Starfleet technology talk

yreodred

Let's have a thread dedicated to discuss Star Trek technology and other things related to it.
For a start, i'm going to ask something that's spinning around my head for a while now.


Why doesn't Starfleet build ships with spherical "saucer" sections?
I know the most common explaination is because of better warp capabilities, but other races build all kinds of shapes and configurations, like the Cardassians, Klingons or Romulans. The dominion for ex. doesn't even use a "saucer" at all.
Even Starfleet builds ships with all kinds of saucers like triangular (prometheus), elliptical (galaxy, nebula), round (ambassador, excelsior), egg shaped:eek: (Odyssey, Guardian), others are completely different (partol escort, Norway, Defiant).

In canon, we know the Daedalus (22nd century) and Olympic Classes (very late 24th century) that feature spherical hulls. Aside from a aesthetical point of view (which is debateable), a spherical shape would offer much more interior space for power generation and other things, while the surface is kept on a minium.

Your thoughts?



Please feel free to ask questions too.
(please keep things civilized )

seriousdave

Because the style we see on most starfleet ships is what evolved from the aesthetic choice the original trek designers came up with.
Dosen't matter how much "lore" you dump over that fact but that's the reason why most ships look like that with their round and oval saucers.

cmdrscarlet

^ True, I think. Yet, there can be other variations of the saucer-theme: Oberth.

thecosmic1

Starfleet probably does build other types of ships. They are just not portrayed in canon often.

Until near the end of DS9 most filming was still using models. Producers used existing models with minor tweaks - kit-bashing - to save money. Thus most of the ships seen in the various series have a similar style.

People now expect to see those styles. Just look at how much bytching we see on the STO forum about Cryptic's original designs, which are not canon enough for some players. In the end it is the fan-bases' inability to change that is the real issue, IMO.

angrytarg

There's a difference between going all crazy and extrapolating on known designs. It is true that canon only showed so much designs - yet, this is what we have. Now making the intel ships and them pointing at people complaining, blaming them for "being incapable of change" goes a bit too far, since at one point you cross the line that your design has literally nothing to do with known aestethics - and then you could have just made a different game.

antonine3258

The primary/secondary hull division seems fairly common to very recent designs, though often with less dramatic separation than Starfleet, though notably, the smaller front sections seem to be on more warships with larger engine sections (arguably the bugships have it with less separation).

It appears to be some sort of speed/maneuverability versus how much you can carry type trade-off, or that's been my headcanon.

dareau

Here's some logic that I remember reading about as a kid, which would put the source of the logic as 70s era, maybe maybe early 80s era. As such, a lot of the "technobabble" of the actual power generation system wasn't invented yet, and it was written with an eye on 60s logic / "design rules". I also can't confirm that M. Jeffries (Original Connie designer) went into designing the Connie with this logic or it came up after he made his nifty ship, but here goes:

The "TOS Connie" was designed with intense scrutiny paid to the issues of "radiation". The primary power conversion systems along with the warp coils both produced tremendous amounts of potentially lethal radiaion. Therefore, the original design was to put all these radioactive systems into nacelles and mount them on pylons so that the "separation" method of radiation control would be put into play keeping the crew safe.
The Secondary (commonly called "engineering" back then) hull was reserved for the "moderately radioactive" and/or easily radiation shielded systems (such as the primary matter-anti matter reactor) and other "essential" ship systems (like cargo bays) leaving the primary hull as the place where the majority of the crew spent the majority of the time (labs, quarters, etc. were all in the saucer).

Hence, the Connie was the epitome of "space safety" from the radioactive nature of high end ship power systemry...

With the advent of TMP and the Connie Refit, it was explicitly designed that the vertical tube running from the impulse engine deck of the primary hull to the top of the secondary hull was the "primary" matter-antimatter reactor, or what TNG started calling the "warp core". The horizontal tube running along the top of the engineering hull from the bottom of that vertical tube to the base of the pylons was either mentioned as another extension of the M/AM reactor or a "massive power conduit" taking "warp plasma" (the forerunner to EPS systems) to the nacelles. Either design had "warp plasma" conduits (or just massive power wires) taking energy up to the nacelles which at this point was converted to be 100% warp coils (after the bussard collectors, of course). Also, "advanced shielding" was coming more and more into play - by this point the radiation concerns around the M/AM reactor required only the wearing of radiation suits for those who face long term exposure and only certain areas were of an extremely radioactive nature like the dilithium crystal alignment room - and were suitably sealed off.

