[TECH/RFC] Gagarin-class starship (REVISED)

[M Fnord]

So you've gone for a aerospace-capable design instead of a pure space design this time. Nice.

Well, a *technically* aerospace-capable design. This was inspired by the realization that the kitbashed Discovery One variant I'd originally went with was ugly as sin and not really in either the Soviet or Trekkie idiom. A wing- or lifting body-shaped hull, though, had a precedent for both.

But a 200m wingspan? Yikes! Definately not going to be seeing one in a standard airport.

Off the top of my head there are three airports where you could land a Gagarin: Mojave Spaceport, Baikonur Cosmodrome and Kennedy Space Center.

Personally. I'd increase the point-defence arrays to at least 4 (dorsal and ventral port and starbord) and probably up to eight (add nose, tail, and outboard both wingtips), and add a rear facing launcher. But that's just me.

I thought about that, and it may go up in a revision. Thing is, Mal is at best a reluctant soldier, and the idea of *arming* EXFOR spacecraft is anathema to him. Still, things might change.

Given their launch dates, I expect no Gagarin-class ship will be involved in Serenity Valley?

Hm.. when was Serenity Valley again? Mid-August? The Shepard will still be in the graving docks, but Gagarin might show up as part of a relief force if nothing else.

WRT MediaWiki markup: I assume you're occasionally playing with this still. The shipbox construct looks interesting IMO.

Yeah, I keep poking at it here and there. The shipbox stuff was sparked by my frustration with having to build a table completely from scratch each time I wanted to do an infobox in Dokuwiki. Getting the template to work was a pain in the ass, but once it was ready it simplified vehicle writeups immensely.

Yet there is one that I gotta ask about: what inspired Rolled A Twenty On The Random Encounter Table? With a name like that, you know there's got to be a story behind it.

There's no real *story* behind Rolled A Twenty, it's a Culturesque ship name that I thought of years ago & kept in dead storage in the back of my head until the time was right.

Incidently, I noticed that while all the Starfleet ships have 'mundane' names, the VVS has all the hilarious ones.

Starfleet, as they'll be the first to tell you, is Serious Business. In-jokes are only allowed if they can masquerade as "legitimate" names.

(In fact, had the VVS had the time & man/botpower to build the Gagarins solo, the first ship of the line would *not* have been the Yuri Gagarin. The ship would've either been the GCU Arbitrary or the GCU Just Passing Through. Now you know.)
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

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