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The Shepard Class.
jake477
Member Posts: 526 Arc User
in Ten Forward
With the newest expansion and event prize it's more modern and uglier cousin I decided to explore another of my favorite starships, the Shepard Class (you might see me in mine the USS Rainier) This ship to put it simply is gorgeous, unlike her co-star the Crossfield class on Disco. While I would argue the purpose of a Crossfield is more utilitarian then impressing a new alien species like contemporary starfleet is know for such as the Galaxy Class and later Intrepid, respectively.
The Shepard Class is another story. It brings back the old school charm of an NX, in a much bigger and elegant form and improves on the Walker Class which took up the mantle of Exploration after the NX was mothballed. The beauty shots from all the STO cutscenes really shows off her lines and weapon ports. Plus she doesn't really have a weak spot unlike the Connie. It almost gives me a Sovereign vibe too on certain angles but far more eye pleasing. Mine runs on Type 0 hull and light grey accent highlights.
As for her function the primary Shepard is a monster, outfitted right she can take on a lot in a TFO if needed. I can't wait to play with it's Mirror Counterpart, here is hoping for a Cmdr Tac officer. If you add the Avenger Battlecruiser Set with an Enhanced RCS console, she is very nimble in a turning fight. I also added the 22nd Century Weapons Set because of the Phase Cannon overload ability. With great timing the Spatial Torps have a significant bonus to damage to hulls and often can overwhelm smaller more annoying targets like frigates. Leaving the player the ability to handle bigger ships.
I also have the Eaglmoss XL Model on my desk. This ship was one of the highlights of Discovery.
The Shepard Class is another story. It brings back the old school charm of an NX, in a much bigger and elegant form and improves on the Walker Class which took up the mantle of Exploration after the NX was mothballed. The beauty shots from all the STO cutscenes really shows off her lines and weapon ports. Plus she doesn't really have a weak spot unlike the Connie. It almost gives me a Sovereign vibe too on certain angles but far more eye pleasing. Mine runs on Type 0 hull and light grey accent highlights.
As for her function the primary Shepard is a monster, outfitted right she can take on a lot in a TFO if needed. I can't wait to play with it's Mirror Counterpart, here is hoping for a Cmdr Tac officer. If you add the Avenger Battlecruiser Set with an Enhanced RCS console, she is very nimble in a turning fight. I also added the 22nd Century Weapons Set because of the Phase Cannon overload ability. With great timing the Spatial Torps have a significant bonus to damage to hulls and often can overwhelm smaller more annoying targets like frigates. Leaving the player the ability to handle bigger ships.
I also have the Eaglmoss XL Model on my desk. This ship was one of the highlights of Discovery.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] "This planet smells, it must be the Klingons"
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I have the Crossfield science spearhead, it is a good ship though I prefer the look of the mirror version's nacelles over the ridiculous chopsticks the Prime version has. The concentric rings instead of a saucer section are that way because of the need to suppress "wave cavitation" when they use the spore drive which the gaps and the spinning surfaces take care of. It would have looked better if they had just used a cleaned up version of the teaser model but it is not too bad the way it was in DSC s1/s2.
If by "weak spot unlike the Connie" you are talking about the neck, that is only valid for the Kelvin ship class that shares the name of the traditional Constitution class but little else. Jefferies has stated the neck and nacelle struts are practically solid and it would be easier to slice a section of the saucer off than to sever the neck or the struts. The easy to sever nonsense is nothing but fan myth.
The issue with the neck is the size compared to other elements of the ship. And honestly even if they were relatively solid support structures, they'd still need to have power conduits running through them, and in the case of the neck the turbolifts. They're still a vulnerabilty. IMO the DSC variant Connie makes it feel less vulnerable by making the neck a bit shorter and thicker, and the pylons were wider.
As for the Kelvin Connie's vulnerability... in that situation I don't think ANY variant would have fared any better due to one simple fact: Sheer numbers. You have that many small craft going kamekaze on any variant of the Constitution Class... it will be the same result. And pinpoint phaser attacks will barely scratch a swarm numbering in the thousands. Even if the phasers were capable of a CWIS style bolt firing cycle, sheer numbers would overwhelm the victim ship.
The neck and struts are counterintuitive, the relative size is actually far less of a factor than the strength and resilience of the materials used, in fact googie design makes good use of the counterintuitiveness to make designs that grab the eye and make people wonder what is holding the structures up.
For instance, most people are used to seeing thick support columns on buildings but they are often just for show and it is the relatively narrow steel beams running up the center of those fashionable columns that really support the building so they are shocked when they see the bare beams because to them they look too flimsy.
In the matter of the struts there is also flexible strength to take into account, the fan-shaped struts from TMP onward are actually less structurally sound from an engineering point of view, they would be much heavier and less resilient, meaning they would be more prone to acceleration stress and possible cracking.
The Wrath of Khan showed what would happen if someone targeted the neck, and that was the relatively thin-skinned and more shield dependent refit with the shields down, and it took not only hitting the neck but also precision strikes to both the saucer and secondary hull engineering sections to disable the ship. Just hitting the neck might sever enough conduits to temporarily interrupt power flow between the saucer and secondary, but both have fusion reactors and batteries along with the impulse reactors in the saucer and the warp reactor in the secondary so that would be little more than a major inconvenience rather than a crippling blow.
