test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Star trek ship designs
cloudripper1
Member Posts: 14 Arc User
Dunno if this would be the right spot to ask this or not, but I have been wondering something about the ships in the star trek universe. Primarily the differences between the shape of the three usable racial playable ships.
Federation: In my honest opinion some are sleek, stylish and the saucer sections are almost always circular save for a few ship styles.
Klingon: Almost always has the bridge out on the end of a long neck from the main body of the ship from what I have seen.
Romulan: Either a circle for starting out roughly and then getting up where the ship is encircling an empty space with the 'head' being on the end of two thin sections.
Personally I dont quite get the point of the way the Klingon and Romulan ships look when it comes to this, because I believe that those long thin sections would leave a lot of weakness in that specific spot.
Can someone tell me if Im wrong, right or just misinformed please?
Federation: In my honest opinion some are sleek, stylish and the saucer sections are almost always circular save for a few ship styles.
Klingon: Almost always has the bridge out on the end of a long neck from the main body of the ship from what I have seen.
Romulan: Either a circle for starting out roughly and then getting up where the ship is encircling an empty space with the 'head' being on the end of two thin sections.
Personally I dont quite get the point of the way the Klingon and Romulan ships look when it comes to this, because I believe that those long thin sections would leave a lot of weakness in that specific spot.
Can someone tell me if Im wrong, right or just misinformed please?
Post edited by cloudripper1 on
0
Comments
That said, I think there's actually a moment onscreen in the DS9 Dominion War where the Dominion tore through the neck of a Klingon cruiser. I don't remember the episode, though. It might have been the one where Dominion bug ships kamikazied about 15 of the Klingon ships.
butcher suspect, "What'd you hit me with?"
Temperance Brennan, "A building"
Of course, on the flip side, every starship weapon belonging to the major powers in Star Trek is basically a doomsday weapon. A TOS photon torpedo already exceeds the yield of the Tsar Bomba, and it's a peashooter even compared to some of its contemporary weapons, let alone TNG and later weapons. No matter how vulnerable or protected a point is, it's still subjected to apocalyptic firepower during combat.
Steamwright mentions the Jem'hadar blasting through the neck of a Klingon cruiser, in the same scene they also just blast a hole right through the thickest part of one just as easily. Weapons regularly cut through the thickest parts of ships as easily as the thinnest, and the Jem'hadar that rammed the Odyssey hit it at one of the thickest parts, just below the main deflector, rather than bothering to target the thinner sections like pylons or the base of the neck.
When it almost doesn't matter, you can afford to take some style points.
I honestly don't know what the motivation was for the artists that came out with the designs and I suppose we could imagine explanations due to the nature of the fictional propulsion systems that these ships use. Each nation has a unique technology and it's ships style reflects that.
The Plot dictates you to survive, that ship looks amazing in its performance and sturdy.
The Plot dictates you to die, the ship's performance looks terrible.
Like "Lady Luck," good 'ol "Plot Armor" is just as fickle. If your ship is not named "USS Enterprise," chances are, you were going to die.
"Fate protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise."
Jem'Hadar bugships that had major personnel like Weyoun or whatever on it seemed to do ok. But the other 99.9% of the Bugship fleet in the Dominion War were being destroyed by the handfuls every scene you can find them. They made Mirandas look as rugged as a Sovereign-class.
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
In short, an unshielded ship in the TOS era and later is as vulnerable to being shot down as a current-day combat airplane, meaning that the main strategy for survival is not enduring a hit, but rather avoiding being hit in the first place.
On overall ship shapes, the warp field shape generally requires the warp nacelles to be at the outer edge of the ship--any structure sticking too far "outboard" from the nacelles in the port/starboard/dorsal/ventral plane would come too close to the warp field's outer layers and either disrupt the field or just get sheared off by the stress. Within the allowed space, however, you can pretty much design the ship the way that you want.
http://onlyhdwallpapers.com/wallpaper/nx_01_refit_high_resolution_desktop_1728x864_hd-wallpaper-938647.jpg gives us a supposed reason for Starfleet's primary/secondary hull design--apparently the saucer most efficiently fills the primary warp node and the secondary hull most efficiently fills the secondary warp node (the geometry would imply that a second dorsal secondary hull could also be added, and some ships such as the Nebula class do indeed put ship structure in that area). In other words, the Starfleet primary/secondary hull design is an attempt to put as much ship volume in the "safe zones" as possible within the smallest warp field possible, whereas radically different design shapes would require a larger warp field null zone in comparison to the ship's internal volume.
