I'm in a discussion on this on a different board. And I wondered what you guys thought of it. Here are two posts for the "in the secondary hull" side of things.
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It sounds like there were pics in Star Trek Magazine
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/firstcontact1.htm
Looking at those it seems that the only thing that looks like an ejection port appears on the pod. It also seems with the shuttlebay and such things are awfully crowded up front.
Personally I like the idea of it being in the pod. For one in Trek ships they seem to like getting the core towards the rear when they can (if for nothing else than so that if you're going forward when you eject it you can be further away). For example how the core is placed on the sabre.
But mostly I like the idea where if you find yourself in the situation where you've got a core breach imminent and you can't eject (it seems you usually can't) than instead of doing a saucer separation leaving yourself without a lot of valuable components you could instead separate just that pod, leaving you with a mostly intact ship.
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Alright well now you've made me start fussing with specs and pics.
Ex astris scientia has a mostly cannon cutaway of the Galaxy class. And then some mostly cannon line drawings for the Steamrunner.
If you scale them to the same size and try to fit those pieces in they just drop right in.
But what if we don't want no stinking second rate navigational deflector/long range sensor system? What if we want to take the system already made for the galaxy class and just straight up drop in into our ship(except for the different shape of the dish)?
For that I scaled things according to the ship lengths given by DITL.
Actually that works out pretty well. The red dot here marks where the thing that looks like a warp core ejection port is. The core being in the middle of the dot. I think it's cool how shifting it to the side allows the galaxy class long range sensor/deflector system to fit right in. And one could easily imagine the engineering computer core shifted off to the other side, and then general engineering all around back there.
Ok so now what about tankage? Well if you take a look at the how the scaled up galaxy components match up it doesn't look so simple anymore.
Though I have also included a scaled image of the defiant class. And it doesn't have room for bubkiss once you add in all the weapons, bridge, other stuff, and occasionally a suttlebay right in the middle of the thing.
First off the only way that sized warp core is fitting anywhere is horizontally (just not allowed). However a warp core a little under half as long should fit, which is all the defiant could have anyway unless it runs with multiple cores. Now there is the issue of the tankage, which the defiant can sidestep by claiming to simply not be a long range ship. I see a couple options.
1. Just scale it down some. The ship doesn't necessarily need a full Galaxy sized loadout. If you scale down their length by a little over half (probably depth the same), and reduce the hight to maybe 75% they fit nicely enough. That would give the ship about 1/6 the capacity of a galaxy. On the other hand the ship has less than a 13th of the mass so we might not be so poorly off.
2. Wrap stuff around a little. From the second pic you can see there is some room off to the sides, maybe move some tankage or the antimatter generator there.
3. Move a lot of the deuterium tankage into the saucer section. I would leave the antimater right where it is, because it's known for going boom, is probably very risky to pipe around, and isn't used for anything but the warp core.
Deuterium however is easy to pipe around, and if you did separate the warp core section you'd be happy to have it on hand to power your impulse engines with.
Note that there should already be some deuterium tankage in the saucer section dedicated to the impulse engines or other fission generators if present.
Or you could have some combination of all three. If I was designing it I'd use a little of all three, but mostly 1 and 3 since that would leave more room for engineering stuff, pipes, turbolifts and the like.
-------------------------------------------
It sounds like there were pics in Star Trek Magazine
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/firstcontact1.htm
Looking at those it seems that the only thing that looks like an ejection port appears on the pod. It also seems with the shuttlebay and such things are awfully crowded up front.
Personally I like the idea of it being in the pod. For one in Trek ships they seem to like getting the core towards the rear when they can (if for nothing else than so that if you're going forward when you eject it you can be further away). For example how the core is placed on the sabre.
But mostly I like the idea where if you find yourself in the situation where you've got a core breach imminent and you can't eject (it seems you usually can't) than instead of doing a saucer separation leaving yourself without a lot of valuable components you could instead separate just that pod, leaving you with a mostly intact ship.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Alright well now you've made me start fussing with specs and pics.
Ex astris scientia has a mostly cannon cutaway of the Galaxy class. And then some mostly cannon line drawings for the Steamrunner.
If you scale them to the same size and try to fit those pieces in they just drop right in.
But what if we don't want no stinking second rate navigational deflector/long range sensor system? What if we want to take the system already made for the galaxy class and just straight up drop in into our ship(except for the different shape of the dish)?
For that I scaled things according to the ship lengths given by DITL.
Actually that works out pretty well. The red dot here marks where the thing that looks like a warp core ejection port is. The core being in the middle of the dot. I think it's cool how shifting it to the side allows the galaxy class long range sensor/deflector system to fit right in. And one could easily imagine the engineering computer core shifted off to the other side, and then general engineering all around back there.
Ok so now what about tankage? Well if you take a look at the how the scaled up galaxy components match up it doesn't look so simple anymore.
Though I have also included a scaled image of the defiant class. And it doesn't have room for bubkiss once you add in all the weapons, bridge, other stuff, and occasionally a suttlebay right in the middle of the thing.
First off the only way that sized warp core is fitting anywhere is horizontally (just not allowed). However a warp core a little under half as long should fit, which is all the defiant could have anyway unless it runs with multiple cores. Now there is the issue of the tankage, which the defiant can sidestep by claiming to simply not be a long range ship. I see a couple options.
1. Just scale it down some. The ship doesn't necessarily need a full Galaxy sized loadout. If you scale down their length by a little over half (probably depth the same), and reduce the hight to maybe 75% they fit nicely enough. That would give the ship about 1/6 the capacity of a galaxy. On the other hand the ship has less than a 13th of the mass so we might not be so poorly off.
2. Wrap stuff around a little. From the second pic you can see there is some room off to the sides, maybe move some tankage or the antimatter generator there.
3. Move a lot of the deuterium tankage into the saucer section. I would leave the antimater right where it is, because it's known for going boom, is probably very risky to pipe around, and isn't used for anything but the warp core.
Deuterium however is easy to pipe around, and if you did separate the warp core section you'd be happy to have it on hand to power your impulse engines with.
Note that there should already be some deuterium tankage in the saucer section dedicated to the impulse engines or other fission generators if present.
Or you could have some combination of all three. If I was designing it I'd use a little of all three, but mostly 1 and 3 since that would leave more room for engineering stuff, pipes, turbolifts and the like.