Punching some holes and doing some damage is one thing, severing the neck (or struts) quickly is a whole different matter and would probably take more energy than is available to a capital starship's weapons.
The TOS connie is no more vulnerable to that kind of thing than the DSC one, and may even be less vulnerable overall with its lack of windows which are worse weak points than a few dozen feet extra of (heavily armored in the case of TOS) neck.
Also, I was being a bit facetious about the Kelvin Enterprise. In fact, it illustrated rather well what Jefferies was talking about when he said it would be easier to slice off part of the saucer than to sever the neck, those drones were going through the saucer like a cannonball through toilet paper and it took a far denser formation of them than were hitting the rest of the ship to cut the neck off (and it could be assumed that the same was true of the struts though it happened off camera).
As for hitting the neck on the refit, Khan actually hit the thicker Torpedo Launcher on the neck, not the neck itself. Potentially more devastating due to possible torpedo magazine nearby, but it was still the thicker point on the neck.
I guess I just feel that the TOS configuration, while being the start of everything, does have some vulnerabilities that were later addressed.
The reason they don't know it is because the engineering room actually represented three different rooms (port and starboard warp engineering rooms in the secondary hull and impulse engineering in the saucer), which is why there were three different dressings for that particular set. As an aside, there were people who would point out the fact that the room was "changed around so much that nothing was canon about it" but they simply did not do their research and assumed it was all one room.
The relevant point is that the glowing thing behind the grill was supposed to represent the impulse stacks in impulse engineering as those short trapezoidal spaces but also it was hinged and had a sort of wedge shaped piece that would slip in and was the forced-perspective view up that central shaft in the strut. The problem is that the first time they started the winches to raise the "shaft" the assembly started coming apart and it turns out that fixing it so it would hold together during those raising and lowering operations would cost too much so they lowered it back down and braced it in place never to move again.
As for TNG, yes, Khan was aiming for the torpedo goiter because he wanted to knock out the launchers, he knew that the chances of hitting something deeper in to cut off the power flow was a longshot and took the sure thing shot instead.
Being skeptical about the neck and struts is natural, it is part of the reason that the googie design style is so attention grabbing, though in the case of Star Trek that phenomenon kind of backfired and ended up part of the driving force behind TOS contempt that arose in the early '70s.
Speaking of the size of struts, the Shepard class has struts that are even thinner, though they are wider from front to back and there are two of them going to each engine (though to be fair, such an arrangement might be good from a cooling standpoint).
Not in the pylons themselves. In the secondary hull. By shifting them forward and into the swept back configuration, they freed up more space in the secondary hull so they could have a larger shuttlebay and other stuff. In the original TOS configuration the EPS Conduits supplying the Nacelles does limit the size of things around them because they're so far back, and pretty much at a 90 degree angle. And don't forget that the TOS Connie didn't use a verticle warp core like the Refit, so again there's space taken up in the secondary hull that is freed up during the refit.
True, shifting the struts forward to accommodate a larger shuttle capacity would probably benefit a carrier like the DSC Constitution, but not so much a gun battlecruiser like the TOS Constitution.
The TOS shuttles were armed with popguns at best (for instance it took the aquashuttle a number of shots to kill or drive off a sea monster in TAS) and could do nothing to hurt a full sized ship, so there was little need to keep more than a few for making away team landings in places were beaming is not possible, or possibly to use one as a temporary base camp for a scientific team on a world with a mildly hostile environment.
Also, the warp core is in the secondary hull in both the TOS and "refit" models, the main difference is that engineering was further back, between the struts instead of forward under the neck. According to both Jefferies and the depiction in TAS the TOS warp core was under the warp engineering rooms seen in the show (with the dilithium chamber access sticking up through the floor) and runs horizontally straight between the ends of the struts down a deck or two below the deck the shuttle landing pad is on. If anything the TOS warp engines took up less space than the TMP ones did.
Connie is fine.
I always go by:
any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The golden ratio also works in the radial angles of the nacelle struts (and partially for the neck). If you look at the ship from the back and imagine a tree branch, the struts are positioned and angled (in that one plane anyway) the way smaller branches come of the sides of a straight branch shaft (not forking branches of course), and they precess along the branch until one of a pair is where the neck is on the secondary hull (though it is missing anything where the second branchlet of that pair would be). Googie was the ideal style to use for that, so that is what he used.
Jefferies wanted to give a subtle hint about what the cultures who built the various ships were like, so he made the Enterprise that clean semi-organic design using the golden ratios to convey the idea that the Federation was the upbeat good guys and that they were advanced enough to put a bit of art into even the design of a wartime-build warship.
Since the Federation was representing NATO in the cold-war analogy that Trek had at its core he designed the Klingon ship with the idea that it represented the Soviets in that analogy and built ships with a simpler but rugged and brutal pragmatism and no thought to aesthetics, but with a menacing look nonetheless. Thus the D7 has a rougher, more industrial, generally art deco style.