So the last question - why saucer for primary hull - can probably be answered in one of two ways. The first being that the saucer is still quite an effective interior volume to outer surface ratio, even if it's not quite as efficient as a sphere or remember what everyone thought was the primary methods of space conveyance in the 60s, it was either rocket-type ship or flying saucer... :P

cmdrscarlet

^ Nice. Makes sense to me.

capnmanx

There is forward profile to consider. You'll notice how the Federation's more aggressive neighbours (Klingons and Cardassians) tend to have fairly flat ships, with their main guns front and centre; perfect for head to head engagements. Romulans did something fairly similar with the double D by giving it a narrow wedge shaped forward section with a lot of negative space behind it.

The Daedalus and Olympic, by contrast, make for fantastic targets.

yreodred

I don't know if a smaller profile really applies to (TV/Movie) Star Trek space battles, because sometimes ships are supposed to be hundreds of Km apart and flying very high speeds.

Of course for the sake of simplicity and drama, TV/Movies always show ships in very close distance to each other when fighting. (And standing almost stational because of 90' FX tech. )


@dareau
Wow that where some very good insights.
Very appreciated!


@thecosmic1
Yeah it's a shame they kept doing models until the end of DS9. Don't get me wrong, i'm not against model FX use, quite the contrary. But some kitbashes where just horrible, lol.
I'm sure, if they had powerful enough Computers a the beginning of DS9, they would have created much better looking starfleet ships for their background shots.

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warmaker001b

The physical models were just fine. But bad design is bad design, regardless if it was a physical model or a CGI one. I'm perfectly fine with these physical models
TOS Enterprise
K'T'Inga
Negh'Var
Akira - So good that the boys of ENT flipped it over with a spatula and called it an NX-01! In CGI, no less!
Excelsior
B'Rel
And of course, the Sovereign.

Last I looked, the Enterprise-E looked ****ing fabulous in First Contact. A studio model and not CGI :cool:

You can make things in either format look great. A physical studio model or in CGI. But again, bad looking designs can be done anywhere.

... Oh wait, not done with how well a physical, studio model can look!
One of the actual film studio models of the Star Destroyer
Actual film model of the Executor-class Super Star Destroyer
Actual studio model of X-Wing "Red 5"

angrytarg

yreodred wrote: »

(...)
Yeah it's a shame they kept doing models until the end of DS9. Don't get me wrong, i'm not against model FX use, quite the contrary. But some kitbashes where just horrible, lol.
I'm sure, if they had powerful enough Computers a the beginning of DS9, they would have created much better looking starfleet ships for their background shots.

Need I remind you of ENT and VOY? They had CGI at hand - but they simply reused the exact same models over and over again for basically every second alien of the week. Look at ENT - the same ship in use by Arkonians (insignificant, one-off alien species never to be heard of again), Tellarites (founders of the federation ffs) and Xindi-Arboreals (yeah, my opinion about the whole Xindi thing is... well) - it was the worst form of cheap recycling since TOS. In TNG they also recycled models - but kitbashed them to look different. When they CGI recycled they used the exact same models.

seriousdave

warmaker001b wrote: »

Akira - So good that the boys of ENT flipped it over with a spatula and called it an NX-01! In CGI, no less!

Congartulations, you just blew my mind.

Srsly, how the hell did I not notice that for years ?!:eek:

warmaker001b

seriousdave wrote: »

Congartulations, you just blew my mind.

Srsly, how the hell did I not notice that for years ?!:eek:

Dude, it was a running joke as soon as images of the NX-01 came out. The howls of "Akiraprise" came out solely because of that

seriousdave

warmaker001b wrote: »

Dude, it was a running joke as soon as images of the NX-01 came out. The howls of "Akiraprise" came out solely because of that

Wow...kinda feel like Sergeant Yates from the South Park episode "Cartman's Incredible Gift" now.:o

yreodred

@westmetals
I don't think the producers of star trek wanted a quality like Bab 5 for Star Trek. The FX of Bab 5 looked very artificial imo.

But i think you mentioned a interesting topic. Atmospheric landing.
In the 60's they originally wanted the Enterprise capable to land or at least use shuttles. But it turned out to be too expensive so they invented the Teleporter (Transporter device).
To me this always seemd a bit too powerful (story telling wise) it was just too easy to get out of danger. Of course they used atmospheric distortions, radiation and so on, but these excuses became tedious very soon, imo.



@warmaker001b
@angrytarg
I didn't mean that CGI is in general superior to model FX. My point was that they COULD have made much better ships for DS9 background (unlike Yeager class for ex.).
But you're right in the end it didn't change very much, lol. I noticed myself they used the same models even more than before, after they migrated to CGI.
I think both techniques have their purpose, CGI and models.

warmaker001b wrote: »

The physical models were just fine. But bad design is bad design, regardless if it was a physical model or a CGI one. I'm perfectly fine with these physical models
TOS Enterprise
K'T'Inga
Negh'Var
Akira - So good that the boys of ENT flipped it over with a spatula and called it an NX-01! In CGI, no less!
Excelsior
B'Rel
And of course, the Sovereign.

