An Excelsior's love child with a Miranda raised by an Intrepid post-"First Contact"
04-17-2018, 04:54 PM
04-17-2018, 04:54 PM
So now that I'm not about to collapse drooling into the keyboard while the weight of my head digs waffle marks into my face, some details. First of course is the ship's frame being nearly complete, just the torpedo pod left to go and I finally got the size of the frame members down to where they feel strong enough to do the jab without being colossally overbuilt, as I have a tendency to do.* Well, besides having a warp core that matches the Intrepid class that's several times her length and width feeding a set of quad-coil engines (despite being housed in two nacelles) which are also large far out of proportion to the rest of the ship... 
Squishy and lacking depth of reserves she may be due to the sheer tininess of her structure and number of crew, but if there's a ship with the legs to make a good attempt at two or three nines past the decimal point in TNG warp factors it's her.
This thought was floating vaguely around the back of my mind looking for something to connect to when it occurred to me that raising the saucer section's impulse engines out of their position inside the hull where they take up already scant space but would seldom if ever be used and couldn't even provide auxilliary power due to burning a hole into Engineering and filling it with radioactive exhaust if they tried would let them be the ship's primary sublight drive, freeing up not only that space but also allowing the pylon engines to be removed and more than doubling the cubage for antimatter and deuterium tankage in there. I tried shifting them up and back a bit and tossed an appropriately scaled cube on to approximate the hull...
"Huh, looks like the Excelsior's impulse section," I thought. Connection. "Oh Enterprise speed records? Doogie Howser's dad says he's going to break you..."
I actually like the Excelsior's design quite a bit and already based elements of the saucer on her, so that engine chane is almost certainly in at this point, contingent on looking at it for a few days from different angles and deciding it doesn't suck. The hemispherical "foam rubber chin" with Excelsior-style deflector and trim stripe... well, it does just continue with the trend of making parts of the ship into thinly disguised sex symbols, but I like the Excelsior, I like Art Deco (the first rather goes with that really,) I like having a nice chunk of internal volume added instead of filled, and I'm not too ashamed to play to the sexy side in ways that don't get anyone hurt, so it's on the table more so than the kitty ears ever were, and especially now that I've seen how she looks with a "belly band" added to use a bunch of 1m sensor pallets like the Galaxy and Intrepid, one of the only things I like about the Galaxy design in fact, though according to some dude on the internet the Excelsior did that first too, placing them in the gaps between fins of the "turtleneck" trim area.
As shown above they're fitted with Borg-derived designs brought back by Voyager, in three banks of nineteen at the front and sides (though I could probably fit twenty each if not for leaving a gap between each one, maybe twenty one) two little strips of five facing diagonally aft, and two sets of three directly aft on the back of the nacelle pylons since the saucer is blocked by the rollbar at that angle. Filling the openings where the original impulse engines were with still more is a possibility if I stick with the "An Excelsior's love child with a Miranda, raised by an Intrepid after The Battle of Sector One" style. Between these and the "sniper scope" deep scanning forward sensors on the pod, the kitty ears units are pretty redundant, however cute, and don't match the style of the Excelsior bow and deflector.
The dudeslabs have also proliferated like crazy as I use them to check headroom on arches, EPS conduits, access corridors and Jeffries tubes etc., which is basically "functioning as in tended" even if what I really intended was to make a quick puppet that was recognizably humanoid instead of a simple box. Eh, haven't got around to it yet and they work so far.
Also visible over the saucer is a turbolift car, which has six dudeslabs riding inside in typical "one handspan and nobody fart" elevator packing, along with the torp and probe that were there all along and a boolean object for cutting 90cm doors with curved upper corners. Two more boolean cutters are visible on the side of the nacelle pylon and back of the torpedo pod, the first because there's an internal airlock there anyway before the access ladder to the nacelle itself and the other because reloading torpedoes through the Jeffrie tube would suck big time, even if they do fit easily enough and an antigravity cargo-lift to do the heavy work would make it possible. Depending on how the autoloader and torp racks work out I may add a two-place transporter pad up there as well for when someone needs quick access without climbing around on ladders or going EVA, and unofficially for those times when the proper weapons are down but so are the enemy's shields, so a quickly beamed IED (or torpedo) is just the thing, or if the ship is boarded and the defenders are driven out of Engineering thorugh the Jeffries tubes so the pod is not the dead end it looks like.
