Why the long, long neck in the battle cruiser?
- Thread starter jayrath
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But the same effect could be obtained by leaving the neck ashore and joining the pod directly to the aft hull.
That is, unless there's something useful in the neck, something long and thin that requires this exact shape of hull to accommodate. In terms of mere volume, the neck doesn't offer much, and could easily be replaced by a slight bulge on the underside of the aft hull or something.
Some people have suggested that the neck is there to keep the officers safe from all the radiation that emanates from the engine section, where the lowly ratings toil at their jobs. Or then it protects the officers from the proverbial (or real!) stench of those ratings. Both are very Klingonesque reasons, IMHO...
Timo Saloniemi
That is, unless there's something useful in the neck, something long and thin that requires this exact shape of hull to accommodate. In terms of mere volume, the neck doesn't offer much, and could easily be replaced by a slight bulge on the underside of the aft hull or something.
Some people have suggested that the neck is there to keep the officers safe from all the radiation that emanates from the engine section, where the lowly ratings toil at their jobs. Or then it protects the officers from the proverbial (or real!) stench of those ratings. Both are very Klingonesque reasons, IMHO...
Timo Saloniemi
Ever see the Discovery in 2001? That may have been an inspiration for Matt Jefferies. He tried to model his starships on realistic proposals for spacecraft, and those tend to consist of multiple modules with long connectors between them, due to the need to separate the inhabited sections from the intense radiation and waste heat generated by the engines.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ap.html
After all, Jefferies was working before TMP came along and stuck the warp reactor right in the middle of the engine room. Although in the case of the D7, with the pod so much smaller than the aft section, it's a bit hard to justify the idea that the aft is all engine. But then, I think John M. Ford's novel The Final Reflection mentioned something about the aft section being occupied by disposable grunts while the important people stayed up front away from the engine radiation.
Given the kinds of energies that starship weapons should realistically be capable of, any ship would pretty much be completely doomed as soon as the shields go down, so the shape of the ship doesn't matter much. It's been the conceit of screenwriters and FX artists to downplay the destructive energy of these weapons to allow for flashy pyrotechnics, so that photon torpedoes, which are supposedly antimatter weapons more powerful than the biggest nuclear bomb ever built, end up having roughly the explosive power of a few dozen pounds of TNT when it suits the filmmakers.
But even accepting that conceit, where's the real benefit in targeting the neck of a Klingon battlecruiser? It's a small target, easy to miss, and it isn't critical. Presumably the fore and aft hulls have their own internal controls and life support.
Klingons are highly trained soldiers. They wouldn't use any pansy turbolift. They'd run, and like it. On real-world aircraft carriers, they don't have elevators or conveyor cars or anything like that, because such enclosed forms of transportation could become bottlenecks or deathtraps if damaged in battle. The crewmembers walk, run, or climb to where they need to be, even on the hugest battleships ever built. And it works, because they're in top physical form and the exertion helps keep them that way.
Besides, the boom of a Klingon battlecruiser is only about 70 meters long. That's only 3/4 of a football field. It's a pretty short walk for anyone in decent shape. And if you did cover it by turbolift, it would take seconds. 70 meters vertically is about 13 stories, which doesn't take long at all for a fast elevator.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ap.html
After all, Jefferies was working before TMP came along and stuck the warp reactor right in the middle of the engine room. Although in the case of the D7, with the pod so much smaller than the aft section, it's a bit hard to justify the idea that the aft is all engine. But then, I think John M. Ford's novel The Final Reflection mentioned something about the aft section being occupied by disposable grunts while the important people stayed up front away from the engine radiation.
Given the kinds of energies that starship weapons should realistically be capable of, any ship would pretty much be completely doomed as soon as the shields go down, so the shape of the ship doesn't matter much. It's been the conceit of screenwriters and FX artists to downplay the destructive energy of these weapons to allow for flashy pyrotechnics, so that photon torpedoes, which are supposedly antimatter weapons more powerful than the biggest nuclear bomb ever built, end up having roughly the explosive power of a few dozen pounds of TNT when it suits the filmmakers.
But even accepting that conceit, where's the real benefit in targeting the neck of a Klingon battlecruiser? It's a small target, easy to miss, and it isn't critical. Presumably the fore and aft hulls have their own internal controls and life support.
Klingons are highly trained soldiers. They wouldn't use any pansy turbolift. They'd run, and like it. On real-world aircraft carriers, they don't have elevators or conveyor cars or anything like that, because such enclosed forms of transportation could become bottlenecks or deathtraps if damaged in battle. The crewmembers walk, run, or climb to where they need to be, even on the hugest battleships ever built. And it works, because they're in top physical form and the exertion helps keep them that way.
Besides, the boom of a Klingon battlecruiser is only about 70 meters long. That's only 3/4 of a football field. It's a pretty short walk for anyone in decent shape. And if you did cover it by turbolift, it would take seconds. 70 meters vertically is about 13 stories, which doesn't take long at all for a fast elevator.
No, Wah Chang designed the Romulan Bird of Prey. The D7 was definitely Jefferies. Some of his design sketches for it are reprinted in The Art of Star Trek. There's also one on Memory Alpha, complete with his signature.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/D7_class#Model
And yes, of course the primary intent was to achieve a predatory design. I love that aspect of the D7, the way it looks like a dragon in flight. I'm just saying that Jefferies's philosophy of starship design was influenced by real-science proposals, and so the long neck of the D7 and the long neck of the Discovery probably have similar antecedents.