For the Feds, the first prototypes were based on Warp 2 Vulcan technology with a single round nacelle containing 2 warps coils. Sketches from the original series, as well as wall hangings from the movies show these early craft.
Earths first production starships utilized a human-designed dual nacelle approach. While early nacelles had potential health concerns for humans, it was due to the type of shielding used. Thier position had more to do with the bussard collectors requiring clearance from the primary and secondary hulls.
Later in Next Generation and again in Voyager we see people working within the nacelles.
Nacelles are built into ship elements, and are part of the primary hull by DS9, with several ships bearing this distinct design (Defiant). We even see small warp nacells built into the saucer sections of the enterprise's primary hull, and in the Gamma module of the Prometheus in voyager.
The Klingons appeared to have had a similar design approach with warp coils being matched in pairs throughout all of the series. The ships have a more utilitarian style, designed for combat rather than exploration.
The positioning of the bridge elements were more driven by the 'naval' examples fo the 1960's; both the Federation and the Klingons have exposed bridges at the 'top' of the ship. early Romulan ships had more enclosed bridges, centered around a central dias, more inline with modern naval vessels - or if you prefer - the re-imagined BSG. But I digress...
So for the most part the locations where part of story-telling, beyond the original bussard collector requirements.
as far as the oddy goes from DS9, considering the jem'hadar clearly had superior technology, scanners and such, they likely knew of the deflector dish generating anti-protons, an explosion there could easily blow the ship up.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
http://fsd.trekships.org/art/1701.html
This link actually details in Matt Jeffrey's own words why he designed the original Enterprise the way he did. Really interesting stuff. There are pages for each of the main ships from the series'. Nothing on ships from other factions, though.
If you think about it, in battle if an enemy ship was to take out one of the nacelles, not only would you be dead in the water, but also partcially defenceless aswell.
Agreed. Now, the people who designed and built Battlestars knew what they were doing. Buried the bridge (CIC) deep inside the ship, surrounded by armor many meters thick.
The Sovereign had them as well (seen best in the early part of the battle in Nemesis, where beams fire both from the trailing edge of the pylon and the lower surface of the nacelle - and to be fair I'll admit the nacelle beams are partially obscured making it possible they're from the top end of the pylon array, which I'll mention again in a moment). As did the Galaxy class in DS9 (originally a leftover from modifying the Enterprise model for All Good Things, but it was also included in the CGI models created later and used in both DS9 and Voyager). Voyager and the pre-All Good Things Galaxy also had them on the pylons very close to the nacelles, where they suffer all the drawbacks you mention.
And losing one of several overlaping firing arcs is a long way from "practically defenseless," particularly since losing a nacelle doesn't make you dead in the water, they aren't used for maneuvering or propulsion at sublight speeds and it is established that with one nacelle intact a starship can still achieve warp at greatly reduced speed.
alcohol, not gasoline. The place is a brewery.
I guess it could be seen as that too. If that is the case then I guess we know what the engineers do on their break, drink beer.
I mean the filming location was a Budweiser brewery, hence my joke. I had heard rumors that Scotty knew how to build and run a still, though. :rolleyes:
Not sure why noone has mentioned this, but the Klingon race was originally supposed to be a slave race which rose up to claim the ships of their overlord master race who had mysteriously vanished. The design of the inherited "Klingon" ships was two fold. The long neck was actually a rocket that would seperate from the rear main body to move the bridge crew out of harm's way. Like how the Enterprise D (?) had the saucer to seperate from the main ship so the civilian's could proceed safely. So it was a safety design feature of the original race.
Federation:
The Federation's use of the saucer hull shape doesn't seem very tactically inspired as it presents a very large target for ships to flank them from above or below. But as the Federation is an organization of explorers, the saucer would accomodate alot of science labs, storage space, larger crew quarters, exercise/entertainment facilitiles and classrooms. Much more accomodating space for officers and crewmen who bring their familes onboard with them.
Romulans:
The Romulan ships tend to mostly be warbirds, rather than using size classification like "Cruisers, Destroyers, Escort, Battleship, etc". Andrew Probert, who designed the D'deridex-class warbird, He writes, "The wings (top and bottom hulls) ..are separated to allow the engines to 'see' each other and generate a warp field. So I guess it was a design toward improving efficiency of their warp drive system.