Thinking about it, holding the torpedo room against invaders (unless they are cpaable of beaming into it of course) would be fairly easy as long as you have at least one armed person per side, since it's not like there's much room to dodge a phaser (or a pocking big wrench t' the head) when crawling out of the tube on arms and legs.
At the front of the bare frame image is a bright green hexagon, this is roughly the volume allocated for the bridge at the moment, a bit small by Starfleet standards at "only" 10m diameter but SF standards are a bit mad to begin with - that's still bigger than the entire house I used to live in. Sickbay will probably be under the rear 2/3 of it with the low-headroom space at the front 1/3 being the kitchen or storage area for the mess hall/lounge at the front of the saucer. One of the smaller nooks between the frame members to one side will be the ready room, with the captain's quarters directly connected on the other, going the other way will be a corridor and a head. Haven't really decided on other internals aside from the ones mentioned and placed before (the workshop/hangar between the holodeck, Engineering, and above the shuttle bay, the main computer core (which was switched port to starboard with the holodeck for better turbolift and workshop access) and the "auxillary cargo bays" p/s in the small frame sections to either side, one of which houses the Cherry Bomb shuttle (renamed from Bear Trap) that informally takes the place of the conformally-carried captain's yachts on the Galaxy/Intrepid/Nova/Sovereign/Akira/etc., just visible under the near end of the phaser strip on the nuddy pic.
The rest of the saucer is a tangle of colored wireframes that's a bit confusing even for me, but here goes. From the outside of the saucer in, the first section is in glowing red wires, and represents the outer ring service corridor as well as the lower level of the mess hall/lounge that is certainly NOT going to be called Two Forward... officially. This only leaves room for the hull itself beyond the floor and (relatively low) ceiling, so enviro equipment and as much of the gravity generation gear as can be physically located to one side must be. Inside of and overlapping that by a couple of meters is the mid-deck proper, with Starfleet-standard 50cm equipment space in the floor and 3-3.5m ceilings dependent on the height of the saucer. This is a half-height off from the nominal two center decks in gold (above) and purple (below), though most of these are taken up by the workshop, holodeck, and computer, since those are kind of cramped even at double height. There are a couple of meters worth of space outboard of the holodeck and computer, though, at least enough space for the holodeck support equipment and some replicator supplies storage.
I can only guess that Voyager was barely carrying any stores when she got tossed to the Delta Quadrant (and that the stuff that kept breaking down and needing repair or replacement was due to the heavy damage sustained and only shipboard resources to repair it with - not ragging on V. even slightly here, her bare cupboards and engine room held together by spit, duct tape, and baling wire aside she got her crew home as safe and mostly intact as any Enterprise we've seen despite everything the Kazon, Borg, Neelix's cooking, or Brannon and Braga could throw at her) because on paper an Intrepid is supped to have a three year cruise duration without resupply, and I want to at least semi-plausibly duplicate that for a crew of 6-10 if not the nominal maximum of thirty.
I think this is the first time I've posted something with a good view of the big double-door over the warp core ejection port as well. They're held shut by explosive bolts normally and propelled open by a charge when needed, then the warp core goes shooting out powered by magnetic linear accelerators in the rails that support it. Doing this out the aft end of the ship rather than sideways to the direction of travel has always made more sense to me, as it means you're moving as fast as possible away from the immanent explosion, get a little boost from tossing it in fact, and it's not subjected to shearing stress on the way out to make it get jammed or worse, break up against the hull.
"Mou, don't stare at my aft sempai! It's embarrassing!"
But it's such a beautiful, shapely aft! Who with a soul could look away!?
