RE: A >small< ship, but still no stars to steer her by
04-28-2018, 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: 04-28-2018, 06:46 PM by classicdrogn.)
04-28-2018, 06:43 PM (This post was last modified: 04-28-2018, 06:46 PM by classicdrogn.)
Well, it is supposed to be a five-year supply, since antimatter is a bit harder to replace in a field-expedient manner than deuterium, which if you really have to you can scoop out of gas giants by bouncing a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish, making sucking *it up as you wish. Really though, it's just based on the size of the block on Voyager's MSD marked "antimatter storage" figured as a minimum (three years' supply with a similar warp core but more ship to run) and then fit into the space I have available. They have to have enough power per second to go changing the laws of physics to let them go thousands of times the speed of light at least 60% of the time, probably more like 90% or higher if the ship is in "get to known destination and do things" mode instead of "stop at every star along the way for planetary scans." Then there's the whole matter-to-energy-to-matter process for transporters and replicators, which is starting with physical sources, yes, but needs enough supplemental energy that efficiency limitations don't lead to arriving missing a tenth of your body mass or burning through your supplies from losses in recycling, and that at a very generous 90% efficient which very few real-world systems enjoy. plus gravity generation, inertial compensation, deflector screens, defensive shields, weapons fire, temperature control, atmospheric recycling, running the utterly massive computer core with its own mini warp field so the optical circuits can process data faster than light, (not large in absolute terms by Trek standards since even the secondary core on an Intrepid is still a third bigger in every direction, but definitely in ratio of volume allotted to total,) lights, sensors, science gear, SCIENCE! gear, and a hundred other things.
Still, it makes those pretty explosions Trek ships make in battle sequences look pretty paltry, doesn't it? Perhaps they're simply being shown at actual size for the distances involved, while the ships themselves are magnified relative to their real positions so everything will fit nicely into a screen at visible sizes, even if that makes them look like a child's bathtub flotilla floating around within a hand's breadth of each other in terms of real distances in space. (Yes, this is my head-canon for Trek and space opera visuals in general, because as a very wise ass man once said, "Space is big. Really, really big."
There's a reason I made it so the crew could get in there and manually check the integrity of the storage cells once or twice a shift, and it's not because I think having a pair of human pachinko machines aboard looks cool. (Though I do.) No, it's because antimatter is basically the very definition of "fail-deadly" and obsessively monitored quintuple redundancy is the only way I see even close to sane about treating it, and being able to evacuate to the saucer and leave it all behind in the secondary hull is the primary justification for going to the effort of designing the ship as able to separate into two functional parts, as I mentioned above. I really would have liked to make the pods independently ejectable, but the structure of the ship just doesn't line up to allow it. Honestly, despite how tiresome adjusting the frame is, I still might go back and rebuild that part of the pylons just so it does work.
Similarly, and just to put this out there so I don't forget, there are two commands for preparing photon torpedoes in a potentially hostile situation. "Ready torpedoes" puts one in the charging chamber where it can have its m/am tanks filled and be launched in about half a second, with a second waiting on the breech tray to be rammed in and fired by the time the full second ticks over. (Phum! Phum!) These can still be pulled out and put back in the racks if you turn out not to end up shooting at each other. "Load torpedoes" fills and pre-spots up to three in the pipe as well as the one in the charging chamber so they can all be fired in a volley as fast as the first single "ready" torpedo, (Phu-phu-phu-phum!) but once this is done they must be considered as expended because there's no way to get (and be be really, really sure you got) every last particle of antimatter out of the casing to safely return it to storage. If you turn out not to have needed "loaded" torpedoes, you still have to shoot them off at asteroids or remote-detonate them in open space, etc. as a training exercise or "celebratory display" or whatever.
Still, it makes those pretty explosions Trek ships make in battle sequences look pretty paltry, doesn't it? Perhaps they're simply being shown at actual size for the distances involved, while the ships themselves are magnified relative to their real positions so everything will fit nicely into a screen at visible sizes, even if that makes them look like a child's bathtub flotilla floating around within a hand's breadth of each other in terms of real distances in space. (Yes, this is my head-canon for Trek and space opera visuals in general, because as a very wise ass man once said, "Space is big. Really, really big."
There's a reason I made it so the crew could get in there and manually check the integrity of the storage cells once or twice a shift, and it's not because I think having a pair of human pachinko machines aboard looks cool. (Though I do.) No, it's because antimatter is basically the very definition of "fail-deadly" and obsessively monitored quintuple redundancy is the only way I see even close to sane about treating it, and being able to evacuate to the saucer and leave it all behind in the secondary hull is the primary justification for going to the effort of designing the ship as able to separate into two functional parts, as I mentioned above. I really would have liked to make the pods independently ejectable, but the structure of the ship just doesn't line up to allow it. Honestly, despite how tiresome adjusting the frame is, I still might go back and rebuild that part of the pylons just so it does work.
Similarly, and just to put this out there so I don't forget, there are two commands for preparing photon torpedoes in a potentially hostile situation. "Ready torpedoes" puts one in the charging chamber where it can have its m/am tanks filled and be launched in about half a second, with a second waiting on the breech tray to be rammed in and fired by the time the full second ticks over. (Phum! Phum!) These can still be pulled out and put back in the racks if you turn out not to end up shooting at each other. "Load torpedoes" fills and pre-spots up to three in the pipe as well as the one in the charging chamber so they can all be fired in a volley as fast as the first single "ready" torpedo, (Phu-phu-phu-phum!) but once this is done they must be considered as expended because there's no way to get (and be be really, really sure you got) every last particle of antimatter out of the casing to safely return it to storage. If you turn out not to have needed "loaded" torpedoes, you still have to shoot them off at asteroids or remote-detonate them in open space, etc. as a training exercise or "celebratory display" or whatever.