Last I looked, the Enterprise-E looked ****ing fabulous in First Contact. A studio model and not CGI :cool:

You can make things in either format look great. A physical studio model or in CGI. But again, bad looking designs can be done anywhere.

... Oh wait, not done with how well a physical, studio model can look!
One of the actual film studio models of the Star Destroyer
Actual film model of the Executor-class Super Star Destroyer
Actual studio model of X-Wing "Red 5"

100% agreed.
A few days ago i saw some film footage of ST.8 in HD and it looked extremely good. There is something about model, CGI footage just cannot capture. But on the other side sometimes a model looks too much like a toy imo. Especially the 4 ft model of the Galaxy looks rather bad imo.(the one with the pronuced hull plating or whatever it is. :eek: )

For the Galaxy, i think the new CGI FX looks much better than the 90' FX. But that doesn't mandatory mean that one of either techniques is superior, i think if they would use a model today it would look better than FX from the 90' anyway. (higher quality cameras, lighting, background and so on)

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raj011

Since in the timeline of STO, the factions are fighting the Iconians. I think it is a good time to introduce an improved version of the ablative generator for the ships.

mustrumridcully0

westmetals wrote: »

Whether the effects look more artificial or not (and I don't agree; I assume you're talking about atmospherics and backgrounds and such, not the ships themselves?) is kinda beside the point I was making... which is simply that saying that DS9/Voyager era Trek used models because they didn't have access to powerful enough CGI... is a false assumption. They could have done CGI at that point, but chose not to; probably because they already had a staff and that staff was already familiar with doing it with models.

The tech was there, but it was not "proven yet". At least not for a TV show with a TV show budget. And so they went with what was more familiar, and they already had a team around.


Some interesting links perhap: http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/cgi.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5

The Ex Atris side stated that the deal for CGI in Television really changed with Lightwave's commercial release in 1994 - which is 2 years before DS9 started, but around the time VOY started.

Before that, Star Trek experimented with CGI, but they were not entirely happy with the results, and they also feared what they would have if the company working for them failed to deliver. I guess with physical models, you at least can get the models and try it yourself, but with propriety software belonging to the CGI company itself, things get difficult.

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yreodred

westmetals wrote: »

I still don't think that the technology, one way or the other, has as much bearing on the actual designs of the ships, as some other people in this thread seem to think.

Well they obviously used old model parts to create those hideous DS9 kitbashes.
If they where able to start from scratch, they surely would have designed better looking ships instead of creating ugliness like the yeager class for ex.
But hey, if you think they would have created ships like the yeager anyway, please do so.

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yreodred

Another issue:
Why are allmost all ships on the same plain/level?

No matter where the hero ships go, if they encounter alien species they have never met before, everyone seems to be aligned to the same orientation.
Maybe they adjust their axis off screen to each other and return to their original axis after.
But that wouldn't explain why they are on the same plain even when they are hostile or in combat?

Thoughts?

johnnymo1

i have always liked the look of models better than cg. As far as the lack of more sphere shaped fed ships, I think it has more to do with a power consumption to weapon capacity more than anything else. The few ships with the sphere shape were all either dedicated science or medical ships, minimal weapons, and not considered to be ship of the line type ships, more support ships. A sphere shaped hull would force designers to have to put a lot more phaser arrays on the ship to allow for the same range of coverage as on a saucer shaped hull. The original series connie and the refit had 6 phaser banks on the saucer, in identical placements on top and below the hull. Uniform coverage on the ship. The TNG era saw the longer phaser arrays on the ships, the Galaxy class with the long, nearly full circle array, above and below. Adding enough of these to allow even coverage on a sphere shaped hull would require an enormous amount of arrays.

angrytarg

yreodred wrote: »

Another issue:
Why are allmost all ships on the same plain/level?

No matter where the hero ships go, if they encounter alien species they have never met before, everyone seems to be aligned to the same orientation.
Maybe they adjust their axis off screen to each other and return to their original axis after.
But that wouldn't explain why they are on the same plain even when they are hostile or in combat?

Thoughts?

Well, opbviously so the audience doesn'T get motion sickness watching

That never bothered me. I like my starships aligned in a fashion that imitates "age of sail" scenarios instead of having upside-down constitutions or flying straight forward on the Z axis. It just looks better.

dareau

yreodred wrote: »

Another issue:
Why are allmost all ships on the same plain/level?