* See also the "footbridge" I built IRL ca. 2004 that was fine having a pickup driven over it and was the only span still in place after a flood rolled through town in 2006, no fucks given about having been submerged in the direct path of the river and having boulders and cars etc. washed past and over it for a couple of days after one bank eroded out from under it - the other end was still in exactly the same place aside form having tipped town into the riverbed like a hinge. After being cut in half and hauled out, it was later made into a deck and the foundation/floor of a shed for storing lawn tractors and groundskeeping equipment.
Squishy and lacking depth of reserves she may be due to the sheer tininess of her structure and number of crew, but if there's a ship with the legs to make a good attempt at two or three nines past the decimal point in TNG warp factors it's her.This thought was floating vaguely around the back of my mind looking for something to connect to when it occurred to me that raising the saucer section's impulse engines out of their position inside the hull where they take up already scant space but would seldom if ever be used and couldn't even provide auxilliary power due to burning a hole into Engineering and filling it with radioactive exhaust if they tried would let them be the ship's primary sublight drive, freeing up not only that space but also allowing the pylon engines to be removed and more than doubling the cubage for antimatter and deuterium tankage in there. I tried shifting them up and back a bit and tossed an appropriately scaled cube on to approximate the hull...
"Huh, looks like the Excelsior's impulse section," I thought. Connection. "Oh Enterprise speed records? Doogie Howser's dad says he's going to break you..."
I actually like the Excelsior's design quite a bit and already based elements of the saucer on her, so that engine chane is almost certainly in at this point, contingent on looking at it for a few days from different angles and deciding it doesn't suck. The hemispherical "foam rubber chin" with Excelsior-style deflector and trim stripe... well, it does just continue with the trend of making parts of the ship into thinly disguised sex symbols, but I like the Excelsior, I like Art Deco (the first rather goes with that really,) I like having a nice chunk of internal volume added instead of filled, and I'm not too ashamed to play to the sexy side in ways that don't get anyone hurt, so it's on the table more so than the kitty ears ever were, and especially now that I've seen how she looks with a "belly band" added to use a bunch of 1m sensor pallets like the Galaxy and Intrepid, one of the only things I like about the Galaxy design in fact, though according to some dude on the internet the Excelsior did that first too, placing them in the gaps between fins of the "turtleneck" trim area.
As shown above they're fitted with Borg-derived designs brought back by Voyager, in three banks of nineteen at the front and sides (though I could probably fit twenty each if not for leaving a gap between each one, maybe twenty one) two little strips of five facing diagonally aft, and two sets of three directly aft on the back of the nacelle pylons since the saucer is blocked by the rollbar at that angle. Filling the openings where the original impulse engines were with still more is a possibility if I stick with the "An Excelsior's love child with a Miranda, raised by an Intrepid after The Battle of Sector One" style. Between these and the "sniper scope" deep scanning forward sensors on the pod, the kitty ears units are pretty redundant, however cute, and don't match the style of the Excelsior bow and deflector.
The dudeslabs have also proliferated like crazy as I use them to check headroom on arches, EPS conduits, access corridors and Jeffries tubes etc., which is basically "functioning as in tended" even if what I really intended was to make a quick puppet that was recognizably humanoid instead of a simple box. Eh, haven't got around to it yet and they work so far.
Also visible over the saucer is a turbolift car, which has six dudeslabs riding inside in typical "one handspan and nobody fart" elevator packing, along with the torp and probe that were there all along and a boolean object for cutting 90cm doors with curved upper corners. Two more boolean cutters are visible on the side of the nacelle pylon and back of the torpedo pod, the first because there's an internal airlock there anyway before the access ladder to the nacelle itself and the other because reloading torpedoes through the Jeffrie tube would suck big time, even if they do fit easily enough and an antigravity cargo-lift to do the heavy work would make it possible. Depending on how the autoloader and torp racks work out I may add a two-place transporter pad up there as well for when someone needs quick access without climbing around on ladders or going EVA, and unofficially for those times when the proper weapons are down but so are the enemy's shields, so a quickly beamed IED (or torpedo) is just the thing, or if the ship is boarded and the defenders are driven out of Engineering thorugh the Jeffries tubes so the pod is not the dead end it looks like.