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/D7_class#Model
And yes, of course the primary intent was to achieve a predatory design. I love that aspect of the D7, the way it looks like a dragon in flight. I'm just saying that Jefferies's philosophy of starship design was influenced by real-science proposals, and so the long neck of the D7 and the long neck of the Discovery probably have similar antecedents.
Sure, but what's the advantage of that kind of trick shooting when the aft section presents a much bigger, easier target? Hitting the neck section is analogous to, say, shooting through the rope of a chandelier and dropping it on the bad guy rather than just shooting the bad guy. Sure, it can work in a movie, but in real life, the odds are that you'll miss altogether and give the bad guy an opening to kill you. In real life, nobody's trained to go for trick shots like that -- you go for the largest, clearest target.
Yeah. But chandeliers are not warships.
My question remains. Why string your command section out on the end of a long, teensy pylon? Shove it back smack against the engineering hull, and you run no risk whatsoever.
The boom has to serve some useful Treknical function, or are we ready to give up and say it just looks cool?
My question remains. Why string your command section out on the end of a long, teensy pylon? Shove it back smack against the engineering hull, and you run no risk whatsoever.
The boom has to serve some useful Treknical function, or are we ready to give up and say it just looks cool?
But seriously folks, if we go for some treknobabble BS, how about a warp dynamics "quick fix" that didn't add too much manouverability robbing mass to the D7? The klingons might see material thickness/stength of ship components as secondary to shield strength.
Possibly. I think the ship's a backwards manta ray. The shape and his original color scheme with the lighter blue-green on the bottom and darker gray dorsal are somewhat suggestive of one.
That plays off stuff on McMaster's plans and from Starfleet Battles which postulate the higher radiation areas in engineering were staffed by lower ratings and servitors, "kuve". The pod is officer country and the long neck, in addition to housing the impulse drive for independant operations, serves as a choke point to hold off any grunts and slaves should they decide to mutiny.
Why you'd put folks who hate your guts in charge of your main power plant, I don't know, but that's the speculation.
In the battleship-inspired paradigm of modern Trek productions, sure. In the science-inspired paradigm that motivated Matt Jefferies's ship designs, modules separated by pylons or spars make a lot of engineering sense.
After all, in a realistic space battle scenario, the ships would most likely be so far apart and moving so fast that they couldn't distinguish each other as anything more than point targets, and weapons would probably be powerful enough that they'd destroy your ship if they hit you at all. Or at the very least, it's unlikely that they could be targeted with surgical precision, given the distances and speeds involved. In that case, having a distributed design, with vital components widely separated from each other rather than clumped together, would actually be to your advantage, because if one part of the ship took heavy damage, the rest of the ship and crew would probably be at a safe remove from it. If your crew is all in one compact area when an intense ion beam hits and causes your own hull to emit lethal levels of Bremsstrahlung radiation, then your whole crew is killed. If the crew is spread out among multiple compartments a fair distance apart, then if the beam strikes one compartment, the crew in there is fried, but the remainder of the crew and equipment elsewhere is safe. Also, if you're far enough apart that your enemy can only see you as an unresolved point source, then a ship made of multiple compartments with connecting struts has a lower probability of being hit somewhere vital than a ship that's one big clump.
Note that in TOS, there was no "target their nacelles" or "target their weapon emitters." And there were no shots of ships swooping past each other five feet apart. The ships were treated as though they were a considerable distance from one another, and surgical precision was not presented as an option. Within that paradigm, the D7 design -- or the Constitution design -- makes sense. It's only when you bring in the fanciful, post-Star Wars, post-TWOK approach to space battles, the kind that's transposed from Horatio Hornblower sea battles and WWII aerial dogfights rather than having any realistic connection to how space combat would actually work, that precision fire becomes an issue and long skinny bits come to be seen as a vulnerability.
The kind of battles that have dominated sci-fi film and TV from Star Wars onward have always been about what "just looks cool" rather than what makes any kind of technical or tactical sense. So yeah, if you're approaching it in terms of the "rules" of space battles in modern Trek shows and films, there's really no valid technical answer anyway.
And let's face it -- there has never, ever been a bad-guy starship that looks nearly as cool as the D7/K'tinga.
You've got the causality backwards there. Ford originated those concepts for The Final Reflection, but he also worked for FASA and incorporated them into the role-playing games' Klingon material. I assume this Star Fleet Battles thing picked them up from that.
Sorry, but no. Star Fleet Battles predates both The Final Reflection (May 1984) and FASA's RPG (1982) stuff by several years. SFB was first published in 1979. The original pocket game (which I can't find at the moment) included these notes as do the Commander's ruleset from 1983. The engineering section is described as being manned by servitor (Ford's kuve) races, not slaves (straav). Not being Klingon, they are monitored closely by security. If security's damaged in a battle, there's a chance for mutiny. Hence, the long neck, etc.
So, the chronology is: FJ Tech Manual > McMaster's D7 plans > SFB > FASA > TFR.
Uhhh... because those ships don't operate in space. The conditions are completely different. I explained specifically why the factors involved in space combat would make these designs practical, and it should be obvious that those same conditions would not apply in the air or water. You might as well ask why submarines don't look like bicycles.
I was going to say no -- it debuted in "Elaan of Troyius," an episode that was filmed in May/June 1968 and aired in December, whereas 2001 debuted in the first week of April '68. However, I double-checked Jefferies's design sketches on Memory Alpha and The Art of Star Trek, and they're dated 11/20/67. So unless Jefferies had inside information about the design process behind 2001, which is possible, it's most likely the designs were independent of each other. Good catch.
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