the Advanced Starship Design Bureau, in Section 9.3, describes a captain's yacht, but not exactly like the one I put in there and placed in accordance with Andy Probert's painting, giving it what I thought was a reasonable size for the Norway class.

Dimensions: Length: 30m; Width: 18.5m; Height: 5m

Here's the link.

http://techspecs.acalltoduty.com/norway.html

It also suggests that I extend the shuttlebay back into the cargo area. That I can live with.

That page also suggests the ship is about 100 meters longer than what we've been working with, though.

Praetor also asked about landing struts. Forward ones I can see, but since the nacelles are so heavy, and there's no room for their mechanisms in the section that holds each nacelle to the pylon, I hestiate. I show them on four other vessels, but logic is telling me it will tip over if all four of them are mounted in the hull (and that it wasn't built on the ground in Iowa).

I still think the flatiron of the primary hull probably has enough mass that if the rear struts extend just slightly aft of the lower 'fanail' it wouldn't tip over.

 

[Bill Morris]

You could ask Timo, but I'm betting you're not only cantilevering the massive support necessary for those nacelles not to get torn off but also the large quantity of verterium cortenide (an extremely heavy material) in those warp coils.

 

[BolianAuthor]

Why would it need to land? Just because it happens to be small? Starfleet ships do not land. The one canon exception being the Intrepid-Class, and even then it is a silly idea. Just because you have a small ship doesn't mean it HAS to land. Just because you have a large ship doesn't mean it HAS to separate.

 

[Maurice]

So, is the left nacelle and pylon Buda and the right Pest, and is the gap between them the Duna (Danube)?

You may only get that joke if you've actually been to Budapest.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Why would it need to land? Just because it happens to be small? Starfleet ships do not land. The one canon exception being the Intrepid-Class, and even then it is a silly idea. Just because you have a small ship doesn't mean it HAS to land. Just because you have a large ship doesn't mean it HAS to separate.

And the Nova-Class through design implication (it was given landing gear hatches, and if I recall, it was on the MSD). It's a reasonable ability for a survey ship... more reasonable for the Nova than for the Intrepid IMO; but yeah, every ship has a different role, and will be equipped as such. Unless the Norway-Class mission profile calls for planetary landings, there's not much of a point.

The DS9 Tech Manual claims the Defiant can make landings... but I don't really buy it. It's a warship. Every square inch needs to be devoted to that. The room taken up by landing gears could hold photon torpedo magazines, or crew facilities, or a small docking bay.

 

[Bill Morris]

The four canon MSDs that I know of that show landing struts are Intrpid, Nova, Defiant, and Prometheus class. And the Delta Flyer CGI shows them. So I put landing struts on my Delta Flyer MSD, as well, and showed them extended.

The Dauntless (not a real Starfleet vessel) and the Raven might have them, too. I'm not sure.

 

[JNG]

This class of ship isn't particularly small and is older than the Intrepid class; it might have emergency landing capability only, or at least cannot independently lift off again. As for the potential tip-over issue, force fields must do a lot of the work anyway, so this is no big deal.

I have a tougher time with the total lack of phaser strips on the hull of the actual CGI; the ship does apparently have at least one phaser, but of a less visually prominent type, so it does make sense to envision it as a lightly armed ship overall. I imagine these ships are suited primarily for missions within the Federation.

 

[Jono]

^ It is possible that the Norway just has emitters arrayed around the hull like the Miranda and Excelsior do instead of the phaser arrays. So that could mean that the ship pre-dates the Ambassador since that's the earliest ship we've seen with phaser arrays.

I know you've put the shuttlebay at the top at the rear of the saucer but there seems to be a rectangle near the bottom of the rear of the hull you can see in the 5views image, that could be a shuttlebay. It would be around 10m wide and 2m in height. You could fit small shuttlecraft in there.

 

[JNG]

^ It is possible that the Norway just has emitters arrayed around the hull like the Miranda and Excelsior do instead of the phaser arrays. So that could mean that the ship pre-dates the Ambassador since that's the earliest ship we've seen with phaser arrays.

It must have some kind, as I believe it was seen to fire a phaser from the forward hull in the movie. But the model didn't have any of the little detailing to represent phasers that the emitters on the Miranda and Excelsior models did, and the ship's general appearance and high registry number don't seem intended to suggest that it predates the Ambassador. It is not impossible, given that registries are not always chronological, but there isn't much to suggest it.

It's a bit of a strange animal, really. The model didn't share the pool of textures that the other new Star Trek: First Contact ships did (and that even the unseen Zandura would have), and so its overall color scheme is distinctive among Starfleet ships. It is also set apart from those other ships that debuted in the movie by the fact that it doesn't happen to be named for one of Alex Jaeger's nerdy interests.

It is unnecessary but to me intriguing to speculate as to what could account for these differences. It is a neat-looking shape and a pretty distinctive one, even compared to the other ships that debuted alongside it. I wonder if it shows heavy design influences from a more distant branch of the Federation, or even originated there. Even though I believe the Starfleet ships are the product of the shared knowledge and technology of all members, still we must acknowledge the consequence of the 8,000-light-year figure mentioned in this movie: there are parts of the Federation which must be several years' travel away from other parts. We are bound to see some "drift," and maybe in some parts of the Federation we may even imagine the shocking idea of ships without Roman lettering on their hulls.

The Earth names don't exactly help with this idea, but could be products of a distant colony of Earthmen, or could merely be named by the home office regardless of where or by whom they were built or what duty they are serving. Of course, Budapest was at Earth, but some ships must make it back to the Federation "inner perimeter" now and then from all the far reaches. I try to think of an in-universe reason why we never saw any of her sisters again (except for a drawing of one in Sisko's "Operation Return" diagram).

 

[Timo]

The big question IMHO is, what do we make of the Amazing Sliding Nacelles?

I mean, the way the pylon structures cradle the nacelles is very suggestive, as are the pronounced rails atop the nacelles. And there seem to be nine round features atop the nacelle that might suggest nine positions to which these things can lock, as they slide forward or back.

I sort of like to think that the sliding is for real, and is intended to accommodate the rebalancing of the ship as something really massive is deployed from between those engine booms.

What is the closest real-world analogy to such a thing? It would be a barge carrier - a vessel that loads up on very large "auxiliaries" by virtue of doing some creative self-flooding, and utilizes rails and other sliding functionalities for handling those barges. A barge carrier might be a very nice ship to have when one assaults a defended planet: a massive, armored barge dropping on enemy positions could stand a greater chance of achieving something than a wave of tiny shuttlecraft or an easily disrupted transporterbeamful of troops and vehicles. OTOH, such a ship would seldom be seen outside planetary assault scenarios, and might not be part of the very first wave on those, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JoeRalat]

Sound cool guy.. I love this ship.

Here is the MSD I did for it.