Thinking about it, holding the torpedo room against invaders (unless they are cpaable of beaming into it of course) would be fairly easy as long as you have at least one armed person per side, since it's not like there's much room to dodge a phaser (or a pocking big wrench t' the head) when crawling out of the tube on arms and legs.
At the front of the bare frame image is a bright green hexagon, this is roughly the volume allocated for the bridge at the moment, a bit small by Starfleet standards at "only" 10m diameter but SF standards are a bit mad to begin with - that's still bigger than the entire house I used to live in. Sickbay will probably be under the rear 2/3 of it with the low-headroom space at the front 1/3 being the kitchen or storage area for the mess hall/lounge at the front of the saucer. One of the smaller nooks between the frame members to one side will be the ready room, with the captain's quarters directly connected on the other, going the other way will be a corridor and a head. Haven't really decided on other internals aside from the ones mentioned and placed before (the workshop/hangar between the holodeck, Engineering, and above the shuttle bay, the main computer core (which was switched port to starboard with the holodeck for better turbolift and workshop access) and the "auxillary cargo bays" p/s in the small frame sections to either side, one of which houses the Cherry Bomb shuttle (renamed from Bear Trap) that informally takes the place of the conformally-carried captain's yachts on the Galaxy/Intrepid/Nova/Sovereign/Akira/etc., just visible under the near end of the phaser strip on the nuddy pic.
The rest of the saucer is a tangle of colored wireframes that's a bit confusing even for me, but here goes. From the outside of the saucer in, the first section is in glowing red wires, and represents the outer ring service corridor as well as the lower level of the mess hall/lounge that is certainly NOT going to be called Two Forward... officially. This only leaves room for the hull itself beyond the floor and (relatively low) ceiling, so enviro equipment and as much of the gravity generation gear as can be physically located to one side must be. Inside of and overlapping that by a couple of meters is the mid-deck proper, with Starfleet-standard 50cm equipment space in the floor and 3-3.5m ceilings dependent on the height of the saucer. This is a half-height off from the nominal two center decks in gold (above) and purple (below), though most of these are taken up by the workshop, holodeck, and computer, since those are kind of cramped even at double height. There are a couple of meters worth of space outboard of the holodeck and computer, though, at least enough space for the holodeck support equipment and some replicator supplies storage.
I can only guess that Voyager was barely carrying any stores when she got tossed to the Delta Quadrant (and that the stuff that kept breaking down and needing repair or replacement was due to the heavy damage sustained and only shipboard resources to repair it with - not ragging on V. even slightly here, her bare cupboards and engine room held together by spit, duct tape, and baling wire aside she got her crew home as safe and mostly intact as any Enterprise we've seen despite everything the Kazon, Borg, Neelix's cooking, or Brannon and Braga could throw at her) because on paper an Intrepid is supped to have a three year cruise duration without resupply, and I want to at least semi-plausibly duplicate that for a crew of 6-10 if not the nominal maximum of thirty.
I think this is the first time I've posted something with a good view of the big double-door over the warp core ejection port as well. They're held shut by explosive bolts normally and propelled open by a charge when needed, then the warp core goes shooting out powered by magnetic linear accelerators in the rails that support it. Doing this out the aft end of the ship rather than sideways to the direction of travel has always made more sense to me, as it means you're moving as fast as possible away from the immanent explosion, get a little boost from tossing it in fact, and it's not subjected to shearing stress on the way out to make it get jammed or worse, break up against the hull.
"Mou, don't stare at my aft sempai! It's embarrassing!"
But it's such a beautiful, shapely aft! Who with a soul could look away!?
* See also the "footbridge" I built IRL ca. 2004 that was fine having a pickup driven over it and was the only span still in place after a flood rolled through town in 2006, no fucks given about having been submerged in the direct path of the river and having boulders and cars etc. washed past and over it for a couple of days after one bank eroded out from under it - the other end was still in exactly the same place aside form having tipped town into the riverbed like a hinge. After being cut in half and hauled out, it was later made into a deck and the foundation/floor of a shed for storing lawn tractors and groundskeeping equipment.