No matter where the hero ships go, if they encounter alien species they have never met before, everyone seems to be aligned to the same orientation.
Maybe they adjust their axis off screen to each other and return to their original axis after.
But that wouldn't explain why they are on the same plain even when they are hostile or in combat?

Thoughts?

We've never seen a "random fly by" of ships in space. It's always either a ship on an intercept course approaching the hero, or the hero Captain orders up an intercept course to meet the hostile.

Therefore, since there's all this intercepting going on, wouldn't it be natural that the ship(s) seem to be nose-to-nose every meeting?

Also, people who grew up with a surface orientation / navigational bent - you know, all us ground-originating surface dweller types - tend to "project" three dimensional surfaces onto two-dimensional navigational tools. Look at STO itself for a prime example, "entire sectors" are represented as "hovering" over the two-dimensional "astrometrics" grid. We don't "fly down" from Sol to Vulcan, we fly "southeast with a touch of descent"...

And, on that thought, can anyone show me a situation - in "any" sci-fi world, of "stacked" systems (planets) where they exist on the same "point" of the two-dimensional map but differ (signficantly) on that third dimensional plane?

yreodred

dareau wrote: »

We've never seen a "random fly by" of ships in space. It's always either a ship on an intercept course approaching the hero, or the hero Captain orders up an intercept course to meet the hostile.

Therefore, since there's all this intercepting going on, wouldn't it be natural that the ship(s) seem to be nose-to-nose every meeting?

Also, people who grew up with a surface orientation / navigational bent - you know, all us ground-originating surface dweller types - tend to "project" three dimensional surfaces onto two-dimensional navigational tools. Look at STO itself for a prime example, "entire sectors" are represented as "hovering" over the two-dimensional "astrometrics" grid. We don't "fly down" from Sol to Vulcan, we fly "southeast with a touch of descent"...

And, on that thought, can anyone show me a situation - in "any" sci-fi world, of "stacked" systems (planets) where they exist on the same "point" of the two-dimensional map but differ (signficantly) on that third dimensional plane?

I understand that, but isn't it a fundamental error to treat Space as a 2D ocean?

Sure if two ships meet, it looks nice to see them aligned to each other. But in Combat, it's complete nonsense imo. Why sould they restrict themselves to only 2 dimensions and not 3?

angrytarg

yreodred wrote: »

I understand that, but isn't it a fundamental error to treat Space as a 2D ocean?

Sure if two ships meet, it looks nice to see them aligned to each other. But in Combat, it's complete nonsense imo. Why sould they restrict themselves to only 2 dimensions and not 3?

Technically that's right. Take a look at "Homeworld". It offers full 3D movement of your units, yet the ships are always aligned the same (Dorsal up, ventral down). That would be a good solution for STO as well, just add a "ascend" and "descend" function. But then again, STO doesn't recognize top/bottom attacks anyway.

Adn in terms of the show, like I said, it never bothered me. I liked the face-offs and I would wish that combat in STO worked like this. Face three frigates, that's one thing. But if there's a ship of your weightclass it's going to be a hard fight. You could add all kinds of tactics and maybe even the ability to hail the other ship, demanding surrender - some captains may be willing to listen, others will initiate ramming speed at your attempt of diplomacy or being a klingon you could congratulate them for a worthy fight before blasting them away

yreodred

angrytarg wrote: »

Technically that's right. Take a look at "Homeworld". It offers full 3D movement of your units, yet the ships are always aligned the same (Dorsal up, ventral down). That would be a good solution for STO as well, just add a "ascend" and "descend" function. But then again, STO doesn't recognize top/bottom attacks anyway.

Adn in terms of the show, like I said, it never bothered me. I liked the face-offs and I would wish that combat in STO worked like this. Face three frigates, that's one thing. But if there's a ship of your weightclass it's going to be a hard fight. You could add all kinds of tactics and maybe even the ability to hail the other ship, demanding surrender - some captains may be willing to listen, others will initiate ramming speed at your attempt of diplomacy or being a klingon you could congratulate them for a worthy fight before blasting them away

That be really cool.
Additionally they could add a "disable" function to space weapons which changes the "destroyed"(blow up)-animation to "disabled". (like you can disable some ships in DQ patrol mission)

steaen

Give it a few centuries (in game timeline terms) and we won't even be talking about saucers and nacelles, spherical or otherwise.

If you look at things like the Defiant, Phantom, Akira and the pilot ships it seems that we're starting to see a change in the the overall direction in which Starfleet ship design is going, which will ultimately lead us to the 29th Century and things looking a lot more like the Wells from ST:VOY.

I would suspect that as time goes on we'll see fewer traditional Trek-style ships (which I personally think would be a shame) and a move more towards that overall 'look'.